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Raise Your Game: What is mind coaching?

Dr Karl Morris: Mind coaching is different to psychology. With mind coaching you're taking somebody that's fine, but you're trying to improve them. You're trying to take them to another level. At the highest levels in business or sport, the extra 1% of performance can make a big difference.

RYG: What do you do?

DKM: I help a lot of tour players like Aaron Clarke, Lee Westward and David Howell. We've found that an awful lot of the issues that golfers face, transfer over into business. When you're playing golf, you have to be in control of your emotions.

Millions of pounds of prize money is lost every year on the European tour because golfers hit poor shots as a result of emotions running away from them. That transfers over into the business world. It's not good to make decisions based on high emotion. You need to try to stay in a neutral state.

RYG: How do you help a golfer increase their performance?

DKM: The first thing you do is establish where they want to go and what it is that they want to achieve. Sometimes, with younger people, it's their parents that have got dreams for them. It's important that they own the dream, and want to do it for themselves. Once that's established I look at, what I call, road blocks. What are the things that they do that stop them from becoming successful?

RYG: How important is the mental side of golf?

DKM: One of the things I make clear to people is that good mind skills are not going to cover up physical deficiencies. If you've got a dreadful golf swing, you're not going to be a top class golfer. You might have decent technique, but if you're very unfit, or inflexible, the same applies. You need to work on three areas. You need to work on your technical side, your physical side and your mental side.

RYG: What's the key to achieving peak performance?

DKM: Curiously, the key to peak performance in sport is actually to reduce the amount of thinking that you do. Let the body take over, so it becomes more instinctive. That's where golf lends itself to my kind of work. There's too much time to think. Other sports are a bit more reactionary, so you've not really got the same issues. I've done some work over the years in snooker and, when a player is playing well, it's the result of a lack of thinking rather than more thinking.

RYG: Is that what athletes mean when they say that they were 'in the zone?'

DKM: Absolutely. Being in the zone is a bit like going to sleep. When you try to go to sleep you can't, but you create the conditions for sleep, and then you allow things to happen. It's very much the same with sport. You create the conditions for peak performance, and then you immerse yourself in the activity, but try not to think too much.

RYG: So you just need to trust your abilities?

DKM: Absolutely. It's like the difference between someone who makes a speech at a wedding and gets very nervous trying to read from a sheet, as opposed to somebody who get's up and starts speaking, and almost has a conversation with the audience. Sometimes you can over plan and over analyse, whereas you should just trust your own conscious process.

RYG: Could these mind skills help people perform in exams?

DKM: Without question. Tiger Woods was working on mind skills from the age of 12. Most decent golfers hit great on the driving range, where it's nice and relaxed. Once they get out on the golf course, and there's a level of anxiety, it's almost as though their body forgets how to swing the club in a certain way. I think it's the same in an exam situation.

You may have learned the stuff, but you can get so nervous that once you get into the exam room your mind goes blank. It isn't because you've forgotten information, it's because your emotional state has changed. One of the big things we work on is state control.

RYG: Is it important to set yourself goals if you want to be successful?

DKM: I'm a great believer in focusing on what I call rituals of success. What are you going to do on a daily basis to maximise your chances of success? If you're focused on a daily basis, you're going to get something out of each and every day, and hopefully enjoy the process.

If you're a 16-year-old and your mind's set on winning the Open Championship, that's fine, but I try to get people to focus on what they can do today. Try to immerse your mind in something that you can control in the here and now.

This is why a lot of New Year's Resolutions, such as losing weight and things like that, end in failure. Someone may be heavily overweight, and have an idea of being a perfect size and shape. The first hiccup tends to throw them off track, because they see themselves as being too far away from that.

If we're working on a daily basis and get something out of each day, then we're moving slowly but surely towards where we want to go. That flies in the face of a lot of trends today, where people want instant success.

I call them the McDonalds fix. People want to drive in and out and for everything to be fine, but the brain doesn't work that way.

RYG: So it's better to set yourself short-term goals?

DKM: Very short term goals. By all means dream of being number 1 in the world, or winning Wimbledon, but my phrase is 'What are we going to do today?'