Golfers among you are going to look at that headline and say 'What kind of Golf technique is that, you can only have fourteen clubs. You'll be penalised!" Absolutely right, you can only have fourteen clubs in your bag. The fifteenth club, the most important one, is the one between your ears! As Hercule Poirot would have siad 'the little grey cells', your most important club is your brain, and how you use your brain is a key factor in how well you play. Mental attitude is all important. Making changes to your mental approach can improve your game and cut your score far more dramatically than you might imagine.

These days you will find that In most professional sports, psychologists are an intrinsic part of the coaching staff and golf is one of the sports that can profit from a positive mental attitude more than any other. It is far more than self-doubt and negative thought processes that you need to eliminate from your game, you also need to be able to concentrate solely on the shot you are about to play. You should have no thoughts whatsoever about the last hole, however well or badly you played it and the next hole doesn't even exist yet!

If you are playing a 'water' hole, you should not be concentrating on the water. It's not there. How often have you hit the ball into the water knowing, without a shadow of doubt, that the ball would never have landed there if it were grass? It's a well known fact that water has a magnetic effect on golf balls, so you have to block the water out of your mind completely. When you focus on avoiding the water, what are you focussing on - the water, so that is where your ball goes. It's the same with Bunkers, you spend so much time putting it into the forefront of your mind that you are bound to hit the ball straight into it. A young friend of mine gave me some very wise advice a while ago "When you are on a golf course, there is no water, there is no sand, there is only grass." He had trained himself to see only the green grass of the fairway - and guess where his ball always landed.

The same can be said about most of the shot problems we have. If you tend to slice the ball, you will focus on not slicing the ball rather than hitting a straight shot. Your focus should always be on what you are going to do, not what you don't want to do. Your swing thought should be 'straight shot' not 'don't slice'.

You should to also aim to discipline yourself to play just one shot at a time and think about just that one shot. Nothing else is of importance. Your fellow players or competitors have their own issues, you don't need to think about them, they are not hitting your ball. Your score is not relevant, all that matters is the next shot. If you think about a bad score that is the thought that will be at the forefront of your mind and will only make things worse. No matter how bad the round might have been there are still chances to make the most of any remaining holes and that's all that matters.

One of the most important mental golf techniques I have ever learned is to treat a round of golf as eighteen seperate games. Each hole is a small game in itself. If one goes badly, it's not the end of the world, because there are lots more little games where I can still do well! Master that golf technique and you will find the fifteenth club is the most useful one in your bag.