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Be Sherlock Holmes for a while and discover the important elements of your setup and swing. Knowing about them will help you become more consistent, if you’re already a sweet swinger. Being able to find them, on command, is essential to playing my unique mind games.

All you have to think about is being wonderful, in your own mind, at least. As Sherlock you’ll be searching for clues that make your performance so special. It’s important that you go to a quiet place to do this exercise. When you do, you will recall when you played a particular shot exceptionally well and relive it in exquisite detail. You’ll think about a very specific shot, not an entire round, or even a whole hole. Out of the hundreds or thousands of shots you’ve struck, you’ll simply select one shot that made you proud. Maybe it was a tee shot that split the fairway, or an approach hit stiff to the pin, or a long, breaking putt that dropped for a birdie.

The idea is to uncover some of the crucial elements of the mental sequence, or strategy, that regulates your movements. That strategy contains a series of representations of sensory cues—sights, sounds, and feelings. I use the letters V, A, and K to signify those cues; V is for visual, A is for auditory, and K is for kinesthetic—muscle and joint feelings, feelings on the surface of your body, and the bodily sensations associated with emotions.

During the execution of a three-second golf swing, from take-away to follow-through, your mind processes as many as one hundred bits of sensory information with machine-gun rapidity. Just a few of those sensory representations are in your conscious awareness. The rest are processed unconsciously because of the speed of the swing.

Sensory information consists of specific internal sights, sounds, and feelings representing specific, past experiences of swinging the golf club along with ongoing, internal and external sights, sounds, and feelings that are occurring as you swing.

Here’s how I want you to think about that specific golf shot. First, just do a general, overall review of it, like watching a sound movie. See the course where you were playing, the lie of the ball, the distance to the pin. Notice the light and shadows and the brightness of the colors. See the images that were in your mind as you were taking that shot. Maybe you were imagining the flight of the ball.

Hear again what you heard then, both on the outside and inside your mind. Perhaps you heard the whoosh of your club and the sound of your own voice giving yourself instructions. Pay attention to the loudness and pitch and tempo of those sounds. As you see and hear those things, feel again what you felt then during your setup and swing—the coordinated movements of your body and the tension and relaxation of your muscles. Also, become aware of the mood or emotional state you were in as you were swinging and hitting the ball.

Now it’s time to get out Holmes’s magnifying glass and ear trumpet and pay more attention to the details of what you saw, heard, and felt back then, on the outside and inside your mind. The main questions to ask yourself as you relive that shot again and again in detail are these: What were the things you saw, the things you heard, and the things you felt that let you know when and how to swing the club? What did you see, hear, and feel that let you know that your movements were either okay or needed to be corrected?

You’re looking for clues in this exercise, details that control what you already know how to do, but may not know that you know. Sometime during the exercise, for instance, you might notice that you took the club all the way back to parallel. That is a clue. The more clues you can gather, the better your swing will become.

Forget about spectators and forget about what your playing partners did. Just pay attention to the sensory clues—what you saw, heard, and felt—that regulated your shot. Those clues could be related to your alignment, stance, grip, or swing and the mood or