I personally have never felt as comfortable and as sure of a European win. It seemed right from the word go; Tiger hitting it in the water on the first, the reception for the European players, the morning fourballs, the strength in depth. Maybe the Americans need to enlist the help of the Australians.

However, back to more important issues. Just before the Ryder Cup we looked at your pre game preparation for putting and specifically how you could increase your feel for the day ahead.

This week I want to take a look at something that has always fascinated me. How you shape your perception.

What do people always say about the size of the hole when they putt well?

"It seemed like a bucketf.I couldn't miss it."

Yet when they have a torrid time out on the greens the hole seems to shrink to the size of a thimble. Now of course the hole doesn't actually change size but our perceptions do.

As it has often been said 'perception is reality', what we perceive to be true is indeed that way, no matter what anybody else thinks.

Some people have a perception that jumping off a bridge with a piece of elastic attached to your back is the essence of fun, it isn't my perception but that doesn't matter to the person enjoying the bungee jump. Unless perhaps they may see a jump that didn't turn out too well.

So our perceptions are individual and they can be changed, they can be adjusted.

So if our perception of the hole has some impact on our performance, shouldn't we then be doing everything in practice to shape our perception of the hole being bigger rather than smaller?

Now when the average golfer lines his 4 balls up on the green just before playing and the first one misses, how does that register in the brain?

And then the next one may go in but then the third one misses.

Each miss has the potential to alter the golfers perception for that day, before they go out to play.

This unfortunately is a win/lose scenario, a scenario that we simply cannot afford to risk.

When we miss a putt out on the course we tend to blame everything in the immediate vicinity, a poor read, a spike mark, whatever we could find as an excuse.

But understanding the brain a little more and recognising the way it works is critical. Some of the putts that you miss out there in the tournament may just be as a result of the seed of doubt that you have inadvertently sowed on the practice green before you went out to play.

Just imagine though that from today you were different in so much that you actually took charge of how your own perceptions where being shaped.

For instance in the last five minutes before you set off to play you stroked a number of eight to five feet putts to a tee peg or you rolled the ball over a tiny five cent coin.

Just consider at the unconscious level if you hit a putt and it just slides past the edge of the tee. How does that register in your brain in terms of a hole?

As the ball misses the tee your mind will actually believe that the ball would have gone into the hole.

But what if you actually hit the tee?

As you undoubtedly will. Now how do you feel about your ability to hit such a tiny object?

How big does the hole look now in comparison to your tee peg?

And what would happen out on the course if you maybe kept seeing a tee peg at the back of the hole on the line you wanted to hit the ball?

How do you think that your mind and body would respond to such a specific target, such a small target within the larger area of the hole?

How many times would we ever actually miss a dartboard when we aim at the bulls-eye?

As you read this next paragraph taking in the information, what I would like you to do is to bring to your mind your favourite colour.

Now I would like you to imagine a tee peg with that same colour and as you do that could you maybe imagine that this tee peg is stuck in the ground on a lush, slick green and could you possibly imagine a golf ball rolling towards it.

Then, possibly, can see that it is in fact rolling from your putter and nowf.

this time the tee is behind the hole and as the ball rolls towards the tee, you see the ball being caught by the hole.

You hear the sound of the ball dropping into the hole and as you feel different because the hole just seems different, the size somehow seems to have changed. But that's only a suggestion.

Our ability to shape our perceptions is so vitally important in our quest to become truly great on the greens and as you can now see the period of time that you spend before you actually go out to play can have a massive implication to your results in the long term.

This period of time on the practice putting green that for most people is a ritual waste of time doing what they have always done.

And as you may have heard in other areas of your life, if you do what you have always done then you will get what you have always got.

Are you going to be different now and take charge of how you roll that ball into the hole?