How many times in your golfing life have you heard someone say, 'Visualize the shot'? Perhaps one of the most famous (or notorious) lines from a golf movie comes from Caddyshack when Ty tells Danny Noonan to "Be the ball, Danny. Be the ball."

Yet many of us simply don't know how to go about this task of visualizing. We step up to the ball, look down the fairway or over the water to the green and 'see' where we want the ball to land and we may even see a tree limb hanging in the general vicinity of the ball's flight path. Then we set up and swing and watch the ball carom far off course, nowhere close the green, nowhere near our intended target.

So what's the process in visualizing? The first component, as with anything else in life, is practice. No one should expect to be able to attempt visualization for the first time and be able to do so accurately. But visualization is certainly something any golfer who wants to improve their game and lower their score should learn to do.

Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods are two of the best golfers in the history of the game and the reason why they are so gifted and able to hit some incredible shots is that they visualize each shot before they take. They visualize where they need to hit the ball, how their swing with look and feel and where the ball will go through its entire flight to reach its destination. They don't simply spot an ideal location and then swing.

It may be simpler to start on the green. When we 'read' a green, we are observing the contour of the green from our ball to the cup and attempting to figure out how far the ball will move from one side to the other and how hard we have to hit it in order for it to find the bottom of the cup. If your approach to putting is more mathematical, calculating probabilities and such, then you are not visualizing.

When you are on the green, survey the green and determine how the ball will roll. 'See' yourself standing over the ball, gripping the club and practicing your stroke. Next, visualize where the ball will roll when you strike it with the putter. Watch the ball in your mind as it rolls down the green, casually begins to break right toward the hole. Of course, your visualization needs to be honest and accurate to the shot itself (you can't expect a ball to break right because you visualized it if the green rolls left). Don't worry if your 'visualization' doesn't result in the putt going in. Rather, focus on creating that visualization in your head as accurately as possible. With more practice, you will soon discover that putts you once considered yourself lucky to make will begin to fall with regular consistency.

The idea of visualizing your iron and wood shots is the same as with putting. You want to see where the ball needs to go and how you will swing the club for it to take that flight path. When you begin to prepare these shots in your mind before addressing the ball, you increase the chances that the shot will be precisely the one you want. You can think about it like carving a line into a piece of wood. When you visualize the shots first, you carve a deeper and narrower groove into the wood. The more consistently you do this, the harder it becomes for the knife (your shot) to make a mistake.

As with any practice, visualization requires time to perfect, but the practice can be done (and should be done) before any shot. Don't be concerned with the results at first but rather focus on the vision itself.

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Prakash Shah answers some of your Golfing Questions and Helps you to Train Your Golf Mind. Download this free eBook - Unleash Your True Golfing Potential. Visit - http://www.golf-mind.com/golf-mission/exit2.aspx