The performer's NOMIND.

When you're learning to play the piano, you endure hours of practice so that your fingering is automatic, and your hands stay at the same level. My first piano teacher placed a penny on the back of my hands while I did scales, and if I made the penny drop, she'd whack my hand with a ruler. Now when I type, I look at the screen and the words appear as if by magic, because I learned touch typing in 1950 (not for numbers, though).

In the learning phase of golf, we have to practice for 10,000 hours (not a made-up figure, cited by Gladwell in his new book, "Outliers", on athletic and musical performers). In that time, if we've done it right, we learn where to place and how to move every part of our bodies, from feet to hands. After enough time has passed, we have developed our own, characteristic "Signature Swing", and with it we can hit shots as well as our genetic and environmental limits will permit.

That means there's no more learning to do.

So that we can play our best, a few of us train ourselves to focus our attention on the path we want the ball to take, pay attention to how we set up, start the club moving on the backswing and feel where the shaft and the clubhead are right up to the end of the backswing. 

Notice I didn't say "try to feel" -- we've learned to do nothing but TAKE IN INFORMATION on the backswing.

Once the backswing feels complete, we acquire the ball, or more precisely the spot on the surface of the ball that we're aiming for. This varies depending on the trajectory we wish the ball to take. At that point, our well-trained bodies take over and the stroke is completed at a subconscious, or nomind, level. We then can observe if this has been one of the 5-10% of our shots (same percent as Hogan, Snead, Woods, Nicklaus) that comes off just as we'd planned, or not.

The point is, we don't give ourselves a bunch of instruction as to what to do during the swing. We take in information on the backswing, then let the subconscious take over on the forward part of the stroke, while we look at the spot on the ball.

This state of nomind is best practiced with the putter, a ball, and a target, be it a hole, a coin, or a golf tee. The trick is allowing yourself to feel the motion of the club -- not your hands, not any part of your body -- and then shut that off by looking at the ball. You give NO commands, no instructions, as to how to do it. You ALLOW or PERMIT your trained body to make the ball go where you want it to go.

NOTHING about a flat wrist, a steady head, an accelerating stroke. NOTHING. NOMIND.

As soon as you start directing what your body can accomplish without direction, you are heading into dangerous waters. That's how the yips -- and more golfers yip with the driver than the putter -- begin.

Attaining NOMIND is not easy, but once learned it becomes automatic, and golf becomes easy.