THE INITIAL APPROACH
KNOWING WHAT TO DO
The planning doesn't actually need to be that much elaborated; it just needs to be laid out. This sets up the foundation for your strategy and then by you having an idea of what you will be doing for each hole before the round starts will give you more focus on each part of the game and keep you busy thinking about what needs to be done rather than what you should have done.
This is a fundamental understanding when playing golf; what has happened in the past is in the past and you can not change it. What happens in our mind is something like this: you hit a bad shot or a shot with a bad outcome and by thinking on what you should not have done you are actually attempting to change your mistake by thinking about it and applying whatever changes you think is necessary to the next shot. Well, I have bad news for you: you CAN NOT change the past so, forget about it and lock your thinking on the next approach and how you will get the results you want and therefore, go to the next part of your planning.
STICK TO THE PLAN!
Probably as you progress into the game and the conditions keep changing, you will feel that you need to make a few changes here and there to your planning and that’s fine. Small adjustments will have to be made because in golf the variations of a shot are too large to be contained into a straight type of thinking, the game is dynamic and so should your decisions be. What I'm trying to say is that the best way of creating a consistency in your game is by creating consistence with you decisions first, but that doesn't mean that you will have to make a decision that you know the outcome is not going to be in your favour, obviously, you will have to change certain aspects of your planning as you play and encounter situations which were not predicted by the time you were putting together your strategy.
When this happens, write it down, to include in your planning next time you find the same conditions. Play the game as you are in classroom learning your favourite subject for the first time, take notes either mentally or writing them down to have as much information as possible to learn about your own game and the shots you have to hit to overcome those conditions. Above of all, be patient and nice to yourself, give yourself time to learn and build a solid mind set every time you find something new and you will see that eventually the unknown situations will show up more rarely than usual and you will be able to achieve the peace of mind and make the right decisions based upon your accurate thinking.