Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
Serious golfer? You know you’ve got the talent—but your brain keeps getting in the way. Think Above Par helps you master the mental game of golf, stop overthinking, and quit worrying about what others think on the course so you can play calm, confident, and consistent golf every round.
If you’re a serious golfer who knows you’re leaving shots out on the course, Think Above Par is your go-to podcast for mastering the mental game of golf. Hosted by Kathy Hart —a former Tour player, Top 50 Teacher, and Certified Mental Coach—each episode helps you strengthen your golf mindset, manage pressure, and play calm, confident, and consistent golf.
You’ll discover why you underperform under pressure, how to stop overthinking your swing, and what to do when you’re worried about what others think on the golf course. Whether you struggle with performance anxiety, perfectionism, or negative self-talk, Kathy shares proven mental-game tools to help you unlock your talent, enjoy the game again, and lower your golf scores.
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Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
3 Traits Of A Coachable Golfer
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 70
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If you want to change and grow, your success is directly related to how coachable and self-coachable you are.
Being not-coachable means you are unwilling to look at your results from a curious and open mindset. It might mean you think you are right and any other way is wrong.
In this episode, I share three traits of a coachable person along with powerful questions to ask yourself along the way.
You also have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to change.
If you want to level up, change your results or just feel better, you want to increase your level of coachability.
Learn more at KathyHartWood.com MasterYourGolfBrain.com
Welcome to Above Par. I'm your host, Kathy Hartwood. I show you how to take more of your talent to the golf course without practicing harder, taking more lessons, or buying new equipment. I show you how to end the frustration of underperforming so you can start playing to your potential. This is where you are going to learn how to think above par so you can play below par. Let's get to it. Hello, my golf friends, and welcome back to Above Par. I hope you're having a wonderful week and the uh temperature has either gone up or calmed down in parts of the country. It's been a crazy week, super cold and super hot. But I hope you're out there playing golf and enjoying yourself. And I wanted to give another shout out to somebody who made a nice post on Facebook talking about recommending my podcast to a Facebook group. This is Holly, and she said, Thank you. You truly made a wonderful difference in my thinking this season. So awesome. Thank you for listening, Holly. And thank you all for recommending my podcast in those Facebook groups and to your friends. I really appreciate it. I'm getting lots of amazing comments and success stories. So I love all of that. Today I wanted to talk about coachability. I don't even know if that's a word, a word, coachable, right? You being coachable by other people and yourself. So whether you're coachable from an instructor or a peer or a friend, you also have to be coachable to yourself because a lot of what I teach you in here is self-coaching, because you're stuck with your dang thoughts all day, right? So you got to be coaching yourself, knowing the tools on how to do that. And I just want to give you some ways to question if you're really coachable or what a coachable person to me looks like. So this is what a non-coachable person looks like. Basically, if you're non-coachable, you're stuck. You're gonna stay the same. You are not going to evolve or change. And if you do, it's really gonna be laborious and hard and heavy. You don't want other people's opinions. You believe that your way is the best way, you believe your own thoughts, you get stuck in in facts that are actually thoughts, and you keep producing the same results over and over again. And I want to mention that sometimes we're we get stuck in our own ways of thinking in certain compartments of our life, certain arenas and different areas. Like at work, you might say, Yeah, it's my way, I do it the best, right? Or at the house, you might be like, this is the only way that you do the dishes, this is the only way that you clean the house, or this is the only way the garage is supposed to look. And in other areas, you might be totally open and coachable. That's fine. It's just something for you to be curious about. And we can like our reasons. If we're like going, I'm done, I like the way I do things in these different areas and I don't want to change, that's fine. But if there's areas that you're not getting the growth that you want or the results that you want, or you know, your indicator is your emotions. If you're just not super happy or pleased, or there's some discontent, then maybe it's worth looking at. I'm gonna share with you three traits of a coachable person, right? Number one is you're open to being wrong. So this is kind of goes back to the first thing that I said. It's either your way or the highway, or you think you know best, or that you're very stuck in a belief that you have about something. I'm gonna use it in the context of golf instruction in this case. Teaching over the years, I've run across a lot of people who thought and a lot of instructors, I'm just gonna say, who taught just one way. There's just one way to do it. There's only one way to make a good pivot. There's only one way to chip, there's only one way to putt, you know, that's like you can't do this, you have to do that. If anybody offered you up any other alternative, you would instantly feel resistance to them and have a feeling or a sense in your head that they were wrong. Now, I run up against this all the time when I coach clients because that's why they're coming to me, right? Their brains are a little stuck in a pattern. My brain was stuck in believing my thoughts about my putting for decades. So I get it. There's only one way to look at things at times. And we really, we sometimes we just get to a point where I can't take it anymore, or there's got to be a different way, or we're open to thinking different things. And some of the things that you would like to question yourself with in this area, if you're a person who finds yourself being, it's my way or the highway, or they're wrong and I'm right, is to ask yourself a couple questions. One would be, how might I be wrong about this? Is this really the only way to look at it? If you're willing to ask yourself those questions, those types of questions, you become more coachable. The minute you do that, you open up your brain to looking at all the different alternatives. When you say, Nope, they're wrong, I'm right, it shuts down your brain. It just goes to sleep. It's like done. You might just go to irritated, actually, because how could they be so wrong when you're so right? But you don't even think of possibilities. It's an instant just conversation ender in your own head. If you say it out loud, it's definitely a conversation ender.
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Right.
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So the minute you ask yourself or your brain, how might I be wrong about this? Is there another way to think about it? What else is possible in this situation? Your brain starts looking for all the possibilities. Now you become coachable. All right, trait number two is you're curious. So many people go through life with their blinders on, they're not looking, they're not curious, they're not paying attention to the things and the patterns that they're creating in their lives. They're not stopping long enough to ask themselves, what's going on here? What else could I possibly do? Okay. So, for instance, in golf, it might be you're like, yeah, I just keep getting off to a bad start. I just keep having to blow up hole. I never could put two rounds together, right? We just kind of go through with our blinders on, not paying attention to the patterns that we're creating for ourselves. And therefore, because our blinders are on and we're not curious, we're going to create the same patterns and results over and over in our life. I heard this amazing analogy uh from Brook Castillo, which basically was a lot of us go through life like in a fish bowl. Like, so we're a goldfish in this fishbowl and we live within the parameters of the fishbowl. We don't really venture outside of them. We never think of actually what's possible outside of the fishbowl. You take that fishbowl and you put it into the ocean, and you don't realize how big of an environment that you could swim in because we stay in our own little bowl. If you got a bird's eye seagull view, the seagull is sitting there going, fish, there's so many places you could go. You know, get out of the confines of your own little bowl. But we never stretch our brain to look outside of it. We're just like, this is the way it is, this is what I do, this is how life is, right? We're not curious. So when you're creating patterns over and over again in your life, and you're just blindly going through, assuming that's your fate, assuming that's the way that things are, such as in golf, getting off to a bad start, never finishing well, always blading it out of the bunker, never being able to break 80. We kind of take that as our fate, as our little goldfish bowl. You just want to start asking yourself really good questions in that situation. It starts with, is it true? Is it true that I always get off to a bad start? Is it true that I'm always going to blade it out of the bunker? Never put two good rounds together. What else can I do? Another question is, what's my next best move? What do I want to think about this? Those questions get your brain looking for different opportunities, different ways to even create different results. Okay. And the third trait is that you're always seeking growth. A lot of times we go through saying things like, I can't, it's hard, it's not possible. That's as good as it gets. When we do that, it's like going through life with a parking break on. You just shut your brain down. It just quits working to look for things that are possible. You just kind of stay right in your little goldfish bowl, swimming around and around the same circle over and over again. So if you find yourself saying those same phrases, if you say I can't, a way to be coachable to yourself is what can I do? You say it's hard, how can I make this easy? Or what part of this is not hard? If you find yourself saying it's not possible, then you want to start asking, what is possible? What can I do? Is this really as good as it gets? And when you do that, you become coachable. You open up yourself for changing the way you're thinking. You open up yourself for changing your results. I promise you, over the years, between golf and coaching, I have run into many a person who is non-coachable. I'm gonna say they don't look very happy either, right? They just get very stuck in their ways, which is so interesting because they come to me because they're not happy, whether it's in their golf swing or in coaching, but yet they're not willing to change. I'm uncomfortable, I'm not happy, I'm miserable, I want different results, but I also am not willing to change. I had this one lady take a lesson from me. She was a beginner golfer. I was I was totally dumbfounded by this. I literally was speechless. I think I stared at her for like 30 seconds, not knowing what to say. These two women came as they were friends, and she was absolutely 100% had her wall up. The minute I never met her before. She just said to me, She goes, I'm gonna take a lesson from you, but you can't change anything. I was like, hmm, I was like, Wow. And so I went, okay, let me watch you hit some balls. Maybe I could, I'll figure out something. She had a god-awful grip, and I'm not being judgmental, but it was god-awful. It was a non-functioning grip. I think she could have broken her wrist if she stayed with that grip. It was that bad. And she goes, You can't touch my grip, you can't change it. I'm like, what do you mean I can't change it? She goes, nope, it's too uncomfortable to change. And that's part of it too. If we're not willing to be uncomfortable, we become not very coachable because changing is uncomfortable. Shifting the way you think about things is uncomfortable. It creates a little resistance in your brain. Your brain doesn't like to change. So, unless you're willing to be uncomfortable, you're not very willing to change. You're gonna go about it a really slow long way, that's for sure, where you barely notice the changes, right? So funny. You know, Brooke, quoting Brooke Christia again, she said, discomfort is the currency of your dreams. If you're not willing to be uncomfortable, if you're not willing to go through discomfort, you're not gonna change. You're not gonna reach your dreams, you're not gonna reach your goals. You're just gonna stay right where you are, comfortable, creating the same results over and over again. So ask yourself, how coachable are you? Are you willing to be wrong? Are you curious? Are you taking the blinders off and really taking a look at your life and the results that you're creating? And are you always seeking growth? Are you willing to be uncomfortable? Ask yourself powerful questions and your brain will give you powerful answers. All right, coachability and self-coachability because you spend a lot of time with yourself. What's that saying? Like, wherever I go, there I am.
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All right. See if you can increase your level of coachability this year. All right, my friends, have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.
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