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.
Learn how to think above par—so you can play below par. Subscribe now to your weekly dose of golf mindset coaching and start transforming your golf brain today.
Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
How to Know if You're Good Enough in Golf
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 126
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In this episode, Kathy addresses a common concern among golfers: the feeling of not being good enough. Explore the detrimental effects of shame and unrealistic expectations, both from comparing oneself to others and from external standards.
Kathy provides practical advice on shifting your mindset, cultivating self-acceptance, and separating your worth from your performance on the golf course. Discover how to identify moments of self-doubt, pivot away from shame, and either work on improving specific areas or embrace self-acceptance. Step into a more empowered and enjoyable golfing experience by recognizing your inherent enough-ness..
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 friend. How are you today? I hope you're out there playing golf and getting some great results. Thank you for all the feedback. Again, I think I say this a lot, but I do appreciate the notes that you send me, whether it's on Instagram or in an email, letting me know that you're getting some value out of the content that I share here with you in the podcast and in my my programs and my coaching. So I really do appreciate it. I read them all. So thank you so much. So today I want to talk to you about how to know if you're good enough at golf. And I think it's a question that comes up often when we play the game. We can constantly feel like we're not good enough, which feels crappy, which feels like shame, which says I could be better than I am. And I want to break this down for you and help you decide, shift the way that you think about it, maybe give yourself a break along the way on how we can decide if we actually are good enough and to catch those moments when they show up when we're playing golf. So this is where not being good enough, which is saying, I could be better, but I'm not, which equals shame. And shame is a crappy emotion. It's one of my least favorite emotions. It just feels heavy. It can linger a while. We usually need some compassion and empathy to get out of it. On the golf course, if we shame ourselves, it's so unuseful because it's more challenging to get back to a positive emotion. You really got to be on top of it. You got to know that you're shaming yourself and you got to know how to pivot out of it. So I tell people, let's not shame ourselves at all. If you can prevent it, if you're on top of it, if you're aware of it, for the benefit of your own game, for the benefit of your score and your enjoyment, your pleasure, and your self-worth, self-acceptance and self-confidence in your identity. So let me go through a couple of different examples where not enough shows up. We can do it one when we use it as a comparison against other people. So you might be playing in a group and you're saying, I don't hit it long enough, or I don't make enough putts, or they hit it closer than I do. They chip better than I do. I don't win enough. So we compare ourselves to other people and we use it against us to feel crappy about ourselves. So if you're out playing a tournament, you're out playing in a round with a group of people, and you can hear yourself comparing others to you, and they're better than you, what you're saying underneath that is that you're not good enough. Potentially. I'm going to show you some ways to look at it. The other ways that we can use not enoughness is other people's standards or expectations of us. It could be a parent, a spouse, a teammate, a coach that they're going to be disappointed in me. They have expectations or opinions of me. They have opinions of how I should play. And their opinions are not going to be that great. They're going to be disappointed. I'm not enough. I didn't do well enough. I didn't play well enough. I didn't hit enough good shots. And the third way we can do it is with our own expectations. They could be unrealistic. So when we set ourselves up with unrealistic expectations and we don't meet them, we open the door for us to tell us that we're not good enough because we didn't meet these expectations that we're unrealistic. So it was an unnecessary and not useful expectation because we used it against us. We used it as an opportunity for us to shame ourselves, to feel crappy, to beat ourselves up. We use it to validate our own self-worth, which is not very great. Right? See, I'm not good enough. See, I'm never going to figure this out. I'm never going to score low enough. I'm never going to win a tournament. I'm never going to make enough putts. I'm never going to hit it far enough. See? And we use those expectations to validate already the opinions that we have of ourselves. Let me give you some examples of some folks that I've worked with. Folks. I don't know why I said folks. Okay. So let me give you an example of some people that I've worked with. Score. I want you to just picture for yourself what score is good enough for you. What score would you shoot and you would walk off the golf course and say, yeah, good job. That's enough. That was good enough. Is it 72? Let's just use par as an example. Okay, I shot par. Fine. Good enough. And then I ask them, what if they shot 76? And the answer gets to Yeah. Just okay. Not great. Not horrible. Okay, how about 80? 81. Nope. Bad. Horrible. I suck. I'm not good enough. In this example, what we're doing is we're using a number on a piece of paper to define our enoughness. What is good enough and what isn't good enough. How we get to talk about ourselves and how we feel about ourselves. It's a number. This can go with distance, how far you hit it. If I hit it far enough, then I get to feel good. If I didn't, I get to feel crappy. This is how you deal with those things that you don't think are enough. We're going to pull it apart into two pieces. The first part is you. You're enough. You are worthy. You are whole. You are enough. Because you are put on this planet that way. Period. End of conversation. Take that out of the equation. Now what are you left with? Now define enough. Is it that is it your distance? Is it your putting? Is it how many times you win? Is it the number that you shoot? Is it how tall you are? It's gonna show up as they're better than me. I'm too blank or I don't do something enough. And this is the thing that I want you to do. There is you who is enough, and then there is the thing. So it sounds like my drives aren't far enough, but I'm enough. My scores aren't low enough, but I'm enough. I don't make enough putts, but I'm enough. We have to separate ourselves from the game. We have to separate ourselves from the thing that we don't think is enough. And then once you do that, I want you to define enough. What is enough? How long is long enough? How low is low enough? And why? There are times if your goal is to make a team or to qualify or to lower your handicap, then we can be scientists about this. We can be factual about it. I'm enough, but to qualify for the team or to lower my handicap or to play in this tournament, my scores aren't yet low enough. That's factual. I'm enough as a person, but my drives aren't long enough. I would ask you why. What's the rest of that sentence? How long do they need to be? Do they need to be long enough for your ego to feel good about yourself so you can compare yourself with other people so that you're the longest person in the group? Or do they need to be long enough so that you can start reaching the greens in regulation? Check in with that. I'm enough, but not enough putts drop. My putting is inconsistent and not yet good enough. Once you go through that exercise, find the different areas where you're saying to yourself that something isn't enough, or compared to other people, they're better than you. Areas that you beat yourself up, areas that you shame yourself, pull it apart, pull you out of the equation. You're already sitting over there to the side, totally whole and perfect and worthy and enough because you were put on the planet this way. So let's pull that out of the equation. Now, what part of your game, your skill set right now do you want to approve? So you get two options right here. You either change it, work on it, get determined to improve it, or accept it. Because when we start arguing with reality, when we won't accept it, we're miserable, we suffer unnecessarily, we shame ourselves. If we keep saying I don't hit it far enough and we beat ourselves up every day, either decide to accept that this is how far I hit it, or go on a mission to change it if you can. That feels so much better than using it against yourself every single time you play, every single time you play with somebody who hits it further than you, every single time you play with somebody who scores lower than you. This shows up in our personal life too, right? We compare ourselves to other people and how we look, the size of our bodies, our clothes, cars, hair, height, weight. We're constantly comparing ourselves against other people and using it against us to tell us we're not good enough. Now, there's something about you personally that you can change. Change it. If not, accept it. Separate it out from who you are because when you attach it to you and your identity, it's just day in and day out feeling crappy. And when you feel crappy, you're not going to do the things that are going to help you feel better anyway, because we don't take action when we're feeling crappy. We don't look for opportunities to change. We our brain can't go there. Our brain is too stuck feeling sorry for itself, beating itself up. It can't at the same time look for areas of growth and change. It's not possible. You got to shift out of it. And I say, let's prevent ourselves from beating ourselves up. Let's look for the times when we're telling ourselves that we're not good enough, where we're comparing ourselves to other people, where we have unrealistic realistic expectations, or we're trying to meet someone else's expectations or opinions of us. The quicker you can identify to that feeling, I know when it happens pretty quickly. I know exactly what it feels like. It's your opportunity then to remind yourself, I am whole and worthy just as I am. Let me pull it out of the equation. What am I doing that's not enough? What can I change or what can I accept about myself? And let's move forward. All right, my friends. In my book, you're totally enough. Are there things that we can work on and improve? Probably. But just enjoy the process. Separate it out from who you are. All right. If I can help you in any of this, if you want to talk about it deeper, join one of my programs, go to kathyheartwood.com. Have a beautiful week. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.
