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
Beliefs that Hold You Back in Golf
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 6
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In this episode, I share with you how to discover the beliefs you have about different parts of your golf and how they affect your performance. I show where to look for these beliefs, why they can be a problem and how they impact your round.
Finally , once you find some beliefs that are holding you back, I share three options you have and the one that creates better golf results.
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. It's nice to have you back. So today I wanted to talk about golf beliefs and how they affect your golf game, what they are, what you're going to do about them. Like, why do you why do you even care that you have golf beliefs? So I want to just shed some light on them and let you know you have them and they affect your golf game for sure. Right. A lot of times we just ignore them and just by the sense of really what they are, which is called a golf belief. So let's talk about the definition of that. So a belief, as far as I'm concerned, is a thought that you think over and over and over again until it becomes a fact. You believe it so strongly that it becomes non-negotiable. And if you listen to uh my last couple of episodes where I talk about my little formula of steer, S-T-E-A-R, a fact is a situation, right? That is something that we can prove in a court of law. 7 billion people on the planet would agree with it. And when we take a thought and we make it a fact, which is what we do when we create a belief, then there's no room for uh negotiation. We can't budget, we can't move it, right? Then we we start noticing that we keep producing the same results over and over again because we have this thought that is optional and we think it's not. And that's where we get a little bit stuck. So I want to talk about some really common beliefs that we have with the golf game, beliefs that you might have that show up for you. You got to do a little bit of exploring, and hopefully through this podcast, I'll shed some light on some of the different ways or different areas of your golf game that you have some very strong beliefs that are keeping you stuck and repeating the same patterns over and over again. And if you want to take your game to the next level, you've got to start creating a little space in there and start questioning whether things are actually true. So let me go through and give you some examples of some very common golf beliefs. So we can have beliefs about our skill set or our clubs, right? So how you hit your driver, what you think about your putter, what you think about bunker, what do you think about a seven-iron or an eight-iron or a fairway wood? Right? You might have beliefs that you I just can't hit fairway woods. That's just a fact. I can't hit them, right? And the more you think that, the more it becomes very true in your mind. You might think that I can't hit fairways, I can't hit a driver, a certain driver. You might think that you stink out of the bunker. It's just a fact. Everybody on the planet would agree that you totally stink on the bunker, out of the bunker, right? And this is not true. And the reason that I know it's not true and that you totally stink out of the bunker is because somebody else who maybe is a big beginner thinks you're amazing out of the bunker, right? It is a thought that you just chose to think. And we're gonna talk about how it serves you and what you can do with that. So you're gonna have thoughts about your different clubs in your bag and your skill set. You're gonna have beliefs about those. You could have beliefs about a course, a certain golf course that you play, right? That either suits you or doesn't suit you, that it's a good course or it's a bad course, right? You're gonna have maybe thoughts about certain holes that you play, that it just this is a hard hole. This hole is my nemesis, right? That's a thought. It is not a fact. And the more that you believe it to be a fact, right, that it is a that it is a belief, then you don't give yourself an opportunity to change, right? That hole kind of owns you when you think that it is your nemesis hole. And we just start believing the things that we say to ourselves, and then you keep getting the results of messing up on that hole, right? So, weather. Sometimes we can have thoughts about weather. I I kind of have one, I just don't do cold weather. I don't know that that's a that's a belief. I just don't like it. You know, I used to play, I used to have to play for a living. I had to play in all kinds of weather, snow, rain, cold. It didn't matter. There's a tournament played in college, I played professionally. You had to play, right? Unless it got called off. Now, you know, for me, I'm kind of a fair weather golfer. I can pick and choose when I want to play. So I choose not to do cold. I just don't, I just don't enjoy that so much. But you might have beliefs about how you play in the rain, right? How you play in cold weather, hot weather, wind, right? So you want to hear what you have to say to yourself about you and your ability to play in those conditions because it's going to affect your results, right? Especially if you think that is true. Of course, conditions, tight fairways. A lot of people have problems with tight fairways, especially if you got a little scoop in there, right? We don't like those tight fairways or fast greens, slow greens, aerated greens, right? We might start complaining a little bit about the golf course, just the on its conditions as far as divots, the uh length of the rough, right out there. You just want to hear what you're saying to yourself about the conditions of the golf course, right? And this, you got we we have to decide if those thoughts are serving us. And I'll show you how we're gonna do that. People, right? We have lots of thoughts and beliefs about people. Some of them might be that women are slow, men are slow, it could be that people talk too much. When people talk too much, it bothers my golf game, right? These are things that we think are b are facts, right, when they're actually just thoughts. So the thing is, why does it matter? Like, why am I talking about all this? So when you have a thought or a belief, the more that you think it or believe it, your brain wants to prove to you that you are right. We like to be right as humans, we like to be right. So your brain is going to prove to you that you are correct. So I make the analogy of I went furniture shopping so for a like tan leather chair. So I went to this leather gallery with my daughter and we started at the beginning of the store and we just circled around the furniture store scanning for a tan leather chair, right? So I told my brain what I wanted, that's what I wanted to look for, and so I went looking for that. I did not notice the black chairs, the brown chairs, the red chairs, the blue chairs. They just, I did not even see them, right? So I went around scanning, I put my brain to work looking for those things. We got back around, my daughter said to me, Mom, did you see those amazing paintings that we could, you know, use that I might like? I was like, I absolutely did not see the paintings. So I started at the door and I put my brain to work on looking for paintings, right? So if you tell your brain that you stink on playing in the wind, the minute you hit a bad shot in the wind, your brain is go, there you go. Your brain is going to scan for every opportunity to prove it is right. So if you feed it things that you think are facts and non-negotiable, you don't give it an opportunity to do anything, then keep producing those same results. That every time it's windy, for example, that you stink, right? That things don't turn out your way, that you don't play very well. Right. So for me, it was for me, it was my putting. This is where this whole belief thing was a big epiphany for me, is that I realized after years and years of playing competitive golf, that I had a very strong belief about my ability to putt well. My my belief was that putting was always going to be the weakest part of my game, that I'm never really going to be a great putter. And I would argue that that was totally a fact. I would tell you that you could take me into a court of law and I could pretty much prove it. And I was so stuck on that belief that anytime that I went on the golf course, and the minute I didn't hit a very good putt, or the minute that I missed a putt, I would be disappointed. And I would say, There you go. Here we go again. Here it starts. Right. My brain would start looking for every opportunity to prove that putting was going to be the weakest part of my game. And it made my game suffer. It made me miserable for the most part on the golf course as well. And until I really noticed it and took a look at it, did I realize what I was creating for myself? It really had nothing to do with my putting. My putting stroke was perfectly fine. But I had this belief that I thought was totally true that anytime that I set foot on the golf course, that putting was always going to be the weakest part of my game, I was going to have a really hard time making a lot of birdie putts. And I was going to have a hard time recovering once I hit a poor putt. This can happen for you as well. So I call this what we do on the golf course anytime before you play, we have, I call it a belief burger. And basically what that means is it's kind of like a Big Mac, two all beef patties, special sauce, let's cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, right? I'm probably dating myself with that one. But it's like a burger, right? And there's layers in between the buttons. The top bun is what you're taking to the golf course, your beliefs that you're taking to the golf course, any golf course, right, on any given day. So that would be your skills, your shots, what you think about your swing, all those different beliefs that you have. If you think that you don't hit seven irons well, then you're gonna take that onto every golf course you play. That's a belief that you want to look at. If you think you stink out of bunkers, right, you're gonna take that with you all the time, right? So those are beliefs that's your top button. The part that's in the middle are the beliefs that we have about that given round. You're gonna have beliefs about who you're playing with, the course, the conditions, the weather, the um, your group, the pace of play, right? The beverage card, right? All of it. You want to pay attention to what you're thinking because it is going to affect your your round of golf. It's gonna affect how well you play. Now, does that mean that you need to um be analyzing everything all day? Not so much. You just really want to get out, you want to get and clean up those big beliefs that are going to give you some negative results and clean them up before you go play. So you have that top bun, which is your skill set. Those are your beliefs about what you what you can do. And then you have in the middle of the buns are the course that you're playing, the group you're playing with, the conditions, all those things that you think about on the golf course that can negatively affect your results. And then the bottom bun, which is what I coach most people on, those are like that's the beliefs about yourself. That really is going to carry a lot of uh weight and influence on your whole round, like your identity as a golfer, your golf esteem, I call it, like how you think about and perceive yourself, your self-confidence, your at your uh fear of failure, all those other things. That's kind of the bottom bun uh that hangs out with you all day that you do want to work on as well, once you clean up the rest of that burger, so to speak. So this is the thing. Once you start looking at your beliefs and your brain is going to tell you that some of these are very true, I want you to ask yourself that exact question. Is it true? Could I be wrong? Right. That's where you're gonna start to create a little bit of space between it being a fact and being a thought. And the minute it jumps into being a thought, my friend, it is optional. And now you get the ability to shift it or change it. And that's where you have then three options. You get to decide if you want to keep it. Do I like this thought? Is it working for me? Do I is it serving me? Am I getting the results that I want? Right. If it, if the answer is yes, then keep it. It's working for you. Right. Or you can drop it. You can just say, this isn't working, and you just totally let it go. You just put it out of your vocabulary and your thought pattern. Sometimes, depending on how long a thought has been hanging out, that is easier said than done. And so your third option is to shift it, give it a little bit of space, wiggle it free a little bit from that belief and fact kind of status that you have given it. Add a little bit, maybe it's not true that I am always gonna struggle with my putting. Sometimes I can hit it out of the bunker pretty well. Start giving it a little bit of space so that you're gonna give it the ability to shift it into something that serves you a little bit better. So take a look at your thought beliefs. What do you think about your ability to play? Go through the belief burger every time before you go and play around to golf. Download that PDF if you find it helpful for you. You can do that at Kathyheartwood.com forward slash beliefs. And I'll put the link in the show notes and start taking a close look. Shed some light on the beliefs that you have about your game, about how you who you play with, how you play, where you play, and see if they are affecting your results and you can start seeing some improvement. All right. Best of luck. You got this. I'll talk to you next time. Bye. I have that download that you can grab about beliefs at Kathyheartwood.com forward slash beliefs. And you can always get more information on my website, KathyHartwood.com. Take care.
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