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
Why You Practice and Don't Get Better
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 30
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Do you ever feel like you are putting in the time practicing and not seeing the results?
if this is the case it is worth taking a look at how you practice. In this episode, I add golf mechanics and mindset to expose some reasons why you are't seeing improvement in your game.
I talk about how to best practice to get the most out of your time. The couple things you should do each practice session and then what to focus on when you take it to the course.
If you want to get on the waitlist for the upcoming Mental Game Workshop, CLICK HERE
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. Hi there my friends and welcome back to Above Par. This is Kathy. I want to talk to you today about practicing and getting the most out of your practice. I hear a lot of people saying I've spent the summer practicing and I'm just not seeing the results. And what I'd like to do is clear up a few things about maybe what you're doing that's not helping and what you could do that could help you. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some mechanical things and some golf techie things, and then I'm going to talk to you about some mental things and your attitude or your mindset going into it. One of the things that I find people do is they go out to the golf course and they just go out there to hit balls and to spend time. So it's like I'm going to go out and hit balls for an hour, or I'm going to go out and hit a basket of balls and that's it. I'm going to throw my clubs back in the car, I'm done for the day. Right. And so it's all about time for you. It's about the number of balls that you hit and the amount of time you spend out there. And while I think it's nice to go out there and spend time hitting balls, but if you do not have a plan, then you're not really ingraining anything. If you're not working on anything, what happens is people go out there and they're like, oh, and yeah, I'm just gonna hit a bunch of balls and just, you know, I'll hit six slices out there, and then they're like, oh, I hit that one straight. That's the one I want. And I always tell them like that. The one that went straight was the accident. What you own are the six slices. You're searching for that straight ball, but what you're doing is you're you're ingraining inconsistency, you're ingraining errant shots because you're just going out there and just whacking balls away. You're not necessarily going through anything to fine-tune what you're working on, whether that's in your um swing or your setup or different shots or ball position, whatever it is, right? Fixing a curve in the ball or contact. So the second one is the person who goes out there and practices and works on something different each time. You might have gone and watched YouTube and came up with some really great ideas. You're like, that sounds like me. I'm gonna go out there and give it a try. And every swing you're trying something different, or you watch TV and you saw something in a player, and you're like, wow, he looks like he's really making a shoulder turn. And I'm gonna go out there today and I'm gonna try and make a shoulder turn. Well, maybe it's a noble cause, your body can't do it. So then your body's going to go to the path of least resistance. You might start coming out of your posture, or you might start locking your right knee, I don't know, whatever it is. So because your body can't do what you're seeing on TV or or you're seeing on YouTube, but you go out there and start trying different things. So now you're spending the time out there practicing, but you're also trying something different every time. All you're doing is creating inconsistency in your swing. Nothing is helping. You're spending the time, you're putting in a lot of brain effort, you're thinking a lot, you're trying all the different things, and you're not getting any better because you haven't done anything consistent, you haven't changed anything in your swing. The third thing that I'd want you to notice is are you taking a lesson? Are you having someone actually help you with what is going on in your golf swing? And one of the reasons why people don't take lessons, it's one of three reasons. One, you don't want to spend the money, right? So you're not seeing the value in spending the money to get a golf lesson. I would tell, I would ask you, what's it costing you? The fastest way for you to get better at anything is to be mentored and taught. The slowest way is to trial and error and figure it out on your own. What's the cost in you not taking a lesson, right? It's got to be worth it to you. The second reason is that you don't trust the instructor, right? So that can come from a couple different things. It might be that you think you know what you need to work on and the instructor doesn't. I've had lots of students like this where they have gone and they think they come in and tell me what they want me to teach them, right? It's so interesting. Nothing wrong with that. It just could be the way your brain is working. You might think you really know what you need to work on, so you don't trust the instructor, or you don't trust that actual person. Maybe you don't think they're qualified enough, or that they're not talented enough as an instructor. That's fine. Just be honest with it and go either find another instructor, find someone who can give you some quality instruction, or question your beliefs. Are you sure that you know exactly what is best for you and your swing? I just question like, is it possible that you might be wrong? Is there possible that there's another way to do it? Or is there possible that there's something that someone could tell you? Okay. Or the third reason is that you don't believe in yourself or you don't trust yourself to put in the time and the work and to make the change. That's why you might not be taking a lesson. It comes from one of those three reasons for the most part. So this thing, you're going out there and you're putting in the time and you're practicing. You might not be practicing anything, you just may be spending time, you might be practicing too many things, you might need different help from an instructor, whatever it is. It's frustrating because you're not going to see the results, because you're not doing anything consistent enough to make a swing change. That time isn't gonna show up for you in the results that you're having on the golf course. So, this is what I would suggest that you do to make the most out of your practice so that you can start seeing your results on the golf course. Is one is that you always want to go back to your fundamentals. But 90% of the problems could have been fixed if someone just stayed on top of their fundamentals. If that is not a priority for you, what happens is small changes start creeping into your swing. So, in other words, your fundamentals are your grip, posture, ball position, aim, and width of stance, right? So those are your five fundamentals. You want to make sure that you have those in check every time you go out and practice. The reason is if golf was like a complicated math equation and it was full of constants and variables, lots of variables, a's and x's and y's and c's and d's, right? So many variables that the that it's complicated to figure out. The more variables you have in your swing or your game, the harder golf is. So, what you want to do is you want to take as many variables as you have and turn them into constants. The more that you can turn into constants, the easier and more consistent your golf game is gonna be. So, what that looks like is if you put your hands on the club different every time, you're adding a variable to your swing. Super complicated. If you aim different every time, you're adding a variable instead of a constant, right? That should be a constant. It should be the same every single time. So all those five things are totally available to you. It does not matter how much talent you have, you can stand over the ball consistently every time. It just takes a little bit of effort and thought. You can practice this at home. You don't even need to go to a golf course to practice your fundamentals, your grip and your posture, right? And but you do not want to hit a shot until that is on point. So that's where you see people putting clubs on the ground and you make a double checking their aim and maybe a club to help you with uh ball position. Because if that is the same every single time, then the difference that I see in my shot, what's happening, the curve in my shot or the contact, at least I've eliminated that it's not my setup. Because if you aim over time to the right, what's gonna happen, for instance, is an example, eventually you're gonna start coming over the top and pulling your ball back to the target. And that just happened because you were misaimed, right? So when people came to me for a lesson and I would look at their fundamentals, it was like sometimes it was just their aim or their grip got a little bit sloppy and it fixed things right away. So always go out and practice and spend the time working on your fundamentals, always. The second thing is have a plan. Know what you're gonna work on, like have a purpose for going out there. I'm gonna work on this, but you gotta know what you want to work on. Don't guess. Don't go to YouTube for the answer. If you need to work on your turn, if you need to work on your wrist position on the top of your swing, if you need to work on your finish, like just have a plan and go through and decide I'm gonna hit five balls doing this, I'm gonna hit six balls doing that with a drill, have some good drills to work on, and then do a couple swings where you don't think about anything and you just try and hit some solid shots. So you go through rotating maybe through some drills or some things that you're trying to ingrain and incorporate into your swing, and then always have some shots where you don't think about a darn thing. So you're not too mechanical. And I'm gonna do this six times, this rotation six times, and I'm done. Like awesome practice session, super good. Right? You're starting to ingrain things into your swing and you had a plan. It wasn't just like out there whacking balls into the middle of the range with no target in in play. And then the last thing is I'd want you to be very clear on why you're not getting results. Is it actually your swing? Is it because you're not seeing the results from your practice session, or are you not trusting what you're working on out on the golf course? So when you go on the golf course, the one thing that I would encourage you to do is to take with you what you own. And sometimes we don't own our swing change yet. So what happens is we have a little bit of our old swing and a little bit of our new swing, and we feel like we don't own anything, right? It's kind of just all discombobulated. Then we go out and we have these mechanical thoughts trying to ingrain, like if you were thinking about making a bigger turn or you're starting to drive your hips or do all the things, whatever it is that you're trying to do, and you think about on the golf course, we become tighter and more tense. So it doesn't seem very natural, and then we don't trust it. So it becomes a little bit of a mess. So I encourage you to be a little patient with yourself when you're out there trying to take a new move or a swing change out onto the golf course. It's very common that one, you'll be in between thoughts, you'll be in between swings, and a little bit of the old and new will show up. You'll also be a little bit more tense because you're trying to think about mechanical thoughts. And when you do that, then it's harder for your swing to feel more natural. And then the third thing I want to mention is that it messes with your tempo. Whenever you're making a swing change and you start thinking about mechanical thoughts on the golf course, or if you get tense, your tempo gets off. So, as a default, I would always encourage you, whether you feel like you're in between some swing changes or not, is always try and have a tempo thought or a tempo feel because good tempo trumps mechanics. So, what that means is if you can go out there and make a swing with pretty decent tempo, then you'll allow your mechanics to kind of come into play and you got a shot of finding the golf ball. But if you go out there and your tempo is off and your mechanics are off, it's kind of like speeding with a flat tire, right? It's just a little bit of a wreck out there. So always go to tempo. You got at least a shot of getting some things to get lined up so that you can find the club face. Those are some of the reasons why you might be struggling with getting your practice that you've put can been putting in to show up on the golf course. Either you're not practicing very well or you're not practicing with a plan or you're just wasting time out there. So it feels like you're putting in a lot of time and you're not seeing the results. Or when you're going out on the golf course, you're a little bit in between swings. And I encourage you just focus on your tempo and stay patient. Have some compassion for yourself and make sure when you practice, you practice with a plan and work on your fundamentals. All right, hope that helps. I'll talk to you next week. So if you want to get into my next mental game workshop, make sure you get onto the wait list. It will be in the description or the show notes below. This is an opportunity we go through four live calls and we dive in deep on your mental game. And I teach you the tools on how to get out of your own way. And this is an interactive workshop. So we're gonna get to work on what is holding you back. So make sure if you're interested, that you get on the wait list so that you will know when the workshop is released. All right, talk to you later.
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