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.
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 girlfriend. Welcome back to Above Par. Super happy you're here. So today what I'm sharing with you is an excerpt from one of my above par Academy calls. And in it I talked about how I want to do a podcast about the subject of experiences versus results. And I was inspired by a podcast that I listened to. And I was getting ready to record it, and I thought, you know what? I pretty much said everything I wanted to say in this call. There were a couple comments during the call, but I added one to this as well, someone's experience with this. So I figured, you know what? I'll just clip it out of one of the calls and I'll share it with you about how we differentiate between our results and our experience with the game of golf. All right. Without further ado, here's a clip from one of my Academy calls. So the one of the things that before I add opened up to questions, I listened to a podcast and it was Jay Shetty. Do you all familiar with Jay Shetty at all? He's got a podcast, right? So he had James Corbin on. And I listened to it while I was on the bike the other day. And there's one thing that he said in there that I wrote down while I was on the bike was that separating out your experience from your results. And he was talking about it in the context of getting an award, like a Grammy or an Oscar. And he said that the people who end up getting the Oscars, sometimes it's their loneliest night ever because it's the pinnacle, like it's lonely at the top. At the top of the mountain is very lonely. It's the climb going up that most people are so engaged in. And that's the experience. But once you're there, then it's this lonely moment of I got my Oscars. But so many of those actors or performers, they say it's the loneliest night of their life. So he made the comment then of separating out your experience from your results. So I thought about this relative to golf. I would love to have a conversation about it. Your first thoughts about when you hear that. But I think personally, I played so much of my golf focused on my results, and my results would have dictated my experience. Like then I would have told you it was a good experience because of my results. Like everything was about the result. Everything was about getting to the top of the mountain. But if you pivoted and you shift it to enjoying the experience and focusing on the experience and appreciating it, would your results be different or would your results be just separate? So, in other words, I had an awesome four hours. Okay, five. Who are we kidding? Right. I feel like a four-hour round is like speed golf anymore from when I watch people play. But okay, so you have these four hours. Can you enjoy that experience and separate it from your results? I think in golf, this is the problem. We tie them together. He made an analogy to cats. He was in cats, the musical, I think, movie, which I think just I think it was horror. I think it tanks really badly. Okay. Jay said, We would do you regret that because it bombed, right? He said, No, I do it all over again because it was an amazing experience. I loved all the people I enjoyed filming it. It was so much fun. I know it's not golf, but I just want you to think in your head if you can make the analogy. So he's enjoying the experience regardless of the result. Could you enjoy a round of golf regardless of the score? Could you enjoy your experience on the golf course regardless of the result? I will tell you one of the rounds of golf that I shot 77. I know some of you would take 77, but I was playing in a professional tournament. I was the only woman pro in the event. It was a pro-am. And the weather stunk. It was in the fall in the northeast. So it was cold. And I think it was raining. Anyway, needless to say, it was the hardest round of golf I've played in a long, long time. And I had a lot at stake because personally I was the only woman playing. I wanted to hold my own. It was at my home course. So there's like lots of members around witnessing it. I didn't want to finish last. There was just so much on my brain. And I hit it horrible. I could not find my golf ball. It was amazing. And I grinded all the way through the golf course. I didn't think I told my people in my group, I'm like, I'm probably not going to talk very much because I'm so focused on grinding. I'm not going to be real sociable. We'll have drinks afterwards, but I got a job to do. And did I enjoy the experience? Kind of. Like I loved being engaged. I wish I was hitting it differently, but I loved that I was so focused and making the most out of the day. The result turned out to be okay. I ended up finishing like seventh of like all the whole field. So everybody was struggling. You don't know that at the time that everybody else is struggling too in the conditions. But that was one of the rounds where I enjoyed the experience so much because I was so focused and on the keeping it from being a 90. I think I could, I could have shot 90 like that, like if I just like not focused as much. So can you find different rounds that you go through where you can, or does it even seem feasible in your head to be able to accept separate the experience from the result? Anybody want to share?
SPEAKER_02
Yes, Chris. So I've done that before when you do have to focus so much and you're pivoting so many times because your brain kind of tries to get you down that other path. And and I I get proud of myself for it. I mean, I'm not sure my whole focus is on golf, but I'm so focused on getting back to where I want to be. And like that, like you said, that grinding. And so it's maybe not the golf experience, but the experience of learning and of making progress that you feel on the course. Definitely experience that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because I think it right Greenlight Days, when we experience green light days, you all know what I'm talking about, where everything is going great. We love our group, the experience is great, like, but it's accidentally great, right? It's just like, oh my gosh, it turned out to be just a super day. Okay. Those days, those experiences like that are easy. We can exp we love those. Can you enjoy when you're not playing with your favorite people or you don't have your favorite tea time or best tea time? That's mental management to me. It's it's enjoying actually sometimes figuring out how to enjoy that experience is pleasurable. Can I learn the skill of managing my mind around having to play with Betty? Can I enjoy having the worst tea time, you know, the late tea time that you didn't want, or the weather is bad. If we're only going to enjoy golf, if the experience is good, then our results are going to be volatile. Our results are going to get affected by our experience. I talk about going out to play golf for you to create your best result, is for you to hit as many shots from calm, certain, and confident as possible, or confident as possible. But the more you can do that, that's the experience. Then your results are going to be what your results are going to be. That's why you separate your result from the experience. Right. So it's when we attach our result to the round that our experience is crappy. It's like the opposite. When they when our we're so focused on making sure that we score well or that we don't embarrass ourselves or we don't feel like a failure, then our experience also sucks. I think it's really, really hard to have a good experience if we're so connected to the result.
SPEAKER_00
You see how yes, Jane? I have a comment on that. Um I did experience this, I have experienced this before. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I looked back on it, um tournament round that I was playing in, and I was just playing terribly. I was not getting off the tee well, I wasn't hitting fairway shots well. But somewhere along the line, I just channeled our work and decided it this was going to be a grinder. This was just going to be a day where if I could do what you had taught us and and opened our minds to, just never give up and keep grinding. And so that's what I did. And I was my grinding paid off in my chipping and in my putting. And so no matter how long it took me to get there, when I got to the chip or the putt, I had a mindset that it was going to go in or it was going to be so if it was a chip, it was gonna be close enough that I was gonna make it. It was gonna be a gimme. It was match play. And somewhere along the line, this pride at having experienced that that feeling of overcoming that feeling that I had in the beginning of being so disappointed with the way I was hitting the ball, the pride of grinding took over and it just became uh a whole new experience. That was definitely from the work that we do. I would have given up long ago and just wrote that round off that I was gone. I was toast. And I ended up winning that that round. And I have drawn on that so much since then. I think I had to actually experience it. I had to see that I could get results with it, even though we had talked about it that you should know that you can just never give up, just don't quit. But when I actually experienced it and looked back on it, I have been able to draw from that so much. So that yeah, I definitely have had that feeling of uh separating them.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I was thinking of the James Corbin thing. Okay, so when you win an Oscar, like that stays with you for the rest of your life as far as it's on your resume. But the moment, the experience, the feeling stays with you a very short amount of time. So when we go out and we play a round of golf and we shoot our best score, whatever it is, let's say you shoot even par. Okay, I'm just gonna make a random number. You go out and shoot 72 and you're like, that was amazing. I want to do that all the time because I love the feeling of shooting this beautiful score. But if it's all about the result, then what's gonna happen is you're not connecting with the experience that created the results. It's like getting a quick dopamine hit. It's like a little kid eating cotton candy or ice cream, right? They eat it, their face lights up, and then it fades.
unknown
Right.
SPEAKER_01
And that's how we can be with a round of golf. We're like, that was amazing. But the next day, all right, how many of you have had multiple day tournaments? And then you go out and you shoot lights out the first round, and you're like, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Kind of forgetting he's got to go out and tee off tomorrow. And if our brain isn't around that the we can do that again, and that it was about the experience, it was all just about that hit of having that great result, then the chances of us creating that result again are not very good. When you go out and play golf and you're all about the result, it's a little, it's like licking off of an ice cream cone when you're young. You get this big dopamine hit, you wake up the next day and you're like, crap, how do I do that again? Versus, I'm all about the experience. And I'm not saying have fun, right? Like grinding is not necessarily fun. This is about the experience of, well, I guess you get to dictate your experience, but for me, it would be about I want to be really fast at pivoting. I want to go through my emotions really quickly. I want to see how quickly I can get over a bad shot. I want to watch my brain go and start focusing on the score and bring it back. I want to not worry about what other people are thinking about me. I want to keep my perfectionism in check. To me, that's my experience that I want to have on the golf course. And if that's my experience, and if that's my objective and my goal and my intention, then my result is going to be pretty dang good, or as good as it could be, the rest of it's golf. Right. But if my experience is I just want it to be a green light day every day because I have a better shot of creating a result, and that's why I want it to be a green light day, then we're not being realistic and we're not actually building up any tools or resilience for the days when they're not.
unknown
Right.
SPEAKER_01
So, okay, so I want you to think about enjoying the experience, setting that as an intention when you go out and play and separating it from your result and what happens in your head. For me, when I first heard that, because I spent so much time with them connected, it was like they're like a magnet to the two of them, like a little bit in my head. So I'm curious if you could the more you can separate them out, what kind of pushback do you get? Just get really curious. All right. All right, gang. Thank you. Have a beautiful week. I'll talk to you next time. All right, bye.
