4 Mental Skills Every Golfer Should Practice This Winter

In this episode Kathy challenges the idea of an "off-season" for mental golf. While the colder months may sideline physical play, now is actually the best time to strengthen your mental game. Kathy shares four powerful practices to develop mental resilience that applies on and off the course. Listeners will learn how to set daily intentions, master the STEAR method for thought awareness, process emotions in 60-90 seconds, and shift limiting beliefs. These skills aren't just for golf — they’re for life. If you want to walk into your next golf season calmer, more confident, and ready to perform under pressure, this episode is a must-listen. Don't wait for spring to start working on your mental game — start now!

Transcript

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.

Oh my golf. Welcome back to Think Above Par Far. I appreciate you being here and listening and I hope you're enjoying the holiday season as this is going to be released in December, a couple weeks before Christmas. So I hope whatever you're doing, you're enjoying it, enjoying the season, enjoying family and friends. This is a slower time of year for golf, so a lot of people are wrapped up in the holidays.

It might be a little bit colder where you are. It's not really tournament season, so golf and mental golf can go on the back burner, so to speak. And what I wanted to talk to you today about is that there is no off season for your mental game of golf. Now is not the time to stop working on your mental golf skills. Your mental skills, and if you haven't been working on them, then now is the time to start.

It is not anything that we're done with. You get to continually practice it. I want you to think of it as a practice, not something that you're going to get to own or you're going to be done. And once you learn a couple skills, you know you can move on and not think about it anymore. You have a brain. I'm pretty sure you have a brain. You're listening to this.

You have a brain. You're constantly working against your brain and you're introduced in new environments and new situations that challenge you. And if you want to grow, if you're a human who wants to grow, or you get to work through being uncomfortable. And that takes mental skills. And we have habits that we have that creep back in. Whether it's perfectionism or people pleasing or being a victim or being hyper vigilant.

We have different patterns that have a tendency to creep back in that we need to be on top of. We get to witness and be curious about. Working on your mental golf isn't about being on the golf course and saying, all right, I've got a wedge in my hand and a hundred yard shot over water and I can feel myself being anxious. Mental golf is about that situation, but also knowing what to do with your anxiety.

It's also witnessing your brain Knowing how to witness your brain being self aware enough to hear the thoughts that are there, getting ahead of things, having an intention so you're ready and you're prepared so you don't get the rug pulled out from underneath you. And you practice that off of the golf course when you have time. On the golf course, you don't have time, right? It's your turn to hit.

It's like, let's go, your turn, case of play, we gotta go off the golf course, you have time to think about it and come up with a plan and witness your brain a little bit more. Process emotions as long as you need to witness yourself, maybe avoiding certain emotions or reacting to emotions that on the golf course wouldn't serve you. And ultimately I do have to share, this isn't about your golf game.

I love that you play better. I love that I hear about all your wins and your successes, but it's about you learning the skill, that you get to take it anywhere and everywhere. It's not about you managing your mind once and winning a tournament. It's about you knowing how to manage your mind on the golf course. It's about you being intentional and thinking on purpose and creating different results for yourself.

Because if you can do it on the golf course, you get to do it anywhere and everywhere. So for me, I don't want you to be a person who can manage your anxiety over a hundred yard shot. I want you to be a person who can manage your anxiety everywhere. I don't want you to be a person who notices that you shame yourself after a double bogey. I want you to notice when you shame yourself, period.

Because if you do it on the golf course, you're doing it in other places. I want you to be a person who can go out and say, all right, I can play with Betty now, she used to bug the crap out of me, but I can play with Betty. I want you to be a person who can play with Betty, Bill Amba, all the people. Because guess what?

In our day to day life, we're dealing with those peoples and how we interact with them and how we manage our mind around it affects our experience in life and on the golf course. And that that influences the results that we create everywhere, how we show up, how we interact with people. So now is not the time for you to stop working on your mental game, your mental golf game, your mental skills.

And if you haven't been doing it, then now is exactly the time you need to start doing it, right. We do not want to get to March or April, when the season starts, wherever you are or kicks in, or some of your tournaments start happening. If you're playing in tournaments and decide now, I want to work on the mental part of my game, you have evidence that it's showing up for you everywhere.

If you find that, you know, I struggle with anxiety on the golf course, I would ask yourself, where does else does that show up for you? Where else do you see anxiety in your life? If you struggle with confidence on the golf course, where else do you struggle with confidence, self doubt? If you're constantly telling yourself you're not good enough on the golf course, where else do you tell yourself you're not good enough?

Get curious with that and ask those questions because you get to work on that. Now, maybe when you don't have golf clubs in your hand as much as you would during the season, during the typical golf season, I know some of you are in your season. Florida, Arizona, right. You're in like the best part of the season. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to give you four ways that you get to work on the mental part of golf right now.

Whether you have a club in your hand or not. These are things that are going to serve you on and off the golf course. You get to practice em, you get to rehearse them, you get to make habits out of them. You get to do them on the daily. So the first one I wanna share with you is practice setting intentions. Wake up every day and set an intention, meaning put your brain to work to look for something right?

When we go on the golf course, we wanna set an intention. We wanna give your brain a job. This is the way that I want you to think about it. Because if you do not give your brain a job, your brain is going to probably be negative. If you leave a void in there, negativity will come in. If you leave a void in there, you can get the rug pulled out from underneath you.

Meaning where you feel like you don't have any control going on, where you feel like your emotions have run amok, your thoughts have run amok because you didn't give your brain a job. Setting an intention, letting it focus on something so it has attention on something. So on the course this would look like. I want to set the intention of being calm, certain or confident over as many shots as possible.

I want to set the intention of after a bad shot or disappointing hold. I want to practice 60 seconds to recover from that shot and then pivot back to something more productive. I want to make the words that come out of Betty's mouth because I'm playing with Betty today. Neutral. As many times as possible. You gotta give your brain a job off of the course. If you're not playing golf right now, you get to give your brain a job.

It could be that today I'm gonna show up and when I have a phone in my hand and someone talks to me, I'm gonna put my phone down, I'm gonna give my brain that intention so that I can pay attention to the people in my life. I'm gonna witness those moments where I have anxiety in my day to day life. I'm going to pay attention to that. I'm going to get curious.

So you get to set an intention every day. You get to set an intention before you start a project. You get to set an intention before Christmas dinner. You get to set an intention before you have conversations with family. Set an intention. Give your brain a job to do. Get in the habit of doing that so that those negative thoughts don't creep in, so that you can create better results for yourself, whether it's how you showed up in that relationship, that conversation, that you spent less time and anxiety, that you practice pivoting out of that, that you connected better with the people in your lives because you put down your phone, whatever resonates for you.

Okay, so practice intentions. The second one is that practice dumping your thoughts out onto a piece of paper and noticing what's in there and getting super curious. And do a steer. Set an unintentional and intentional steer, meaning intentional is. This is what I want to think. Unintentionally, I'm thinking these crap thoughts. This is what we notice when we do a brain dump. Oh, I didn't even know that thought was in my brain.

Well, if you don't know what's in your brain, it is running the show. It's having an impact on you. But I want to remind you, you are not your thoughts. You are the thinker of your thoughts. But if we don't get curious, those thoughts that we don't even know are in there, that are running the show in the background are influencing how you show up. So you do a brain dump.

Get all your thoughts out onto a piece of paper and then you look and you see, like, what? What am I thinking in there? That's not serving me. And do a steer. If you don't know how to do a steer, I encourage you to join one of my programs or join the membership or get some coaching from me and I'll Walk you through with how to do a steer.

It's an amazing coaching tool to help you bring awareness to how you're showing up in your day to day life and then setting intentions that work for you. It's how we pivot and shift beliefs. In my opinion, it's a super powerful tool that you get to practice every day. And the more that you practice it, this is my experience, the more that I practice this, the quicker I could shift from something unintentional to intentional.

And the more I practice this, the more I see steers in other people. Now why is that beneficial? Because I get curious about, I wonder why they're acting that way. I can make people more neutral. I see them as just a series of thoughts, faulty thoughts that aren't serving them. I don't take the things that they do and they say personally as much. I just get really curious.

I wonder why they're doing that or why they're feeling that way because I can see their steer. Right. And that can serve you too, whether it's with your family or with people that you work with or just friends. Well, it's just, you just get to understand them a little bit better. Right? So steer the doing a brain dump. Super powerful self awareness tool three is process your emotions, right?

So off the course you get to process your emotions. You get to get more aware of how you're feeling. And if it's a negative emotion or something that's not serving you, you get to process it. Practice doing that in 60 to 90 seconds. Cause when you get on the golf course, that's what you get. It's not about not being disappointed or pissed off on the golf course. It's not about not having anxiety.

It's about not about not having fear. You're human, you're going to have that on the golf course. It's about I can experience anxiety and I can move through that in 60 to 90 seconds. I can be disappointed and ticked off and I can give myself 60 seconds and I can pivot back to being calm or certain or confident. I know how to do that because I've been practicing it off the golf course.

Right. How long you stay in a negative emotion is often up to you. Not all of them. Like grief, we have a tendency to stay in a little bit longer. Shame, I think, can last a little bit longer. That's why one, it's one you want to avoid in my opinion. Just a little sticky kind of hangs around a little bit. Right? But a majority of the emotions you can move through them and process them in 60 to 90 seconds.

And then you get to be really aware of emotions that you're avoiding. Make it an intention in this off site season to practice processing your emotions. That's going to serve you on the course. And the last thing I would encourage you to do is rehearse new beliefs. Now is the time if you want to shift some beliefs that you have about yourself in your golf game, now is the time to start practicing them and shift them.

They take time. You have a belief meaning like I don't finish well in tournaments, I never win anything, I'm not good enough, I never get off to a good start, I can't put two good rounds together, I'm never going to play or shoot this number. These are beliefs and the reason that you have a belief is because you rehearsed it a long time. It was a thought that you rehearsed a long time and it became a belief.

So you get to start slowly shifting those beliefs out into what I call little ladder thoughts. If you don't know how to do that, I'm happy to show you how to do that too. Just connect with me on my website, join one of my programs, get into the coaching or the membership and I'll show you how to do that into something that was more use. I shifted that whole leap that I was stuck with for decades and 10 days because I knew how to do it.

I wasn't doing it the right way before, but you got to find those first. And that starts with you being really self aware, getting your thoughts out of your head. Learning how to process emotions is going to be super useful for you. Setting intentions and then start shifting those beliefs into what do you want to believe next year? The time to start that is now. My friends. Do not give up on this work.

In this off season, continue building the skills of thinking, intentionally processing emotions, shifting beliefs, building your confidence, working on any of the things that feel like weighted raincoats for you, your people pleasing and your perfectionism. Maybe some emotions that are a little more challenging, like shame and anxiety, now is the time to work on them. So I'm encouraging you not to stop through this holiday season, through your slower season.

Keep it going. And if I can support you at all, make sure you head to kathyheartwood.com and connect with me. I'd love to help you out. All right my friends, have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.