Bounce Back: Protecting Your Confidence on the Golf Course

Join Kathy as she dives deep into the world of self-confidence on and off the golf course. Discover the vivid analogy of a "Confidence Bubble" to understand how your internal dialogue shapes your self-assurance. Kathy unravels the differences between self-confidence and golf confidence, emphasizing the crucial role of self-talk in maintaining our confidence bubble. Whether you're prepping for the season or in the thick of competition, this episode offers invaluable insights on protecting and nurturing your confidence every single day. Tune in to fortify your mental game and keep your confidence bubble intact!

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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.

Wanna go, friend? Welcome back to Think Above Par. So today I want to talk about your confidence. I had a conversation with a client, we talked about confidence. And this is what happens in my brain. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's not so great. But I make analogies all the time and they pop into my head and given a certain situation. And sometimes they're really great. Like, I like them.

I like. Sometimes we like our own analogies, right? Because they make sense in our head. And sometimes they're not so great. Sometimes I'm like, that was a bad analogy and I gotta rework it. But I'm very visual. So I liked this analogy that I came up with about talking about confidence. And I want to share it with you because I want you to start building up your confidence now, today, right now, before your season hits, before the big tournaments come that you play in or your major golf season arrives.

And even if you are playing right now, the time to work on your confidence is every single day. And I want to preface this by saying there is a difference between self confidence and confidence in far as far as I'm concerned, relative to the game of golf. So your confidence with your ball striking and your putting and your bunker play can ebb and flow. We can have days where, like, we're on point and we have lots of confidence, and other days we're like, where the heck did it go?

I feel like I can't walk and chew gum. That's golf. That's going to happen. We can go in and out of learning curves relative to the game of golf. You're like, oh, and I thought I had it, but now I got to go back to the range or I gotta go take some lessons. There's nothing wrong with that. That is the way golf operates, right? That's the nature of the beast of the game that we play.

Self confidence is about your language, the way that you treat yourself and the way that you talk about yourself. It's about being decisive and making decisions and having your own back. It's something that you build. You do not want to look outside of yourself for confidence. Confidence Comes internally from you about the words that you say about yourself and the words that you don't say about yourself. So this isn't about you having an inflated ego, like I'm the best player here and being cocky and arrogant.

You want to believe them. Self confidence is not about you feeling that you're better than anybody else. It's about how you get to feel internally. Nobody can experience your self confidence other than you. People who are cocky or outwardly confident or arrogant are usually insecure because what they're doing is they're looking for outside validation from someone else. They need to hear it and me tell you on how great I am.

If you are so great or if you're pretty good or you're feeling good about yourself, you don't need to share that with other people. It's for the benefit of yourself. They can't feel that. They get to feel whatever they're thinking and feeling inside of them, inside of their container, right? So often when I see people being a little extra outwardly confident or arrogant, they usually get an internal bless your heart from me.

Bless their heart. Boy, they're just really insecure. They need to tell me they need me to validate it. And if they need me to validate, they really don't believe it. Because if they really believed it, they wouldn't need me to validate it. So they wouldn't be telling me it'd be for them. Right. In self counseling, people want everybody to feel what they're feeling. I want you to be self confident.

There's plenty to go around. It's not a scarcity thing. It's not like I want to be self confident and I don't want you to be self confident. That's not the way it goes. So we are not innately born with self confidence. I want you to think about it as something that you want to work on every day and it's something that you want to protect every day. It comes from you.

It can get damaged by you, but it can also get damaged by other people. Especially if you're looking for other people to validate you, for you to hear, I'm okay, tell me I'm okay, right when you're looking for that from people outside of you, or tell me that I'm good or tell me that I'm pretty good at this game. Now, it's nice to hear. Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying we don't want to hear that, but we don't want to have to rely on it. So that we get to feel self confident about ourselves. Okay, so this is the visual that I want you to have. It's a big inflatable ball that you kind of slide your body in and then people can play games with them and bounce off of each other like a big sumo wrestler.

You guys know what I'm talking about. It's some. Sometimes you can get inside of these big balls that are inflated and roll down a hill, right? You're inside of it. So picture yourself inside of this big inflatable exercise ball. This exercise ball is your confidence. You're inside of it. It is exuding around you. The way that it gets inflated is from the inside. The valved blow up. This ball is on the inside.

It comes from you, it comes from your thoughts about you. I'm figuring things out. I'm doing a pretty good job. That was a good round. Good for you. I'm going to get this. You're the one who fills up this self confidence. And as you build up this self confidence and it exudes around you, it is a protective layer that you don't want to let people poke holes in.

So someone says words to you and if you listen to them and you take them in and you absorb them, you poke holes in this insulated bubble that you just built if you allow it. So when people say words to you, I want you to visualize them bouncing off of this ball and going wherever they go back at the person out into the universe, it doesn't matter, but they're just going to bounce off of you.

You are not going to allow people to poke holes in this insulated ball that you work hard on filling every single day. Right? Because it's going to take energy for, for you to patch it up and blow it back up. Because the valve's on the inside, it comes from you. And if you think the valve is on the outside and that it comes from other people, that other people are what fills up your self confidence, then you are going to spend a lot of time and energy scanning for people to validate you.

You're going to go out of your way trying to please people so that they can validate you so you get to feel good about yourself. You are going to put so much pressure on your golf game. So at the end of the round, a number, a score allows you to fill up from the outside your self confidence. That's not the way it works. Right? So don't allow words that people say or situations that happen outside of you to poke holes in this ball.

That you have this insulated ball, rubber ball. If you're picturing it, that is the self confidence that you get to feel. It feels great, right? It's a state of being. You walk around with your head held high as an energy that you can feel when you walk into a room from other people, when they're self confident. People want to be around people who are self confident. On the flip side of that, while you are the valve, the valve is on the inside.

You're the one blowing it up. You can also be the one poking the holes. You can be opening the valve and letting things out, letting the air out. You could be poking holes on your liner inside, right? So you're letting air go out and your confidence deflates and it gets lower and lower and more doubt creeps in, insecurity creeps in. It's because the words that you say to yourself are poking holes in this bubble.

This ball. I suck. I'm never gonna figure this out. This is too hard. I quit. I'm an idiot. I should be better than I am right now. Everybody's better than me. I have no talent. I don't hit it far enough. I'm too weak, I'm too old. All these things poke away at your self confidence from the inside. And when you're the one doing the damage. We can do this to ourselves every single day, over and over and over again.

And what happens is we could also create a lot of momentum doing that. We can start saying to ourselves that we're an idiot, we're never gonna figure this out. And this is too hard. And I don't know why I'm doing this. And I am not seeing the results fast enough. Everybody's getting it faster than me. And other people win tournaments and I don't win tournaments. And we get this momentum of a bunch of negative thoughts, just poking holes consistently into our confidence bubble.

And when that momentum gets going, it takes energy to stop it. And once you stop it, you've done so much damage to your self confidence now it's going to take energy for you to patch up those holes and build your confidence back up. So I don't want you to poke any holes. I want you to notice when you are poking a hole. I want you to consistently build up that confidence bubble every single day by words that you say to yourself.

And the more that you believe them, that you feel them and you believe them, then that's a bigger shot of air into your confidence bubble. If you don't believe them, it's you're not going to really make a whole lot of dent. If you're BS in your brain and you don't believe it, it's not going to gain a lot of traction. So you want to say something that is believable or at least on a scale of 1 to 10, at least 7 believable.

Now you got some traction. Now you can start blowing up that ball and go look for things that are also true. Find your wins. It's so important. And the reason it's so important is because you're giving little shots of air into your self confidence bubble that by default our brain likes to poke holes in, by the way. That's why we have to work on this intentionally. Our brain's just naturally a little hard on us and knocks us down and can be negative.

So. So we're working against that and you have to do that intentionally. You want to go out with the intention of finding things that are true. On the golf course, after a round of golf, you might feel really crappy about a couple numbers that you made or some poor shots. But you know what? I also hit a couple good chip shots and my bunker play was on point today, I gotta say.

And that was the best score I've ever had on that one hole. It's worth saying that to yourself because you are giving that ball, that insulated ball shot so of air, you're filling it up a little bit. And so often we don't believe that we deserve to recognize that part of our game or ourselves because we did this other thing over here that was so crappy. So we don't deserve that.

You do keep that ball insulated and full of air for your own benefit. So find anything that you did well on that round of golf that didn't go so great, you didn't score so great just for the benefit of giving yourself shots of air. And be very cautious about the number of times that you give yourself a nick that you're poking holes in it because you got to do some work to fill it back up.

You got to patch it and you got to put in extra air. All right? So I want you to visualize yourself in this ball when you go out and play around a golf words people say are going to bounce off of you and you're not going to look for validation from the outside to fill it up. The valve isn't there. It feels nice and we like to have it, but the truth is that you're the person who fills up your self confidence from the inside.

Don't be the person who leaks it. All right, my friends, I hope that resonated with you, that visual. If you want to take this stuff to the next level, make sure you head to kathyheartwood.com to see what programs I have available. And I hope you have a beautiful week. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.