Golf Emotions: The Good, The Bad, and The Beneficial

Let’s talk golf emotions. Not the deep life stuff (although we touch on that too), but the short list of feelings that show up when you're standing over a shot, or watching a putt lip out... again.

In this episode, I’m breaking down the difference between emotions that are useful vs. just loud, why excitement can sabotage your swing, and how identifying your top 3 go-to golf emotions can completely shift your game. Spoiler: disappointment isn’t the problem. Taking your next shot from disappointment is.

If you want more calm, confidence, and consistency out there, this one’s for you.

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Are all available at KathyHartWood.com/book

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, my golf friend. Welcome back to Think Above Par. Glad you're here and listening. Hope you're having a beautiful day. So today I'm gonna jump right in. I wanna talk about golf emotions and I wanna talk about excitement and being excited to play. It's a topic that comes up a lot of times if people are like, you know, I ask my clients like, how you feeling about the upcoming tournament?

What are you thinking? What are you believing about yourself? . I get an answer. I'm excited to play. I'm excited for the tournament. I'm excited to go out there and play. And I want them to get curious. What does that mean?

What? What does excitement feel like? I. And what does that do for you going into the tournament? And I'm not saying that we're not excited about going out and playing in competitions or having rounds of golf and we can really look forward to them, but excitement and excited is an emotion. And it actually feels a lot like anxiety, we get moving a little bit faster. We might, you know, our hands might shake a little bit. Our heart might palpitate just like first tee jitters, and

[00:01:00] so excitement isn't always a useful emotion for golf. We can think it's a positive emotion, but it's not always a useful or beneficial emotion, which is what I want to start reframing things a little bit on talking about how things are either they benefit me.

Useful or they don't benefit me, not so much in the context of something being positive or negative, because when we say an emotion is either positive. That means in our head we process it as that it's good. And if we have a negative emotion, we process it as being bad or we think about it as being bad.

And then we go through life and golf thinking that we're supposed to avoid negative emotions.

And I think this creates a little bit of a disconnect for a lot of people in golf is that I shouldn't have a negative emotion because a negative emotion is not good. It's bad I, right. And emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are, they're either

[00:02:00] beneficial or they're not beneficial to you.

Your actions, your results, how you show up in the world, how you show up in the golf course. And you're the creator of them, which is what I encourage you to understand and dive into a lot on this podcast and in all the programs that I do, is that you're the one who creates that emotional state. You're the one who creates it.

Whether you're feeling angry or frustrated or shame or disappointment, it is not a thing outside of you. It is you that is creating that, and it's either beneficial for you or it's not beneficial for you, and how long you stay in that place is up to you. And where we lose a lot of our power, which I've talked about, is that we give it away to things outside of us.

We give it away to numbers and we give it away to bounces and we give it away to people and our group and words that people say. while I started this conversation talking about excitement, it's not really what I wanna talk about in this whole context of this episode, but I do wanna talk about emotions and the spectrum of emotions that we have on the golf course is

[00:03:00] really.

Uh, much smaller than the spectrum of emotions that we can experience in life. And this is kind of good news and it's good news from the standpoint that. If we have a smaller bucket of emotions that we're actually dealing with on the golf course, then we can create a lot of tools to help us with those emotions.

We get to know ourselves a little bit and say, these are the emotions that I have a tendency to experience on the golf course the most.

So let me give you an example. I talk about the emotional spectrum, that as humans, we have the ability to experience any emotion. We are born with that ability. We might, through life and life experiences, start judging these emotions and just deciding that as a human, I'm not going to experience this emotion.

I'm gonna wipe it off of the dry erase board that I have back here, or I'm gonna wipe it off and you, I'm not gonna experience it. I don't want to feel. Grief. I don't wanna feel terror. I don't wanna feel vulnerability, right? I

[00:04:00] don't want to feel shame, right? And so you might decide, I don't wanna feel those emotions, so I'm not gonna put myself out into the world that I have an opportunity to experience 'em.

So we shut ourselves down. Maybe we don't sign up for events, or we don't engage with people, or we don't put ourselves out there because we're trying really hard to avoid. What we deem as being negative emotions that these things that we experience could possibly create this emotion that I don't think I have the capacity or the capability to, uh, process and to experience, so I'm just gonna avoid it.

I play life small. I go out and I'm like, I'm not gonna put myself out there so that this is a possibility for me because it's bad. This emotion is bad. You get to experience 'em all. Really, it takes 90 seconds , for you to process an emotion.

We hang on to some a little bit longer because of. The thoughts that we have about it, the what we make it mean and the story we tell shame is a great example

[00:05:00] of that, is that we can say to ourselves, we're not good enough. And then we're also like, yeah, and I stink at this and I suck at that, and no one's gonna like me and I'm never gonna get good at this game.

We just bury ourselves with all this other dialogue and it starts to feel really crappy and we're like, wow, I really, really don't like shame. And yeah, I don't blame you. I think shame is a heavy emotion.

So that was a lot of life stuff.

Let me bring it back to golf. Golf. Our spectrum of emotions that we're gonna experience is much smaller.

We're not gonna have the full range of a life experience when we go to the golf course, where chances are, we're not gonna experience too much grief or terror when we're out on the golf course. Hopefully. They're usually going to be in a certain bucket of emotions, a certain range of emotions. Excitement can be one of those.

But because it's emotion that moves a little bit faster, it's not super useful or beneficial for a golf game because the goal when you're playing golf is to hit as many shots from calm, certain and confident is to get back to that, you know, we sign

[00:06:00] up to play golf, we sign up for the possibility that we're going to have these ranges of emotions all on one hole.

But really when I go through and I talk to people about this, they're pretty similar, the emotions that most people experience on the golf course. So before a shot. You might experience some nerves or anxiety, fear, pressure, stress,

doubt, but after a shot, after you hit a shot, let's say it doesn't go your way, you might have some disappointment, shame, anger, or frustration, potentially embarrassment.

Right. For the most part, there's like four emotions you could possibly have before you play and hit a shot. There's four emotions that you could possibly have after you hit a shot. I'm not saying that there's other ones that don't come into play, like hope or motivation or determination, but for the most part, these are our standard emotions that are not beneficial.

And then at the end of 18, after a round, you have the

[00:07:00] possibility of being proud. Fulfilled, , satisfied. Those are positive emotions, useful emotions that we're all striving for, we're trying to experience. That's why we put pressure on our golf game is so that we get to feel those emotions, but we also sign up to have the possibility that we're going to be disappointed, maybe angry.

We're gonna have shame and we could have embarrassment.

Right? Really like four negative emotions. And again, I'm not saying that you can't have other ones, but I'm saying for the most part, so this is good news in the standpoint that I don't have to deal with all of life's emotions that come at me, that are gonna come at all of us at some point. If we allow ourselves to live a full life, right, we're gonna experience them.

But on the golf course, I'm just really gonna have to deal with just a handful of emotions. My spectrum is much shorter, smaller. So if you can. Ask yourself, what are the emotions that I'm experienced on the golf course on a consistent basis? Get curious about what you're thinking that's creating that emotion,

[00:08:00] knowing that you're the creator of it, not the lie, not the people, not the number that is creating that it's you and your thoughts about the thing that happened and how can I manage this emotion, this particular emotion, so that I can get back to being calm, certain and confident.

Before my next shot, right? So after a shot, you hit, and let's say you're disappointed. Disappointment is not a problem. You get to be disappointed if you play a round of golf and you're never disappointed. You are not. Living a full golf experience because golf can be disappointing. It's just one bad bounce.

You hit a great shot out of an amazingly hard lie, and you think it's gonna land right next to the pin, and it lands two inches short in the bunker. I mean, you're gonna be disappointed. You hit a great putt and it lips out, right, you're gonna be disappointed. This is not a problem. 

The problem lies is if you take a swing from disappointment on that next shot, you are going to affect your

[00:09:00] results and they're not going to be very good. Most likely. Golf is weird. We can still be disappointed and angry and have and be nervous and still create a great result. It's just not a predictable result.

It's not the state that we wanna be in on a consistent basis. It's not our preferred place to be right. 

So being disappointed is not the problem.

So when you say, okay, I'm gonna be disappointed. How do I wanna deal with the disappointment? I saw this clip, I think it was at the Masters of Jordan. Speed. Saying, I'm so frustrated right now to his caddy, and his caddy said, you gotta get over it. He goes, I just need to be frustrated right now. And he had like, he did a little walk about, and you know, he needed, he had 60 to 90 seconds to get over it and he started, he pivoted and started thinking about the next shot, right?

But he just stated out loud his emotion. This is useful. Stay out loud. I'm frustrated right now. It's not a problem. I'm disappointed. Not a problem. Yeah, you got 60 to 90 seconds. Let's go pivot. You need to mentally pivot

[00:10:00] like a boss because your next shot, your best shot of your best shot of hitting that shot.

Uh, with a, and creating a great result is to get away from that frustration is to move into being calm. Certain or confident is to get focused again, because when we're frustrated or we're disappointed or we have fear, we're not thinking clearly either, and that's not useful. And I think in this situation.

Um, that I was talking about, the reel that I saw on Instagram is that, you know, Jordan had a, had a, a challenging shot that he had to hit. And so if he wasn't thinking clearly, he was likely not gonna make a great decision. And then we, we create a bigger mistake and a bigger error and a bigger number.

Right? 

So. My point in this podcast is I want you to take a look at what emotions do you typically experience on the golf course. And when I talk to people, when people come and work with me, one of the first things that I have them do is fill out a form. Is tell me your top three emotions. What are your top three emotions that you experience on the golf course?

And when I say top, I'm like, not saying

[00:11:00] your worst, I'm saying your most common. Because it's very revealing about what's going on in your head, like what you're thinking on a consistent basis, or maybe what you're making golf mean about yourself, or how much pressure you're putting on yourself, or what you're making golf mean relative to other people and what they're thinking about you, right?

And then if you start knocking those out and having a plan one by one. Because we're not experiencing and having the work of like life and all the possible emotions we can have, we really only have to deal with eight to 10 emotions. Let me start getting ahead of these. Let me start processing these emotions faster 

so I'm affecting myself less on the golf course , by being in a not beneficial emotion, right? That's not gonna serve me. So that my experience is better, I get to enjoy the game more, and that my results are going to be better, and I get to step into feeling more beneficial emotions when I finish the round of being fulfilled and

[00:12:00] satisfied and having pride in what I did out there.

More often than being disappointed or shaming myself or being angry or frustrated, and if you play enough golf, you are going to be disappointed and have shame and be down on yourself at times about your results.

If you can start tackling your major emotions. And knocking them off your personal ones right? Then you are so much more empowered and tooled that other thing. Have more tools on the golf course to manage your mind and all ultimately have more control over your results, more predictability in your experience.

All right, my friends.

And going back to where I started, excitement in there, like if you had a hole in one. A hole in one is so fun. I can't tell you how many people I've coached or who have reached out to me like I had a hole in one and then a double bogey in the next hole. I said, how did you make a double bogey? I hit it outta

[00:13:00] bounds.

'cause I was so excited. I was swinging faster. I wasn't thinking clearly. Right. And it, that's a challenging moment. Maybe you hold out or something. And that excitement. On the next shot doesn't serve you. It's not beneficial because it's an energy and an emotion that, that we move faster in and you get to move out of that emotion back to being calm, certain and confident.

But a lot of times what happens is people are like, well, I don't get to be very excited on the golf course very often. Why do I wanna move out of that? You just wanna move out of it for that next shot. You get to be excited in between shots. At the end of the round, you get to buy everybody drinks in the bar and be super excited.

You might just be postponing that satisfaction and that excitement for the benefit of your own golf game. 

So looking at the emotions that serve you on the golf course, they're not always going to be in that. Quote unquote negative spectrum. There's sometimes in the positive spectrum on things that you experience that don't serve you, but I want you to look at the ones that you have the most often and start coming up with tools or different ways that you can pivot away from 'em.

What do you need to think? What can you think about this

[00:14:00] situation so that you can move through that frustration, that disappointment, that fear, that anxiety faster. All right, my friends. I hope that was helpful.

make sure you get on my email list so that you can know about all the programs that I have coming up this year@kathyhartwood.com slash join, and have a beautiful week. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.