Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
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Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
A Concept to Change Your Negative Golf Moments
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 113
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Golf isn't always great. I know you know this. We certainly wish that everyday was amazing. But if everyday was awesome then no day would be. We want the contrast. If we don't know what bad shots are we won't know what good shots are.
If we don't know what hopeless feels like, we won't recognize hope when it happens.
This is a concept of 50/50 that shows up in our lives and on the course.
In this episode, I explain how to use this concept to make the most of the inevitable negative moments that we will experience with the game of golf.
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 girl friends. Super glad you're here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. I hope you're sharing the podcast. I know a lot of you have told me you shared the podcast. Some of you might be new to me, and if you are, I would love it if you could like and subscribe to the podcast so you get all the podcast updates. If you're not on my email list, make sure you get on my email list so you're up to date on all the programs and the things I have to offer and some nuggets of wisdom in there. You can do that at KathyHartwood.com forward slash join. So either way, I'm so happy that you're here. So today I want to talk about a concept that I learned through my mentor, Brooke Castillo, and my coach through the Life Coach School. And it was a concept that she taught called 50-50. And the reason I want to share it to you is because I think it's so applicable in golf. And it's really helped me get through those moments that aren't so great in life and in golf. And when you can get your head around this, it's a way of just not fighting what's happening. It's not fighting the ups and downs of golf. It's more surrendering to the game and the process and enjoying it and making the most of it instead of us getting in our own way. So this is basically the concept that life and golf are 50-50, which means 50% positive and 50% negative. And initially, a lot of people will fight this concept of I don't want to spend half of my life in the negative. And the concept is that we're going to have moments, it's just kind of surrendering to the fact that not everything is going to be positive in our life. 50% of the time it's going to be negative experiences, right? We're going to get stuck in traffic or we're going to get in the wrong line at the grocery store or we're going to stub our toe or break our toe, which is what I did a couple weeks ago. Life isn't always amazing and positive and full of rainbows and daisies and unicorns. When we can accept that instead of fighting it, then we're not so surprised when those moments come. Golf is for sure this way. I think so many people go out and anticipate that golf is going to be great every single time they play, or their best game is going to come out every single time they play. And if you teed off expecting that the game is going to be 50-50, you're going to have some good shots, you're going to have some bad shots, you're going to have some good breaks, you're going to have some bad breaks. Then when the negative 50 happen, right, we don't feel like the rug got pulled out from underneath us. We're not being a victim to it. We're not saying, why me? You know, I think Tom Hoagie a couple weeks ago in the players' championship was a great example of this, right? He shot 78-62. That's a 16-shot swing. It can be days like that where all of our negative things come out at one round and all of our positive things come out in another round. When I first started playing for a living, I remember struggling with this concept. I didn't know it at the time, but I would go out and play. And let's say one day my driving was great. I was hitting my irons really well, but my chipping was off and my putting was off. And then the next day I'd go out and I couldn't drive it very well, and my irons were just fair. My fairway woods were horrible, but I chipped and putted great. And then the next day, it would be a totally different combination. And I always go like, why can't they all come together at the same time? Why can't they all be on point on the same day? Right? That's a 62 for Hoagie. That's what that is. And when they're all off, if they all line up and they're off, that's the 78. And that happens to us. And we when we surrender to the fact that that's going to happen, then we don't fight against the game. We don't argue with the game. We don't become a victim to the game. So the other point that I want to make is that just because I'm sharing this concept of 50-50 with you, and whether this is with golf or whether in life, that doesn't mean that we spend 50% of our time in a negative emotion or a negative place. The amount of time you spend in that negative emotion is totally up to you. Whether the negative things are going to happen is part of life. So for instance, you could get stuck in traffic, which would be a negative 50-50 for most people, unless you're trying to avoid a meeting, which you're going to be late for. But that would be on the negative side for most people. How long you stay miserable in the car is totally up to you. My daughter, I had three kids in three years, three daughters in three years, and we take them in to get shots. And my daughter Charlie hated shots, like freak out panic attack kind of shots. And I remember taking her to the pediatrician, and the nurse walks in, and she's just super happy, very cheerful, and she's all excited, and she announces that you only have to have two booster shots today. My daughter looks at me like I was a lying leper. And of course, I deflect that look onto the nurse and I look at her like, Are you high? Or is this your first day of the job? So now I'm thinking instantly, um, where are all the exits and how do I bar them from her running out of the building? The nurse walks out, my daughter's gone white. I follow her out, I tell her you're gonna need four people to hold her down to give her a shot now that you just announced that out loud. Like she's freaking out. She's probably seven or eight or something like that. So I walk back in and she has one leg out of this transom window that's four feet wide by about a foot and a half high. She's cranked it open, she's got one leg out, she's going to escape, and the fall is about 12 feet down to the pavement. So I grab her out. The nurse comes in, we're grabbing her out the window. I'm like, Charlie, I was like, if you fell out that window, you would have broken a leg. That would have hurt way more than if you just got this little prick in your arm. She goes, I don't care. I don't want to have the shot. So needless to say, we got that done. It was horrible for her. But she was unnecessarily suffering. And then in contrast, I have my middle daughter goes in, and of course, none of them like shots when they're when they're little, for sure. But the nurses came in, they had this tactic going with one rubbed alcohol swab on the one arm, and they gave her a shot in the other one, and her misery lasted maybe 15 seconds. Both had the same experience, both had that same negative experience of getting a shot. One made it huge and suffered for a very long time in a negative, panicky, high anxiety place. And the other one, it took like 15 seconds. I still get yelled at to this day. But how did I know any better? I was like, I'm sorry, I had too many kids in a short amount of time. I couldn't keep your shot record straight. I would have given you a heads up and a warning. Actually, I probably not I would not have given her a heads up and a warning going into a doctor's office because I never would have gotten her into the car. It's like good to know. She actually graduated college with a blood donation badge or honor. So that turned around. She did a 180 on the on the needle thing. But my whole point of my story is that's an example that perhaps you could relate to if you had children and getting shots, or just understanding that they're both the same experience, they're both the same negative experience. How long and how much we suffer is totally in our control. So because we're going to experience negative things on and off of the golf course doesn't mean that we have to stay in a negative emotion that that long. That's the part where you have control. That's the part where you have agency. You get to decide what you want to think about it, you get to decide what you want to feel about it. But the more we fight against it, that it shouldn't be happening, the worse we make it. So in golf, this can be that you're just struggling. Maybe you're hitting a lot of odd shots that day. And we can make it so much worse when we think something's gone horribly wrong, my game is off, I'm never gonna figure it out, woe is me. Or we just accept that that's part of golf and not make it a big deal, and then figure out what we can do from there. Come up with a new plan. Come up maybe with a new strategy to get yourself around the golf course. And this is the biggest point is that we want life in golf to be 50-50. We need it to be 50-50. We need the contrast. We need the contrast of the negative so we know what a positive thing is, a positive moment is. We need to know what hopelessness feels like so that we know hope when it comes up. We need to be able to feel doubt so that we can feel certainty and confidence. We need to know what a bad shot is, so therefore we know what a good shot is. We want the contrast of playing with people we don't care about so that when we play with people, we recognize who we enjoy playing with. We get attracted to people who we enjoy spending time with. You see, most people try and avoid negative emotions and negative experiences, but when you do that, you only get the contrast of it on the positive side. If you're unwilling to experience any negative emotion, if you're constantly buffering true, which means we're gonna have a negative emotion or negative experience and we run to do something to give us some dopamine hits, whether that's eating or drinking or Netflix or watching movies or shopping or overworking, overworking out, all the things so that we don't have to experience a negative emotion, then it's challenging for us to go very large into the positive end of the spectrum. It's hard for us to go to the full, full contrast of positive experiences and emotions if we're not willing to go to the negative end of the spectrum. So we want to have those negative moments. We want to experience the negative emotions so that we can also have the contrast of it. It actually serves us and makes our life bigger and richer. It's when we go out expecting us never to have a negative experience or a negative emotion, when we're surprised they happen or we have no idea how to deal with it, then we actually shrink. We shrink our experience, we shrink our emotional capacity, and we end up buffering through most of life. And the biggest point is just not to be surprised when negative things happen. If you went out with the assumption that golf is 50-50, just like life is 50-50, and you anticipated some of that to show up on any given day, then when those moments came when you got a terrible lipout, or you got a bad bounce, or you scalded out of the bunker, or you don't like your pairing, you're not blindsided and the rug's not pulled out from underneath you. You're like, this is part of it, this is part of golf. Now I get to decide how I want to react to this moment, to this thing, to this negative part of the game. When you go in with that mindset, when you go in and accept that golf is like that, when you go in and accept that life is like that, you feel like you have so much more power and control over what you experience on any given day, how long you stay in a negative emotion. We get to really love those days that all of the positive 50-50 show up on one day. And we get to know that when we have a really bad day where all the negative part shows up on one day, we know that tomorrow is gonna go back to being a chance at 50-50. It balances out. I'm not saying that every day is exactly evenly 50-50. I'm saying overall it's going to balance out. We're going to have negative experiences, we're going to have positive experiences. The better you get at managing your mind, managing your thoughts, and managing your emotions, the less time you spent in a negative emotion because of a negative event. That's where you have so much more power on the golf course. All right, my friends, marinate on that a little bit. Could hurt your brain. Just remember there's a difference between negative moments and negative emotions and how long you spend there. All right, have a beautiful day, and I'll talk to you next Wednesday.
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