Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
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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.
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Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
Navigating Gamesmanship in Golf
•Kathy Hart Wood•Episode 190
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Ever wondered how to handle gamesmanship on the golf course? In this episode, Kathy delves into the concept of gamesmanship in golf, sharing personal anecdotes and insights into how players can get into each other's heads to disrupt performance. Drawing from her experiences with family members and tournament play, Kathy explores both the negative impacts and potential uses of gamesmanship. She offers advice on protecting yourself from such tactics and questions the motivations behind employing them. Tune in to learn how to maintain your mental edge on the golf course, set boundaries, and foster a positive competitive spirit.
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 gonna learn how to think above par so you can play below par. Let's get to it. Hello my girlfriend. Welcome back to Think Above Par. Super happy that you are here and listening. One of these times I am going to change the intro. I have people who talk to me all the time, like, hello my girlfriend. I try. I try to change it. I just I can't. I don't know. I don't know. It just doesn't come across very naturally. I can say this in my sleep. So anyway, hello my girlfriend. I'm super glad. Glad that you're here. One of these days, you're gonna listen to this podcast and I'm gonna start with something different. You're like, wait a minute, who's filling in? But I will try. I'll see if I can come up with some. But anyway, I am glad that you're here and listening and um enjoying in your golf. And what I want to talk to you today about is gamesmanship, uh, playing games on the golf course. Not playing games as in competitive games, but gamesmanship, where you're trying to get into somebody else's head to mess them up. And it happens, and I'm sure you have experienced it, or you might do it, right? And I just want to talk about it from maybe a little bit of a different perspective, my angle. This is my opinion. You get to do whatever the heck you want, but I want to just talk to you a little bit about it. Now, I have been the subject of a lot of gamesmanship in my golf days playing. I've witnessed a lot of it, and the biggest source of that actually was from my dad and my brother and my husband, but I played more golf with my dad and my brother before I got married. And we played a lot of golf together and little competitions. And my dad and my brother would love to get in my head, they would love to get a reaction out of me, they would love to say things to me to see if they could kind of mess me up. I think they tried to tick me off. I clearly I've learned over the years that I'm very entertaining when I'm mad because I don't do mad very well, but they would get the biggest kick out of it on me reacting, right? And when I was younger, I reacted a lot. And so when I did that, I actually I didn't play very good golf. And then if I didn't have a very good shot after they tried to get in my head, then I get even more mad, and they were more entertained. So it became a source of great pleasure for them, but not so much for me, right? I was irritated that they were trying to do that. Now, when would they do that if I got ahead? If I started playing a little bit better, if I was winning, they would start making comments that would affect me. Okay, what would they be? What would those be? Well, some of the times it would be talking about my swing. If they knew I was working on something in my swing or something that I was sensitive to, so I usually, and most of us do this, we have the same little moves in our swing that we've done since we were younger. Um, it could be I have a tendency to straighten my right leg and I might be working on that. I could sway a little bit in my swing. So they might comment on that. Um, they might say something about maybe my change of direction. So they could say, Oh, pretty good, considering how much your legs straightened. I'm like, seriously, right? This big reaction and these big eyeballs, right? And then they'd giggle, and then I'd start thinking about my swing. Not nice, right? Very not nice, because it's very hard to play well when you're thinking about mechanics, but they knew I would start thinking about it, and so that would be funny if that if they got behind. Or they might mention something about women and T's, and you have such an advantage because you're playing these T's versus the T's that we're playing, and that would irritate me. Um, usually, just so you know, a little side note, we made a deal because they made that that comment so many times, and it would bug me because they can hit it, they I mean they can hit further than me. So we made a deal that we would play, I would play whatever T's I needed to play so that we were all hitting in the same iron-ish. Like my brother got longer than my dad for sure, but we'd be all hitting in about the same iron. So it whatever T marker, if I was gonna hit in a seven iron in that range and he was hitting in a seven iron, then that was fair. And we decided that that was fair because I had taken so much slack on the course. If I started playing well, or if I had a wedge in and they had a longer club in, it's like, oh, you know, started trying to make comments about the T's I was playing, but they never made a comment if I had a three-iron in and they had a seven-iron in. But either way, gamesmanship. I've been exposed to a lot of it, and then when I play in tournaments, I witnessed a lot of it. And I just want to share a little bit about my perspective. Now, in this arena of playing with my dad and my brother, a couple things. One is gamesmanship, I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying don't do it. If you have some buddies and you got a little shtick and you guys are kind of ribbing each other and you're laughing and having a great time, yeah, that's super fun. Right, if they have a sense of humor. But it's different if you're doing and playing games trying to disrupt somebody, trying to get in their head, trying to make them fail or mess up so that you can win. That happens a lot. In your world, it might you know, it might be someone rattling their change in their pocket. It might be them standing in your line, it might be them talking in your swing, opening up even you know, a bag of chips while you're swinging. Now, some of that could be accidental, but some of it could be purposeful. It could be saying words like, I hit it out of bounds here yesterday before you tee off. Could be accidental, could be ignorant, or it could be gangsmanship. One of the things that I say and I share with my clients, and now I'm gonna share it with you, is that the less things affect you emotionally on the golf course, then the less uh ammunition you are giving to your opponent. Okay, so if you expose your cards on things that bug you, you are giving ammunition to a person who wants to play games with you, who knows your triggers, so to speak. My dad and my brother and my husband knew my triggers. They knew the things that would bug me. And they would poke and push my buttons all the time for their own entertainment. And the way that they stopped doing that was when I stopped reacting. Now, this is also true in life. When you give, when you react to people and then they keep pushing that button, there's right, sometimes they're getting pleasure out of seeing you react. So if you don't react, they'll quit pushing the button.
unknown
Right?
SPEAKER_00
So the minute I stopped reacting and my head exploding, when they would say it, they stopped doing it because it wasn't entertaining to them anymore. Don't expose your cards, don't expose the things that really bug you. For someone who's ready to play some games with you and you are revealing to them the things that bother you, they will start pushing those buttons, they will take advantage of it.
unknown
Right?
SPEAKER_00
And if you're in the middle of someone and you know that they're actually playing games with you, you get to draw a line, you get to draw a boundary. Call them out. I did that not too long ago when we were playing in a member guest, and a guy was playing games with me. And I called him out. I said, Are you playing games with me? Well, he had just mentioned the word gamesmanship before. I said, Wait a minute, are you playing gamesmanship with me? Basically, what he said is he made a birdie putt. They, the team made a birdie putt. He goes, Oh, now we have to stand here and watch you make a five-footer before anybody putted. It was by five or six feet, maybe even longer. And I st and I stood over the putt, and he was kind of standing behind me, and I called him out. I said, Are you playing games with me? Are you trying to play head games with me right now? I said, one, you need to move. And I called him out, right? So that was the last time he did it. But I've you know, I've been around, I know exactly what he's doing. I've had my dad and my brother say things like that to me all the time, but it ticked me off. Actually, it's probably it ticked me off. I had deja vu from playing so much golf with the guys in my family. But anyway, you get to draw a line and sit there and go, dude, that's not fair. That's not right. Don't stand there. Don't rattle your change in your pocket. Keep the rapper quiet. You don't need to tell me where there's trouble on this hole. Right? You can set boundaries. Now, if you are the person who is playing games, if that is your choice and you know who you are, and you might play games, I want you to get really clear on why you're doing it. So whenever any anytime someone does something, when I notice they're doing the thing, like the guy that I just talked about a second ago, he was doing that because he wanted to win. Because trust me, he did not want to have two girls beat him, two women, right? Beat him and his partner. So he was really trying to save himself from having a feeling of maybe shame or embarrassment. I get it. I knew exactly what he was doing. But for you, I want you to ask yourself, why am I doing that? Why do I want to play games? Why do I want to affect this person negatively? How badly do I need to win that I need to Tanya Harding these people in my group? No, you're not literally taking a golf club to their legs or their knees, but basically that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to take out the competition. Personally, I think I would rather win without having to make someone play worse so that I get to win and feel better. I haven't helped myself. I want someone else to push me to become a better player mentally and physically. So I would encourage you to look at why do I need to do that? What am I trying to prevent feeling, or what do I want to feel so badly, right? That I want to tanya them somehow, somehow. And the other thing I would tell you, it really doesn't feel good. Playing games with people, I mean, unless you're playing with your buddies and your family and you got a shtick going on and you're laughing and joking, but if it's a serious competition, let's say you don't know this person very well, it takes mental effort to come up with some things to say to try and derail the other person. And I just don't think that feels that feels good. I don't think that's a positive energy. I don't think that's going to move you forward. And I have the mentality, just like with cheating, if someone is going to cheat, what goes around comes around. So I'm not going to play games with somebody else and feel crappy and try and get myself back to a place of being calm, certain, and confident and present and focused on what I'm doing, because that's going to come back and bite me in the butt. That's the way I look at it. You get to do whatever you want. But either way, if you're the person playing games, or if you're having games played upon you, figure out why you're doing it. How do you want to feel? What are you trying to avoid feeling? And does it feel good to do it? And if it's happening to you, don't expose your cards. Don't let people know what bugs you. And then set boundaries if it's happening. You have every right to do that. Alright, my friends, have fun. Have a beautiful week. And if you want to reach out with me, stay connected, go to kathyheartwood.com forward slash join. All right, I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.
