Golf Commands: How to Stop Giving Yourself Bad Orders on the Course

In this episode of Think Above Par, Kathy dives into the secret language we use on the golf course—commands! You know the ones: “Don’t hit it in the bunker!” or “Get it to the hole!” But are these commands helping or hurting your game? Spoiler: Your brain doesn't like being bossed around (even by you!).

Kathy breaks down the types of commands we give ourselves on the course: swing commands, result commands, and feel commands. She explains why some are useful, while others might be putting extra pressure on your swing. If you’ve ever wondered why your brain seems to ignore that “don’t hit it in the water” directive, this episode is for you.

Whether you're a seasoned golfer or just getting started, Kathy’s tips will help you recognize the mental traps of golf commands and learn how to replace them with ones that actually work.

Key Takeaways:

• The three types of golf commands you give yourself
• Why negative commands (like “don’t”) never work
• How to identify commands that create calm and confidence
• Practical strategies to rewire your internal golf talk

Schedule of a clarity call here

KathyHartWood.com

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 parental let's get to it.

Hello, my golf friend. Welcome back to think above par. I'm super happy you are here and listening, putting into use all the content that you hear here on this podcast that I share with you takes a little work. You gotta piece it together. You gotta be self motivated, gotta be determined. You gotta be curious and aware as you listen to this podcast, how can it apply to you? And then you gotta put it to work.

You get to learn how to self coach. You get to learn how to notice the ways that you're getting in your own way. And from the notices and the message that I get, a lot of you are putting it to use and getting a lot of great results. So kudos to you for putting in the work. And so today I want to talk about commands, golf commands. And this topic actually came up in a private coaching call I had with Becky.

So thank you, Becky, for letting me share this here. And it was so great because it was just the context of what we were talking about that triggered a lot of thoughts for me so that I could provide more content to you. And it helped her pivot and shift. And it's something that actually, this was a paradigm shift for me that I hadn't really thought about in this, in this way.

So I want to share it with you. So a command, according to the dictionary, is to give an order to tell someone to do something in a forceful and official way. If we were going to have a command as a sentence, some of the characteristics of a command sentence would be that it's using a verb that is a bossy verb or imperative verb, like go or stop or put.

The subject is implied, meaning it starts with a predicate. There's no subject. It has a period or an exclamation point. It can be very short. A command sentence is short, and it can have an urgent or angry tone. So I want to talk about the commands that you give yourself out on the golf course. The sentences you say in your head that use a bossy verb that may have an urgent or angry tone to them, because commands either work and serve you or they don't.

But they can certainly sound useful. They can certainly sound like they're a decent thing to say. It makes total sense to tell myself to do that. And I want to break the commands down into three different types of commands that you might have for yourself on the golf course, and I want you to get super curious about whether they serve you or not. And I want to talk about the ones that are a little bit better than the other ones.

Okay, so the first one that I want to talk about are your swing commands, which would be sentences or phrases like, finished your backswing, pause on the top of your swing, hold your finish, start the club head first, turn your hips. Okay, I'm not saying you need any of these swing thoughts. They're just swing thoughts that might serve you. So for me, I pick my swing thought before I go out and play.

I have a handful of them that I've had probably since I was in junior golf. I still have the same idiosyncrasies as I had back then, and I select on the range before I go play the ones that I need or that resonate with me that day. I don't come up with ones in the middle of the round. I don't make them up unless I've practiced them or I know that I have some evidence and proof that they work for me.

Now, when you're swinging over the ball, a mechanical or swing thought will serve you if you have some certainty about its effect. If you're guessing, it's not very useful if you're just making stuff up, or if you're grabbing at straws on the golf course and you try a new command on the next one, or you have more than one, one command to yourself over the golf ball, it's not so useful now.

You have too many, right? It's overwhelming. And if you say it in an angry tone, it's also not useful. Right. You don't want to yell at yourself while you're hitting a golf ball. You can give yourself a command like start your backswing with your left arm, start your backswing with your shoulders, whatever it is that resonates with you as a reminder on what to do, as a mental trigger to get you going, as that one thing that you want to focus on so that you can make your repeatable swing and make better contact.

Totally fine. So we have swing commands. Make sure they're useful, make sure they serve you. Make sure you try them on the range. I stick with one swing thought for the day, unless I'm totally bleeding like on the operating table and I need to get sewn up and switch swing thoughts. But I want you to be conscious and have a swing thought that you pick with a lot of intention and make sure it's one.

Your brain cannot handle a ton of different swing thoughts over the golf ball. And you will confuse yourself if you keep switching around and coming up with different thoughts. Because this is the thing is, you don't know. You don't know whether you did it or not. You just think you did or you didn't. So in other words, if you had a swing thought about just finish your back swing and you hit a crappy shot, you're like, well, I'm not going to think that anymore.

You don't even know if you did it. You don't know because you don't have a camera to look at it. And we can't connect really our feeling with reality because what feels like we might have swing finished our backswing isn't actually reality. I know this firsthand thousands and thousands of times, not only for myself or for people that I've taught. What you think you're doing and what feels like what you're doing are two totally different things.

Often, and sometimes we need evidence of the video camera to help us. So it's not useful to just quickly abandon and shift around to different swing commands in the middle of the round. So pick one on the range before you go out and play and stick with it. The other one that we do is result commands. So result commands will sound like, make sure you get it to the hole, which is aka for don't leave it short, don't hit it in the trees, don't leave it in the bunker, get it out of the bunker, don't hit it over the green, don't make a six, get it out of the rough, hit it in the fairway, hit the green, right.

What we're doing is we're stating the result that we want in a command. We're ordering ourselves to do the result. Now, if you know enough about what I talk about in this podcast, the result doesn't come because you ordered it to happen. The result happens because of the thoughts and the emotions you had that drove the actions that created the result. That's how you create the result. Now, one of the things that you really want to pay attention to on whether these commands, on creating this result are going to, whatever the result is, are going to serve you or not, is if you set it to your playing partner, would it be kind and useful and would they be calm or certain or competent?

So if you said to your playing partner, before they hit a pot, make sure you get it to the hole. Would that be useful to them? Would they say, you know what, thank you so much for reminding me. I almost forgot that I didn't want to leave it short. If you told them don't leave it in the bunker, would that be helpful for them? Over the golf ball?

If you said hit it in the fairway or don't make a six, don't mess up on this hole, hit it out of the rough, hit it over the water, would those be useful to your playing partner? And that's really a key to know if it's useful to say to yourself. So if it it's not useful to say to your playing partner, why are we saying it to ourselves now?

I am not saying that every result command might not work for you. It might. Your indicator is how you feel. If you feel really confident and certain and determined and hopeful because you gave yourself a command about the result that you want to create, stick with it, have at it, it's all yours. I'm not saying switch it. I am saying most of the time they end up putting a little bit of pressure or stress or worry or anxiety over us over the shot.

It is not calm, certain or confident. It is not useful. The reason you're giving yourself a result command is because there's a little fear behind it. It's a lack of understanding that actually the way to create result is to get yourself to a calm, certain or confident state so that you can swing freely and think clearly. It's not to tell yourself to not leave it in the bunker to scold yourself, especially if you're doing it with an urgent or angry tone.

Now with that being said, don'ts don't work. Anytime you're telling yourself don't do something as a command super not useful. Your brain doesn't know don't or negative anyway. So all it hears is leave it in the bunker and you're putting your attention on the thing that you're trying not to do. So for instance, if you're saying don't hit it in the water, you just put your attention, attention on the water.

You turned your eyes to the water. If you were riding a bike on a trail and you told yourself don't go off the ledge, which seems so sensical, it seems like the proper thing to do. But the problem is all you're going to focus on is not going over the ledge. That ride is not going to be very smooth. You will probably get off your bike and start walking.

I'm just saying. Right, so we do this to ourselves on the golf course, and we don't pay attention to it because it seems kind of like the right thing to do. Of course I don't want to go in the water. Why wouldn't I tell myself not to go in the water? It's all about the emotion that it creates for you, the feeling. Are you in a place where you can swing freely, think clearly, or are you putting pressure on yourself?

It's that simple. But those thoughts become little habits in our head. So I want you to decide if you're going to say it to a friend, is it useful? And would they say, thank you very much for telling me to do that? Does it produce a positive emotion that is going to be useful and serve you to make make your best swings, or does it create a negative emotion?

Does it create more pressure? And are you actually going to create a result from that command that is not positive? Meaning if you say don't hit it in the water, you actually hit in the water. If you say, get it to the hole, make sure you don't leave it short. You actually ram it by, like, are you producing the opposite result, even? Okay, so those are result commands, and the negative ones just don't work.

So listen for your don'ts. Okay, the third kind is feel commands. So feel commands. Are you telling yourself what to feel now? I believe and know that feel, sensory touch, smell, sound, breathing, anything inside of your body that you're sensing is useful because you're not in the back part of your brain. It brings you up to your prefrontal cortex, right? So you're more in the present moment. You're more self aware.

You're feeling your body. I have lots of tools. I talk about all the sensory things to help you get back up into your prefrontal cortex. So basically what you're doing is you're commanding yourself to feel something which is useful because you're putting your brain's attention now on your body or on your senses. That is going to bring you up to the front part of your brain, where you think clearly.

That's going to be in a place where you're going to be in a more calm space relative to your feelings. Okay? So feel commands would be listen for to go in. Now, one of the stories that I tell is my brother won the Canadian Open, and this was years ago, where you can watch things on replay over and over again. So I found out that he won, but I had to watch it on tape delay so when I was watching it, he had a four foot putt on the last hole to win.

I was super nervous watching him, and I already knew what the result was. So I was, I was sweating watching him hit this putt. And then I got to talk to him later, and I said, oh, my gosh, you had like a four foot putt to win that tournament. What were you thinking over that putt? And he said to me, just listen for the ball to go in.

Okay. So now, this is a very simple, almost beginner type of thought that we can have about putting, especially if we're moving our head around a lot or if we're peaking. But it was so useful for him because he had played enough golf that he knows that when you're nervous, we have a tendency to peek, tendency to look up. He also knew, or maybe he didn't know, but when he commanded himself to listen, he tapped into his ear balls.

He tapped into listening, which was going to take him out of the back part of the brain and into the front part of the brain, where he was going to be able to be more present and internal and not focused on his stroke. Not worried about the results, not worried about missing it. He was super focused on the task at hand, and that was listening for the ball to go in.

Now, for sure, he practiced this, and he knew that this worked, but it was also a feel command. So listen for it. To go in is great. Over short putts, you might say, feel the club head, right? You've got to get inside of your body, inside of your hands, to feel the weight in the head of the club, tempo, in anything, in full swing or in your short game, some command to focus on your tempo.

I always say tempo trumps mechanics. And one of the reasons tempo trumps mechanics is because tempo is going to get you into side of your body, bring out your athleticism for sure, but also allows you to get up to the front part of your brain where you're in your prefrontal cortex. And that's going to be a great place to be, versus in the back of your brain, where fear and anxiety and stress are where you don't think clearly.

And those emotions, when they're in your body, they. They are, they prohibit you. They get in the way of you being able to swing freely. You might go to visual, which is picture the shot. Some people can tap into visualization easier than other people. I think it's one of those things you can practice and get better at it, but you might picture the shot or picture the putt or picture the chip.

That's a useful thing to get up into the front part of your brain. Count to three. You could tell yourself as a command, count to three, count to four, whatever you want in your swing, you're focusing on the counting, which basically is a tempo type of count, right? It has a rhythm to it, a beat to it. You might also say back and through. Back and through, where you're visualizing a metronome.

That's a common feel command. Or you might say TikTok. I used to give this to all my students with chipping so they could get a better tempo when they were focusing on tick tock versus hit the ball. They did so much better in chipping. Same thing with putting. But those work doesn't matter what level you're at, whether you're a beginner golfer or you're advanced golfer. Just like, just like the feel thought that my brother used on the tour for listen for the ball to go in.

So those are your three major commands that you can give yourself. Some serve you and some don't. You got the swing commands about what you're telling yourself to do. Don't use a negative command like don't sway. That's not useful. You tell yourself rather to turn or turn your hips, but don't give yourself a negative command on what not to do. Then you have your results. Commands. These typically are not useful.

I am going to scan my brain for some that are useful, but I don't know very many. And the only way you really know, to be quite honest, or maybe they're not, they're not useful for me, they might be useful for you. This is why I said you want to make sure you're tapping into how that command rather resonates with you. And if you like it and it's working and you are getting good results with it, stick with it by all means.

And then you have your field commands, and those would be my favorite ones for you to use out on the golf course. So when you have some self talk to yourself over the golf ball or before a shot or after a shot, that you know that you're going to get some traction with it and some create some positive results. Okay, so what I want you to do is start listening for the commands that you give yourself on the golf course.

Decide which command they are. Make sure they're not negative, because those rarely work. And if you can't decide if it's useful or not, just, just ask yourself, if I said this to my playing partner right now, would they thank me? But they say, thank you so much. That was so useful. All right, my friends, golf commands, start paying attention. Find ones that serve you on the golf course.

All right, my friends, have a beautiful week, and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye. And if you're ready to level up, or if you feel like you didn't get what you wanted out of your golf game this season, or you felt like you underperformed, I'm looking for four to five serious golfers who want to play to their potential and feel proud of the way that they showed up and the results they created on the golf course.

So if that's you and you feel like you're ready, make sure that you look at the show notes for a link to schedule a short ten minute clarity call so we can see if we're a good fit.