Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
Serious golfer? You know you’ve got the talent—but your brain keeps getting in the way. Think Above Par helps you master the mental game of golf, stop overthinking, and quit worrying about what others think on the course so you can play calm, confident, and consistent golf every round.
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.
Learn how to think above par—so you can play below par. Subscribe now to your weekly dose of golf mindset coaching and start transforming your golf brain today.
Think Above Par | Your Mental Caddy for Golf Mindset & Performance
How to Get More Out of Your Golf Lessons
•Episode 291
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Taking a golf lesson is one thing. Getting the most out of it is another.
In this episode of Think Above Par, I’m talking about the mental side of golf instruction—how to find an instructor who communicates in a way you understand, what you should realistically expect from a lesson, and what your responsibility is once the lesson is over.
We’ll talk about why a good instructor may still not be the right instructor for you, why understanding a swing change isn’t the same as owning it, and why feeling uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong.
I also share some thoughts about consuming golf instruction on YouTube and social media, practicing what you were actually taught, and why judging a change too quickly by your ball flight can get you into trouble.
Because sometimes the hardest part of changing your golf swing isn’t the swing change.
It’s how you think about yourself while you’re learning it.
In this episode: • How to choose the right golf instructor for you • What to expect from a golf lesson • Why communication between golfer and instructor matters • The danger of chasing the next swing tip online • Why swing changes often feel uncomfortable • How to practice after a lesson • How often you should take golf lessons • Why immediate results aren’t always the best measure of progress • What golf lessons can reveal about your patience, perfectionism, and expectations
If you’re investing time and money into golf instruction, this episode will help you become a better student—and get more out of the work you’re already doing.
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 golf friend, and welcome back. Hope you're having an amazing week. So last week I told you that practice is repetition, but repetition isn't automatically improvement. You have to know what you're practicing and why. And that brings me to lessons. Now there is a mental component to lessons, and I know this because I taught for many years. And if you didn't know this, I was an LPGA top 50 teacher and best in state and golf digest in several different states because I moved all the time, among some other awards and recognitions. So I taught for a very long time. And I was a person who took lessons consistently college golf, professional golf, right up into the years when I was giving lessons. I constantly wanted to have eyes on my golf swing. I have taken lessons from several different professionals, from some of the biggest names in the industry to your Come to Code Pro that you might not know. And how you manage yourself in a lesson, how coachable you are, your mentality about going into a lesson is really important for you making and getting the most out of it. So I want to talk about how you find the right instructor, what you should expect from a lesson, what's your responsibility once the lesson is over, so that you're getting the most out of it. And as I talked about last week, listen, if you're not a person who takes lessons, or if you're a YouTuber, any of you guys YouTubers, where you watch YouTube lessons over and over again or Instagram and you're watching things and you hear one thing from one instructor and then another thing from another instructor, I'm gonna tell you a story. I was Golf for Women Magazine, this is how old I am. Golf for Women Magazine was a publication from the Meredith Corporation, I think it was, years ago. And I was one of their contributing editors. I was on the cover a couple times and I wrote articles for them on the regular. And one of the things that they would ask their contributing editors is to come up with something new and fresh, something different. So it was basically about saying the same thing, but just saying it different. Come up with something fresh so that they could sell magazines. I'm just gonna give you a heads up on that. So when you're watching YouTube videos and you see the title or you see an Instagram that has, you know, something that gets your attention in three seconds, you're probably gonna hear the same information, just share it a little bit differently. But what happens is you, as the listener and the consumer and someone who's eager to change your swing, you have big ears and you consume it all. And I know this because when I taught, I'd have people coming, well, I was doing really well. And then I got on YouTube and I watched this video, and now I'm trying to put pressure into my left pinky toe because I heard that was really important. So I do that on my back swing, and then on the down swing, I switch it to my right pinky toe. It's like, okay, if it works, great, but it just seems like the next shiny object. So I'm just gonna throw that out there to be slightly cautious. So I do know that it's challenging to find the right instructor, and sometimes you will go through some, it's kind of like finding the right hairdresser. And I know we can feel like we're wasting money, but you're probably not wasting any more money if you do a half hour lesson if it's available to you than you would if you were getting your hair done and it wasn't so great. But a good instructor still might not be the right instructor for you. So the questions you want to ask yourself, can they communicate in a way you understand? Can they explain the why without burying you in information? Like, why are you doing what you're doing without over inundating you with a bunch of information? Do you feel comfortable asking questions? This is important. Do they understand how you learn? Not everybody learns the same exact way. Can they simplify your problem for you? And do you leave knowing exactly what to work on? This is important. I mean, unless you're coming to somebody for a quick band-aid and you got a tournament the next day, band-aids fall off. They might last you through the tournament, but you want something that's gonna last a long time. I have done plenty of band-aid lessons, I've taken plenty of band-aid lessons. Just get me through this next round. But do you know exactly what you want to work on? That's an important thing. I'm not a big fan of a method teacher, meaning that they're gonna consistently teach the same exact thing to the same exact person because we're all different, we're all built different, we think differently. Our bodies move differently. I don't think we can do the same exact thing. So someone who has a broad understanding of what is supposed to happen in the golf swing is very useful. Not just teaching one way and one method. I used to say that I had a big Rollodex. If you guys remember Rollodexes, I had multiple ways of saying the same thing. The more I taught, the better I got at picking the right card sooner. If I can start seeing somebody go, I know exactly what's going to resonate with you because I get you, I understand you, I understand how you learn, I can see what you're doing. Let's try this first. And communication matters. One instructor might say something technically correct, but if the golfer doesn't understand it, it isn't very useful. I've done lots of golf schools with lots of instructors in the same environment, and I listened to 10 instructors say the same thing a different way. And then you connect with the students later and they're like, I didn't get a dang word he was saying. I didn't understand it. He was talking over my head, and the other person was like, That totally resonated with me. I got that analogy, right? Because the best information in the world isn't helpful if you don't understand what you're supposed to do with it. Okay, so what should you expect from the instructor? A good instructor should help you identify the priority. Now, this is what happens when you're taking a lesson from a spouse or your friend who's an accountant or a dentist, and they're like, dude, I can tell right away what you're doing. Your foot's twisting. Just gonna tell you that might not be on the totem pole of things to work on, not the priority. It's usually a result of something else. It's why is your foot twisting? You don't stand up there and just do some Elvis move for no reason and just twist your foot. There's cause and effect usually in it. So a lot of the people that you see on a day-to-day basis might be very good diagnosers. Oh, I know what you're doing. I can see it. But it might not be really good for you to try and do that because there's something else that's causing it. So a good instructor should help you identify the priority, not like here are 14 things wrong with your swing. It's here is the thing that we need to address first. So you shouldn't be overwhelmed and you should leave knowing how to practice. This is really important. And what I talked about last week was you can go out there and practice a ton, but if you're not practicing the right thing, all you're doing is ingraining whatever you were practicing. So I want you to think of practicing as rehearsing. What are you rehearsing? Are you rehearsing rushing? Are you rehearsing a loop? Are you rehearsing five top shots in a row? Because you're gonna get really good at five top shots in a row. And so then I want to talk about your expectations relative to lessons. And this is the part that's gonna hurt. A lesson is not the same thing as a swing change. You can understand something in 10 minutes, but that doesn't mean that your body will own it in 10 minutes. There's a huge difference between understanding what to do and being able to do it automatically. So then it goes to asking you, what are you expecting to happen in one lesson? I'm not also saying that things can't change quickly. I'm just saying you owning it might be a different thing. And it depends on how big of a change that you're looking for. Because this is the other part. Swing changes are uncomfortable. This is why a lot of times people don't like to make a swing change because you're gonna have to go through a stage of being uncomfortable. If it felt good, you probably didn't change anything. So your mindset going into a lesson should be this should be slightly uncomfortable. It should be a red flag if you become comfortable too soon. I would double check that you didn't creep back to the thing that you were doing that you're familiar with. So different and uncomfortable doesn't automatically mean wrong. You have just repeated something so many times, maybe something wrong or not useful, and it became comfortable. So for you to change it, you've got to be willing to be slightly uncomfortable. This is not a problem. This is part of mental growth and anything in life. If you want to change your mental game and the way that you shift on your thinking on the golf course, you're gonna be uncomfortable because you want to go back to your old patterns. If you want to shift a habit in your day-to-day life, it's gonna be uncomfortable. Your brain loves familiar and comfort. It does not like to change. So the idea that it has to change triggers that something is wrong. There's danger. We're gonna take our energy away from saving our lives in the prehistoric days, and we're gonna focus on something for change. That our brain doesn't want to do that. That's why I think it's so important if you take a lesson that the instructor gives you something to practice and rehearse so that you know that you're doing it, like you be the eyes, because you can't see your swing unless you set up a video and know what you're looking for. So I think it's really important to have drills to do personally or a way to practice. Don't just send the student to the range with a concept. Give them some specific things to practice. That's important. And I hope you're getting that out of the lessons if you're taking them. In that context, I want you to be careful judging the change by immediate results. Most people are looking at the ball flight to give them satisfaction that they've done the right thing. And I'm not saying it's not going to change there, but sometimes you will go in if you're making an adjustment in your swing, and a win is that you did the drill and you did the move that you know that you're trying to integrate into your swing, and your sequence might be off and your timing's off, and it might be a little tight and a little awkward, whatever you're doing, and you might not see it in your result. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. That doesn't mean that you haven't moved forward. A section of your practice should be that you're going to integrate whatever you were practicing into your full swing, where you're just going to go through your routine and take some free swings and integrate it. So you have to rehearse it. And one of the hardest things about taking lessons is that once you take a lesson and then you go on the golf course and you're like, okay, I was doing pretty good on the range, and now it's horrible. I'm back to my old ways, or I feel like I'm in this no man's land. That is part of that growth. So anticipate it. Being on the golf course is not a place to work on your golf swing. And the range, who cares, right? You can go anywhere. But on the golf course, there's a little extra tension and you're trying to be mechanical, the chances of you hitting a great result aren't stupendous. So you've got to be able to first do it on the range, and then you've got to train your brain to become comfortable with it on the golf course. Because the minute the fear and pressure sets in, we're going to go back to our old patterns. And that's the most challenging thing. And that's why I think it's so important that you find an instructor that sets you up for practice in a really impactful, strong way that you're going to get a lot out of it and also sets things up as a priority. I had people who would take lessons from me every week. I was on a schedule. And then they would show up and I'd ask, okay, how'd you do? Tell me about your practice. And it would be, Oh, Kathy, I didn't practice. It's like, okay. Then what's going to happen is I'm going to do the same thing we worked on last week. Why would I move forward if you haven't owned that first priority? So now I would tell these students who I love that you're paying me to watch you practice. And if that's what you want, that's okay. Because I'm not moving forward until you've given this a go a few times, and then I have some feedback, and then we can tweak it, we can adjust it, and you can start ingraining some of it. So this goes to how often you should take a lesson. And my rule of thumb was that if I give you something to work on, I tell my students, or told my students, I don't teach lessons anymore, that practice it two or three times and then come back and see me. If that takes you a week, I'll see you in a week. If it takes you a month, I'll see you in a month. And I also think that would be a good use of your time and your money to determine how often you should take a lesson that can give you motivation to go out there and practice. But I think it's really funny because taking a golf lesson can expose a lot about how you manage yourself out on the golf course. It can expose your patience or impatience, your perfectionism, your want and desire for immediate results, your fear of getting worse, discomfort of not knowing. It exposes frustration and comparison, doubt. It exposes how coachable you are or not coachable you are. I mean, and those aren't really swing problems, right? They're responses to learning, but it exposes the way that you process things. So there is a huge component, a mental component to taking and receiving coaching in a lesson and then what you do with it. And sometimes, my friends, the hardest part of changing your swing isn't the swing change. It's how you think about yourself while you're learning it. So practicing matters, but practicing the right thing matters more. And if you're listening to this, you want to perform better. And if you want to perform better, I know you're likely taking lessons. And I just want you to get the most out of your lesson, not only from your instructor, but from you as a student. All right, my friends, have a beautiful week, and I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye.
