Hey Fellow Golfer - 

Thank you for reading this week’s More Pars Than Bogeys Newsletter.

You can click here to read the online version of this week’s newsletter.

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about how mindset coaching and hypnotherapy can help you get unstuck from the proverbial bunker of poor performance on - and off - the course, click here to schedule a coaching discovery call with me. 

It’s a sunny Saturday morning at your local course…

You and your friend Jason are teeing off on the first tee with the same goal: to break 80.

Jason, the more patient golfer, begins his round with a steady mindset. On the second hole, he slices his drive into the rough. Instead of getting frustrated, he takes a deep breath, assesses his options, and calmly punches out safely to the fairway. 

He reminds himself that one bad shot doesn’t define the round. As the day goes on, Jason faces more challenges - missed putts, a bunker on the 10th - but he remains composed, sticking to his routine. He trusts that his preparation will eventually pay off. 

By the 18th hole, Jason finished with a solid 82, just shy of his goal. He felt proud of how he handled the ups and downs, knowing he was improving.

You, on the other hand, are known as the more impatient golfer, and you start your round with high expectations…

By the 4th hole, you’re already frustrated after a couple of missed putts. When you hit a bad shot into the water on the 5th, your impatience kicks in. You begin to swing aggressively, trying to make up for lost strokes, leading to mishits. 

Your frustration builds with every mistake, and by the back nine, emotions are boiling over. You’re rushing his shots, making poor decisions, and end up carding a 92. You’re irritated, emotionally drained, and no fun to be around.

The difference: a patient mindset. 

Although you both faced the same set of challenges on the course, the difference in your mindsets made all the difference in your score and experience. 

Jason’s patience allowed him to maintain focus, make smart decisions, and enjoy the round despite setbacks. Your impatience, on the other hand, led to frustration, poor decision-making, and a loss of enjoyment, preventing you from playing your best.

Patience helped Jason progress, while impatience held you back.

In today’s newsletter, you’ll learn what it means, looks, and feels like to play patient and impatient golf. 

We’ll look at how an attitude of patience or impatience affects you during a round and your journey to breaking 80 (or scratch) as a hole. We’ll then discuss potent action steps you can begin taking today to practice more patience on (and off) the course.

Let’s tee off!

Patience (and Impatience) Defined

Patience is staying calm, composed, and focused on long-term improvement, even when immediate results aren’t visible.

It’s about trusting the learning process and allowing skills to develop over time. 

In our world, patience means understanding that progress - whether in your swing or your ability to break 80 - happens incrementally; patience necessitates accepting the highs and lows of the progress without losing confidence that you’re headed in the right direction.

For instance, I am on a journey to break 90 on or before November 13. My last handful of rounds have looked like this:

• 103

• 98

• 109

• 105

• 97

• 103

Admittedly, a part of me feels impatient - especially after underperforming during a round -  which manifests as frustration and anxiousness that results aren’t coming as quickly as I think they should. 

This is normal.

However, I - like you - have a choice to feed the voice of patience or the voice of impatience. Learning how to feed the former empowers me to remain present and focused on what I can control: my effort, attitude, and action. 

If I choose a path of impatience, I’ll begin to allow frustration to take over, negatively influencing my practice (quality and quantity), attitude, and effort. On the course, this may begin to look and feel like:

• Rushing through shots

• Frequently changing strategies or techniques

• Making poor decisions

• Expecting immediate improvement after a lesson or practice session

• Engaging in negative self-talk

Ultimately, this mindset creates pressure, frustration, and a lack of enjoyment, pulling me further away from my goal.

Practicing patience will allow me to remain steady during setbacks (like when I carded two triples on the final three holes), make thoughtful decisions, and focus on my growth over time rather than rushing for quick fixes.

Here are nine additional reasons to practice patience on the course.

9 Reasons to Practice Patience

1. Long-Term Improvement: Golf is a game of incremental progress. Practicing patience allows you to appreciate each small indicator of progress and remain committed to the game and journey.
   
   It’s this commitment that proves to be the difference maker over time that catalyzes progress.
   

2. Avoiding Burnout: Being patient allows you to stay engaged in the game without becoming mentally or emotionally exhausted from short-term frustrations.
   
   How many times have you told yourself you’re done with the game of golf after a bad round?
   
   A patient mindset helps minimize (hopefully, eliminate) these feelings so that you can remain focused and enjoy the game.
   

3. Managing Expectations: Patience helps you set realistic goals and understand that improvement takes time, reducing the stress of unmet expectations.
   
   Remember that it’s the gap between expectation and reality that invites frustration…
   

4. Better Decision-Making: Patience empowers you with an opportunity to find flow and take your time to assess each shot carefully, leading to smarter, more strategic decisions on the course.
   

5. Emotional Control: Practicing patience helps manage emotions during bad shots or rounds, preventing anger or frustration from ruining their game.
   
   When you understand and accept that today’s shot or round is a microscopic part of your golf journey, you’re able to defuse the emotional charge far quicker, leading to calm, presence, and focus on the game.

Here are two powerful resources to learn more about why (and how) to practice acceptance on the course.

• Episode #29: The Art and Science of Acceptance to Accelerate Progress

• The Art and Science of Acceptance: Learn how practicing acceptance can accelerate results

6. Consistency: By being patient, you can focus on mastering one aspect of your game at a time, which leads to consistent improvement.
   

7. Mental Resilience: Patience builds mental toughness, allowing you to bounce back from mistakes or difficult rounds without losing focus.
   

8. Sustainable Enjoyment: Patience allows you to savor the process and enjoy the game more, even during challenging rounds.
   
   Admittedly, it’s the rounds you underperform and play poorly that prove to be the best teachers. A patient attitude accepts these as part of the journey. An impatient attitude cultivates frustration.
   

9. Avoiding Hasty Corrections: Patience prevents you from changing techniques or strategies too quickly, allowing time for skills to develop properly.
   
   If you constantly bail on one technique for another the moment you encounter resistance, you’ll continue to remain stuck. This is the equivalent of starting a diet and not seeing progress after a week and hopping to another, e.g. from keto to Paleo to carnivore to intermittent fasting (face palm). 

Catch up on this week’s episodes on The Scratch Golfer’s Mindset Podcast:

• Episode #30: [Journey to Scratch] Patience, Pressure, and Focus On (And Away From) the Course

• Episode #31: [Inside the Mind] Chris Ardolina: Get to the Root Cause of Your Struggles and Accelerate Improvement

10 Ways Impatience Impairs Performance

1. Frustration: Impatience leads to frustration when immediate results aren’t seen, which can cause emotional spirals that ruin performance, enjoyment, and commitment.
   

2. Poor Decision-Making: Impatience leads to rushed shots or decisions, often leading to mistakes and poor course management. Would you slow down, already?
   

3. Swing Changes: Impatience leads to a lack of commitment, which leads to changing techniques too quickly before you have a chance to realize its impact and benefit. The result: you remain stuck bouncing from one chipping or putting technique to the next.
   

4. Emotional Burnout: Constant impatience leads to emotional exhaustion, which can kill the love for the game and lead to burnout.
   

5. Pressure to Perform: Impatience creates unnecessary pressure to achieve quick results, increasing anxiety and diminishing enjoyment. This breeds tension and tightness throughout the round, which sabotages your swing and thinking.
   
   I’m currently working through this…

6. Loss of Focus: When you become impatient, you’re more prone to losing focus during a round, especially after mistakes, leading to more errors and poor performance.
   

7. Lack of Confidence: When you don’t see quick improvements, impatience can erode confidence and reinforce self-doubt. Good luck hitting it over the water hazard with that combination…
   

8. Reactive Mindset: Impatience makes you prone to negative overreactions to poor shots, leading to a cycle of emotional instability and poor play.
   

9. Poor Self-Talk: Impatience permeates your self-talk, ultimately turning up the volume of your harsh inner critic.
   

10. Missed Learning Opportunities: When you have an impatient mindset, you fail to reflect on mistakes and learn from them because you’re focused on immediate results rather than long-term growth.

5 Action Steps to Cultivate More Patience

At this point, you should understand how and why patience is critical if you wish to play to your potential. Here are several powerful strategies to help you cultivate a patient mindset.

1. Develop a Breathing Practice: Breathwork is an excellent, powerful strategy for quickly cultivating presence on demand. It’s a skill that can be used both on and off the course to turn down the volume of your emotional brain, thus lending itself well to cultivating more patience.
   
   You need to have an arsenal of breathwork strategies that you can wield on and off the course. Here are a handful of my favorites. 

For me, this looks like a daily breathwork routine that I execute first thing in the morning, as well as having multiple options to deploy on the golf course.

2. Set Performance Goals: My ultimate goal is scratch. My primary goal at this time is to break 90 before November 13. Even more granular, my goal is to average 30 putts (or less) per round and to hit at least 40 percent of greens in regulation.
   
   These performance goals help me shape my processes and ultimately allow me to remain focused and patient in achieving my ultimate goal because they give me constant feedback and reflect progress.
   

3. Embrace the Learning Process: Every round is a learning opportunity - if you choose to view it that way. Golf is a fantastic teacher, as it mirrors the areas of yourself that need most awareness and focus to excel on and off the course. 

There’s always something to learn, and if you adopt a growth-oriented mindset that understands and respects this aspect of the game, you’ll experience more enjoyment and progress.

4. Invite in Curiosity: Rather than impatiently reacting, how can you get patiently curious about your results?
   
   For instance, at the end of each week or month, when reflecting on the past rounds, rather than feeling impatient and frustrated, how can you get curious about your scores and performance to identify your highest priority of focus?
   

5. Set an Intention to Practice Patience: Before each round, set an intention to slow down and practice more patience. This simple act of keeping patience top of mind will begin to permeate your pre-shot routine, decision-making, and course-management strategy consciously (and unconsciously). 

As a golf hypnotherapist, I use hypnosis to uncover the origin of outdated behaviors and limiting beliefs that hold you back from playing your best so that you can unlearn or upgrade them to align with the best version of yourself.

The result: you get out of your own way and experience ease, effortlessness, and flow, executing what you know you need to do to play to your potential. 

Click here to schedule a free Mental Game Strategy session to learn how I can help you learn faster and shoot lower scores.

Your Next Step

Every newsletter will conclude with a suggested action step and further resources on the topic we discussed.

After reading today’s newsletter, commit to implementing one of the strategies I shared to begin cultivating a patient mindset. Make this non-negotiable. 

Thank you for reading today’s newsletter.

If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow golfer ready to take their game to the next level.

Until next time,

Paul

P.S. What did you think of today’s newsletter? Reply back / drop a comment below to let me know.

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2. Overcome the Mental Hazards of Your Mind: How Hypnosis Can Help You Shoot Lower Scores: Whether you spend two or ten hours at the range each week, if you don’t learn to address and overcome your mind's mental and emotional hazards, you’ll remain stuck in the proverbial bunker of poor performance playing well short of your potential. Shoot More Pars.
   

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