Golf Burnout: What is it and Why? And How Do You Stop It?

Podcast Transcript

It was 2016, I had finished playing D1 college golf 3 years earlier and was living at home with my parents trying to get good enough to turn pro. I had everything I needed. I had a membership at a country club. I worked only two days a week. I had basically unlimited time. I had every reason and resource to be able to reach my goal of playing pro golf. Yet I was playing terrible and completely burnt out.

What is burnout? What causes it? How can we stop it from happening? I want to dive into the concept of burnout and give you some knowledge and tools to be able to withstand the forces that can cause burnout, and to bounce out of it if or when it happens.

So, burnout. Let’s start by nailing down a good definition of burnout. In one of my many conversations with Raymond Prior on The Mental Golf Show, he described burnout really well: burnout is expecting one thing, but repeatedly getting less than you expect. It doesn’t take long before golf becomes an aversive experience that way. So basically, burnout is expectations repeatedly not meeting reality.

So when you show up to the course and you expect it to go one way, and it goes much worse, that hurts. But instead of accepting it, you double down on the next one to really make a good outcome happen. Your expectations might even get higher. So if, or when, it doesn’t go well again, because you were really white knuckling the result, it hurts even more. This spiral continues on and on until you don’t even want to try anymore. So you take a week or a month off, then you show back up, this time with lower expectations, and you play great! This of course gets your expectations right back up where they were. So in the next round you expect it to go well, and reality proves different yet again, and when this happens repeatedly, you’re right back where you started: burnout.

So if mismatched expectations lead to burnout, then naturally we’ve got to address expectations and make a change there. I believe there’s one real way to address expectations: acceptance.

What is acceptance? Acceptance is seeing things as they are, now as you wish they were. That’s basically the opposite of expectations. Expectations are by nature how you expect things to go. How things should or could go. That is decidedly not seeing things as they are going.

So what does it look like to see things as they are? It means getting very neutral, very objective. Not labelling things with judgment, such as good, bad, positive, negative, lucky, unlucky. Or for our purposes, how you expected them to be. Those labels all come from a place of wishing things were different than they are. So if you’re always in that mental posture of judgment and labels, if it’s not going well you will always play wishing things were different.

Acceptance is seeing things as they are, but another important component of acceptance is not having a need to to change how things are. You’re allowing things to be. Letting. Permitting. Even embracing. The things that are happening are just happening, and that’s ok.

Are you seeing how this could help with burnout? If burnout happens when you don’t like how reality is, then accepting and embracing reality as it is means there’s never a discrepancy between reality and what you need reality to be. Because you don’t need reality to be anything that it isn’t. Burnout can’t exist in that mental framework. You can play forever and never get burnt out because you’re never truly disappointed.

Now, as with every time I talk about acceptance, this can pretty quickly venture into resignation territory. If reality is what it is and you’re ok with that and you don’t feel any need to change it, then how can you ever get better? Well first off, how is that judgmental disappointment-fueled burnout working out for your improvement?

I think having this nonjudgmental acceptance of reality is the way to improve. You’re not motivated by anger or revenge. You’re able to see the state of your game clearly, as it is, without being clouded by what it should be. And you can say “I want to work on my game for the pure sake of working on it, because working hard is simply what I do.” And then results will simply be feedback on what you’ve worked on, not indictments on you as a golfer or a person. You can practice, play, get a result, then keep practicing, all without that disparity between reality and expectations. Which means burnout will never happen.

When you’re getting frustrated with results, know that you could be early on the path to burnout. There’s nothing wrong with being frustrated, or emotions in general, but in those moments check your need to change reality. Go instead to acceptance. See reality as it is, not how you wish it was.