Golf helped me through one of the darkest periods of my life.

Following the loss of my son, golf gave me something I desperately needed: routine, purpose, connection, and a place to direct my attention when life felt overwhelming.

That experience led me to launch Golf Yourself Healthy, inspired not only by my own journey but also by a growing body of research highlighting the health and wellbeing benefits of golf.

But over time, I found myself wrestling with a difficult question:

If golf is so good for us, why are so many golfers struggling because of it?

In this episode, I share the story behind the evolution from Golf Yourself Healthy to Golf Yourself Happy, and explore two of the core convictions that now underpin everything I do.

We discuss:

• Why golf may have defined success too narrowly
• How golfers often move the goalposts on their own achievements
• The hidden cost of tying self-worth to performance
• Why belonging might be more important than playing ability
• The subtle ways golf culture can make people feel like outsiders
• The difference between measuring golfers and valuing golfers

Along the way, I share a personal story about joining a golf club in Wales, serving on the board of directors, and an encounter that revealed something deeper about how we decide who belongs in golf.

If you've ever felt frustrated by the game, doubted whether you're "good enough" to call yourself a golfer, or found your enjoyment of golf rising and falling with your scorecard, this episode is for you.

Key Takeaways

• Golf is good for us, but its benefits are not automatic.
• Golfers are remarkably good at telling themselves they're not "good enough"
• Success becomes almost impossible to achieve when it is defined too narrowly.
• The same culture that narrows success can also narrow belonging.
• Your right to belong should not depend on your performance.

💚 Join the Happy Hackers Club

https://www.golfyourselfhappy.com/happy-hackers/free-community

The Happy Hackers Club is a community for golfers who want a healthier, happier, and more sustainable relationship with the game.

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to join us.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Kris and Innes story features in the PGA's GBQ magazine -https://www.gbqdigital.com/featuresarchive/inspiration-golf-yourself-healthy
• Golf Yourself Healthy - www.golfyourselfhealthy.com
• Golf Yourself Happy - www.golfyourselfhappy.com
• Golf and Health report - https://www.randa.org/en/key-projects/golf-and-health
• World Handicap System - https://www.whs.com/

Closing Thought

Remember to put your Happiness First and your Handicap Later

Golf is scientifically proven to be good for your health and well-being. However, in my experience, it doesn't always make people happy, it actually makes them miserable. So let me ask you this: does golf make you healthy or happy even? Or actually is it causing you to hate the game or even hate yourself?

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Golf Yourself Happy with me, Chris Lynch, your head coach. Before I get into the meat in the sandwich of today's conversation and discuss whether golf is truly healthy or conducive to happiness, I want to firstly introduce you to and give you a personal invitation to join the Happy Hackers Club. The Happy Hackers is a free

WhatsApp community intended for everyday recreational golfers who love the game of golf, absolutely adore the game, but they don't always love the difficult feelings of anger, frustration, or complicated emotions that this game naturally provokes in us. And so the Happy Hackers Club has been running for a couple of months now. During that time, we've amassed between around 50 to 60 people.

With golfers from all over the world, in particular from the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, continental Europe, you name it. We've got people from all over, and all of us are unified by this love of the game, but also unified by some struggles too. struggles with mourning the loss of the golfer that we used to be, or the golfer that we never were and still want to be. But really, we all support each other and

Happy Hackers is built around a couple of key principles. Number one, we're reclaiming this word hacker. Normally it's meant as an insult in golf, but in this case, we mean it affectionately and lovingly. And basically what we're saying is we are everyday golfers. We're comfortable with that. Yes, we want to improve. And as a community, we want to help each other improve and achieve better performance in golf, but we're inverting the usual.

Flawed logic that I believe exists in golf, which is to say that when you play better, you'll be happier. No, no, we're saying we want to be happy first, we want to enjoy our golf. We want to come at golf from a place of joy and enjoyment and fulfillment, which we believe will then naturally lead us to a place of playing even better. And that's what the community is all about. It's totally free to join. It's very warm and welcoming

I will greet you personally upon clicking that link to join us. So I will place the link for that in the show notes. But without any further ado, let's tee off and get into this healthy and happy debate in golf.

A little over two years ago, I launched a platform called Golf Yourself Healthy. At that point in time, I had come to believe that golf was good for me personally, but also that golf was good for others. Let me explain.

incredibly interesting statistics in there about how golfers live longer than people who don't play golf. Golfers report having a better social life than non-golfers. Golf is great for your heart health, for your brain health. I could go on and on. I encourage you to read it. So that had been the first time for me that I had seen golf being spoken about in that way. Because in my experience up until that point,

I had only ever really experienced golf being spoken about in very performative terms, i.e., you play golf to get the ball in the hole in as few shots as possible. I don't question that as a reason for anyone playing golf. And, you know, certainly I myself have ⁓ seen golf through that lens myself before now. However, I just really love because also one of my passions and values is around health and well-being. So

Soon after losing Innis,

I realised that I really needed golf then more than ever. I remember heading out to the golf course within days of him passing and losing myself in the golf course and having a place to privately grieve. I played golf on my own almost exclusively at that point in time and it did wonders for me. Now, me sharing

openly about the loss of my son with you now, I want to say something quite clearly to you.

I don't want your sympathy. If I could ask of anything from you now, it's to ask you to pause and reflect on actually maybe what golf really means to you and what golf does for you and how actually it has showed up for you at difficult times in your life.

And also, if I had to ask for one other thing as well, is for you just to consider how we can turn adversity into an opportunity to develop resilience. One of the taglines that I established for Golf Yourself Healthy back in the early days was embrace the rough and cherish the fairway. That is to say that in golf,

we end up in the rough, as everyday golfers in golf, we end up in the rough, in the long grass more often than we care to be in there or more often than we care to admit. And we want to get out of there as quick as we possibly can. We want to get back into the fairway and that is where we cherish the fairway. But really what this is saying is two key things is in the rough, we learn the most about ourselves as golfers.

if we actually bother to take the time to reflect on how we ended up in the rough in the first place, what we did to get out of it and how we can use that experience to accelerate us forward in our growth in the game of golf and in the game of life. And also it is to say that when we find ourselves in the fairway, those are fleeting moments often as recreational everyday golfers and therefore we should cherish that moment.

while it happens because we just never know when the next challenging moment may be around the corner. And so...

with this life-changing moment for me came a moment of realization. I thought, well, here is an opportunity.

to completely decide the trajectory of my life. I had been working in a corporate job for coming up to 10 years at that point. I'd started going through the motions. My passion for it had gone if it was ever really truly there in the first place. And as you yourself listening to this or watching this may have experienced, turning point moments, fork in the road moments happen in our lives where we take everything into account.

We have perspective. And I thought, do you know what? What do I love? What am I passionate about? How could I make a career out of that? How could I do something? How can I channel this energy and this inspiration that I've taken from my son's life and put it into something that can help others truly? And that's where Golf Yourself Healthy came from. I coupled the research, the passion, the desire.

to pursue a career in golf and to act out my values of helping other people through creating Golf Yourself Healthy. Now, for the first couple of years, it was predominantly a content engine. It was revolving around a podcast. It had no coaching offering. It had no real community necessarily. And really I started out interviewing people who like me had used golf as almost like a therapeutic tool.

to overcome challenging times in their lives. But then gradually I was then using it as a platform, as a opportunity to network within the industry. I was recognized, I was rewarded for the work that I was doing by being invited last year to the

Third International Congress on Golf and Health hosted at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. I was personally invited by Dr. Andrew Murray, who is the Chief Medical Advisor to the DP World Tour. And he invited me to come along and share my own experience of how golf was great for health and wellbeing, to tell my story, but to tell my vision for how I was hoping to help other golfers on their journey. Now, truthfully, at that point in time,

Golf yourself happy hadn't even occurred to me yet. And I was really going down this track of promoting, know, spreading the word, sharing the gospel of how golf is great for health and wellbeing. But actually a couple of things started to happen. So one thing was as I traveled around the UK, for example, to interview people,

I remember one instance in particular where I went to a place called the Warwick Golf Sim, which is owned by and ran by a guy, a PGA pro called Fred Dewsbury. And he gave us the venue to host or record a podcast with a friend and a fellow happy hacker, Dan Ashcroft, who is himself also a PGA pro.

Him and I recorded a podcast episode together there and I was chatting with Fred and I told him about Golf Self Healthy, how golf is good for your health and well-being. And I remember him saying to me, are you mad? Golf is the hardest and most frustrating game in the world. It's not good for my mental health. It frustrates the hell out of me and it gets me down a lot of the time. Now, admittedly, Fred is someone who, like Dan, who you might meet if you were to come into the Happy Hackers Club.

These are guys who play golf, not necessarily for a living because although they're PGA pros who teach people, they still do compete for, you know, for, yeah, they compete for money, but it's not their main bread and butter necessarily. So it's not like a tour pro who their entire livelihood depends on it. But the point is these are guys who have played golf for a long time and it's their job basically, right? So I can sort of understand why they feel a bit jaded.

But ultimately that moment really stuck with me because it made me go, do you know what? I think if I look back anecdotally and reflect on my own experiences of golf as an every day average golfer, but then also with loads of other golfers that I play with who are similar stage in life to me, you know, they've got young families, young kids, they don't maybe get to play as much as they used to. And on that rare occasion that they maybe do get to play or on that one weekend round that they get,

They've been looking forward to it all week. They get out in the course and they feel mad as hell because they top it off the first tee or, you know, they have multiple double bogeys. And even though there's some good stuff on the scorecard, they can't help but dwell on the bad stuff, on the negative stuff. And so then in the second half of last year, when I was tapped on the shoulder in my corporate job to say, we're doing a restructuring, we're making some redundancies, we're sorry, we're to have to let you go.

I pretended to be gutted for a little while, but then very quickly thereafter I was like, hallelujah, because I really wanted to get out of there, if I'm being honest. And this afforded me the runway and the opportunity to launch Golf Yourself Happy. So back end last year, I worked on it. I came up with this idea and I thought, I can see how people love golf, but it isn't always making them happy. And then to coincide with this and knowing I was leaving my corporate job,

with a background in learning and development, in coaching, I then retrained as a health coach, which for me now, as a golf coach specializing in the mindset and the emotional side of things, it has afforded me a set of skills to then take into golf and to lead this community, to be here with you now and to help you have a happier and healthier relationship with golf.

That is a little bit of background, that moment, that aha moment, that realisation I had, which was to say, yes, golf is good for you. It's proven, the science says it is good, but golfers aren't always happy.

Golfers are remarkably good at moving the goal posts. You lower your handicap, but it doesn't count because it was through general play.

Then it needs to happen in competition. Then it needs to happen consistently. Somebody needs to recognize it. Someone needs to respect that handicap and tell you that you're good enough to be there in the first place. Eventually, I have found myself wondering whether golf has defined success so narrowly that many golfers spend their entire golfing lives feeling unsuccessful.

Now you see, this is one of these very sneaky cultural norms, or one of these commonly held beliefs or unwritten rules that seems to be in existence in golf, which sends you a signal to say that you are not good enough, or your achievements are not worthy of your own.

Validation or recognition. let me share some of my own observations, lived experiences, and work that I do with some of my coaching clients that that would back this up. So, you know, I have been having

the possibility of having a golf handicap was to be offered up in more flexible terms and greater access given to that to golfers than existed before. Because prior to that time, Handicaps are only really accessible if you were the if you were a member.

At a golf club, if you're a paying member. However, now, to my mind, one of the great things that has evolved with this is you do not necessarily need to be a fully fledged member of a golf club to have a handicap. you can have a handicap without necessarily being

Affiliated to a club. It's like a flexi thing where you pay a certain amount per month, it's tied to the governing body, and you can submit scores, all of which count towards you being given an official handicap. And by extension of all of this, we now have this situation where,

You don't just get a handicap through playing competition play, you also get it through general play or social play, casual play effectively, whereby you can go out in the course with your friends, your family, you can play nine holes or eighteen holes. There's way more flexibility.

And actually, what I have found in speaking to some golfers who have been around the game for quite a long time is some of them actually go as far as taking a fairly dim view of this. And actually they they lessen the ⁓ the credibility or the achievement of somebody if the handicap that they have acquired has been acquired exclusively or solely through scores that have been generated in these more social and casual settings. And also.

Going a step further than that, those same golfers say that they will not allow themselves that flexibility. They still subscribe to a golf world view that says, I will only recognize my achievements in golf and my handicap achievements specifically, if those scores have been acquired and generated through competition play. I want to say this. I understand that and I respect that, and I will always say.

And when I coach golfers like yourselves, I will never ever force a worldview or or my own views or perspectives upon you because you are you, you have your own values, you have your own purpose and perspective around playing golf. I want you to get out of golf what you want to get out of it and enjoy it while you're doing it. But where I will always

encourage alternative thinking, more open-mindedness with this is to say, why is it that you golfers are making this needlessly difficult for yourself? When the institution of golf allows for this to happen now, it's it's legit. So you can be wholly morally intact on your principles, your morals and your values.

by playing golf in this way. And then at the same time you can possibly even enjoy it more. But it really is amazing. we just put these restrictions around ourselves as golfers.

And so, if there were one thing I would like you to take away from watching or listening to this section of this episode, it is for you to get comfortable with what your version of golf looks like, how you enjoy playing it, and if you're motivated by performance and by handicaps, then

Give yourself some leeway. You do not need to play a version of golf which is deemed acceptable, valuable, credible by other people. You get to play golf in your own way.

Golf has a strange habit.

We've often asked somebody what their handicap is before we've even bothered to get to know them as a person. In fact I sometimes joke that golf has its own version of the UFC. Not the UFC, the MMC. That is the member measuring contest.

And we've all seen it before. No sooner have you exchanged names and handshakes

And then somebody leans in and goes, What's your handicap?

And look, in fairness, more often than not, this is really harmless or quite innocently asked. Golfers are just making conversation at the end of the day. But every now and then

The question isn't being used to understand you, it's actually being used to measure you.

And I want to give you one very real, lived example of this that I myself was on the receiving end of a couple of years ago. having developed this desire.

To carve out a career for myself in golf, I got myself appointed voluntarily as a volunteer, not a paid role, to the board of directors at one of my local golf clubs, where I was already a member, to be clear, but there was a they were embracing this new progressive, inclusive blueprint on club governance that the local governing body, Wales Golf, had.

rolled out across the country and this golf club were embracing it and they wanted to bring on various ⁓ people of different professional backgrounds to bring people on with a diverse skill set and a more progressive outlook to do away with a lot of the very staid and unprogressive, let's say ways of thinking and ways of operating that are altogether very common unfortunately in member run golf clubs.

And I will always remember very soon after being appointed to the board, ⁓ and the role I occupied at the time was I was the course director. So I had the head greenkeeper reporting into me. And I wanted to do this kind of like man-of-the-people style thing,

We're gonna get some tree saplings and I'm gonna go out there into the forest next to the to the thirteenth fairway where it's a bit sparse. We've had to cut down a few dead trees and we're gonna plant some tree saplings. So I took my wife along, I took my in-laws and we we got our spades and we were doing our thing. And these couple of golfers approached us, they saw us in the woods, in the forest or whatever, next to the to the the thirteenth hole at this golf club, right? And one of them comes over and he says, Who are you then?

And I pleased to meet you. I'm Chris Lynch. I'm one of the new directors here on the board. And he looked me up and down, and he said, I've never heard of you. I didn't vote for you. What's your handicap?

And I and I just I was stunned. Now I so many things then happened, right? I it I I I was kind of speechless like I am now in the moment. And I remember this like it was yesterday. I felt so seen. And then one of my first reactions was, I think I told him what my handicap was. I then instantly justified ⁓ why it was as high as it was. you know, because I don't play much competition play and you know I don't get much time to play anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But then also, like, I felt so humiliated and embarrassed in front of my family that whether that was something or everything to do with the fact that they then finally knew that I was a completely average golfer, but it really didn't sit well with me at all. I just thought, ⁓ you know, is are we honestly saying that for one to be ⁓ a board member, you have to be of a certain playing standard?

But in a broader sense, it just said to me so much about how much value and weight that a lot of golfers place on people's handicap as a measure of their of their status, of their standing as a human being, and crucially whether or not we feel that that person.

Belongs in that environment or is quote unquote good enough to be in that golf club in the first place. And

I think by and large, in my experience, when golfers ask each other what their handicaps are, or you know, if I give you an example, like if I speak to people in my in my network who are not necessarily golfers or they play casually, they maybe play a charity day once a year or a corporate thing or whatever, and you say to them, I'm a golfer or I'm a golf coach, they'll then say to you, yeah, ⁓ what's your handicap?

And and the reason why they'll ask that is because in fairness, that tends to be one of those go to known things that is a thing in golf, that somebody has a handicap.

But then what's funny is when you reverse that question on that person and ask them what theirs is, or what I've seen in say corporate environments, where my last job, when I was working with senior executives, some highly confident, alpha male, super successful people, the minute that you ask them about golf, their game of golf, and maybe what their handicap is, you just watch them wilt before your eyes.

And that is what handicaps do to people. That's what golf can do to people. That is what performance culture in golf does to people. Which, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole reason really why I have created Golf Yourself Happy and why I'm stood here now talking to you and trying to help you feel better about yourselves and to tell you that you can enjoy this game.

without being obsessed about score, about performance, about handicap. There is another way. And one of the other ways that you can start to build this mindset is by coming into the Happy Hackers Club. Again, I'm going to give it a push. The link is in the show notes. Please join us. I want you to see for yourself how others talk. And even within a short period of time, after only two months of of being live,

We're already starting to see a few transformation stories of you know, people developing new techniques and tools, mindset approaches, pre-shot routines, things that they didn't know how to do before, or just a different view of golf, whereby they're enjoying it more. And would you know it, they're playing better, their scores are lower.

But other than the Happy Hackers Club and before we finish up today, I want to ask you to please subscribe on your preferred podcast platform so that you do not miss out on any future episodes and that you're notified as soon as they drop.

But until the next time, please folks, always remember to put your happiness first and your handicap later.