The Truth About Expectations
Do they help or hurt your game?
’Twas the night before golf, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
You know that magical feeling. It’s Christmas Eve for grown men. You have a tee time tomorrow morning and you can’t sleep!
Maybe you’ve been playing really well lately. The driver is finally locked in. The putter is behaving. The short game is sharp. This could finally be the round where it all comes together!
You’re lying in bed, running the mental math:
“If I can par #7 and #14, and maybe sneak a birdie on #9, that sets me up to play safe down the stretch…”
You can already see the final number on the scorecard.
Then you double the first hole and proceed to shoot the exact same score you always shoot…
After the round, your buddies offer their expert analysis: You cared too much. You went in with expectations. You tensed up because you were trying to force a score.
And so, with good faith and sincerity, they give you the classic advice: You just need to LOWER your expectations.
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You Can’t Remove Expectations
Expectations are an odd thing in golf. You can’t really play without them. Every shot comes with a mental picture of what should happen — where the ball should start, how it should curve, where it should finish.
Every hole comes with a number of strokes it should take to make par. Every course carries a target score based on its difficulty. There is even a target time to complete all 18 holes. So expectations are kind of baked in. They are all around you. They’re unavoidable.
And according to the conventional wisdom: they are also quietly ruining your game.
The argument makes sense. You get tense over a shot you need to hit well. The very act of wanting the outcome seems to get in the way of producing it. Every golfer has felt this.
But here is where it gets interesting.
While it’s true that expectations can sometimes backfire, plenty of psychological research shows that high expectations can actually supercharge performance.
You've all heard the idea that athletes who expect to perform well actually do perform better — not because believing makes it so, but because confidence allows the automated skill to run without interference.
There is plenty of research that point in the same direction: golfers with higher pre-shot self-belief make more putts, not fewer.
The more you believe in your ability to execute, the more likely you tend to execute.
So which is it? Are expectations hindering your game, or are expectations holding it together?
The answer is both.
Let’s break it down.
