Kris Lynch on Golf Yourself Healthy, Loss, Purpose, and Embracing the Rough
5/19/202658 min
In this episode, Tommy sits down with Kris Lynch, founder of Golf Yourself Healthy and host of the Golf Yourself Happy podcast, for one of the most personal conversations Links for Life has hosted. Kris shares the story of his son Innes, who was born still in February 2023, and how that loss became the inspiration behind a platform helping golfers use the game as a path to mental and emotional health. This is a tender, honest episode about grief, golf as therapy, and the choice to embrace the rough instead of running from it.
What You'll Hear in This Episode:
- Kris's journey from Scotland to London to Wales and his complicated early relationship with golf
- Why Kris took redundancy from an 11-year banking career to go full-time on his coaching platform
- The story of his son Innes and the surge of inspiration that founded Golf Yourself Healthy
- The Scottish Gaelic meaning of Innes and the symbolism behind the Golf Yourself Healthy logo
- The tagline "embrace the rough and cherish the fairway" and what it really means
- A PGA study on golf elitism that showed half of UK golfers don't identify as golfers
- The HAPPY framework, habits, acceptance, presence, purpose, and your call to action
- Tommy and Kris on the good hard story and why we often climb someone else's ladder
Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro & Kris' Story
(24:08) Embrace the rough, cherish the fairway
(31:32) Living an integrated life
(40:52) Founding Golf Yourself Healthy
(48:47) The HAPPY framework explained
(52:42) How to connect with Kris
Resources / Next Steps:
- Visit Kris at golfyourselfhealthy.com
- Follow the Golf Yourself Happy podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube
- Email Kris directly at chris@golfyourselfhealthy.com to connect or explore coaching
- Pick up Treasures in the Dark by Katherine Wolf, referenced in the conversation
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsKris Lynch· Guest0:00
The PGA did a study three years ago in the UK and Ireland that found of the 22 or so million people who play or consume golf in some way, shape, or form, of the portion of those who play golf traditionally on a course, on like a full-length course, only half of those people actually identify, as they called it in this research report, as a golfer. And the other half that didn't, it was largely either because they didn't feel, again, quote-unquote, good enough to be there, or that they thought golf was too elitist.
Tommy Thompson· Host0:33
[upbeat music] Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Links for Life. Uh, we're going global again, uh, this week. I have as my special guest, uh, Chris Lynch, who is a fellow podcaster, a fellow golf podcaster, and so this is a really fun, uh, conversation. Uh, Chris is the founder of Golf Yourself Healthy. And if you're like me, when I've heard that title of his podcast, I was immediately intrigued to know, well, what is this podcast all about? And so we're gonna be able to talk about Golf Yourself Healthy, but probably more importantly about the story