Ep. 298 - Focus Your "I Care" Beam

[00:00:00.820] - Tony Roig Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. My name is Tony Roig, the host of this weekly podcast. It's a pleasure to be with you. This week we're going to be talking about the idea that pickleball is this activity that we love, brings us all this joy, all this happiness, all this excitement., but also brings us all this angst sometimes, this despair, sadness, interferes with our happiness. And so I've been really thinking about that over the last few days. [00:00:40.870] - Tony Roig And I have a way of presenting it to you that I think will help you navigate it and a concept that'll help you focus on the reasons why you love pickleball and perhaps diminish some of the negativity that can come along with it. And then I have a riff for you this week. One of our students wrote in. I think you're really going to enjoy Jess and Iris's story about a match that they played. It's the kind of story that it's encouraging to all of us. [00:01:08.520] - Tony Roig It's one of those moments that we celebrate as pickleball players. Everybody listening has had a story. It may not be exactly the same as Jesse and Iris's, but it's going to remind you of a time and times probably where you had these kind of battles and comebacks. And sometimes we're on the good side of it, sometimes we're on the other side of it, which goes to the overall conversation we're having about the joy and potentially despair that pickleball can bring to us. As we dive into the podcast, if you haven't picked one up yet, Pickleball Therapy, the book, still available on Amazon, Barnes Noble, and Walmart. [00:01:48.270] - Tony Roig So you can go to any of those sites. If you've read the book and enjoyed the book, the best thing you can do— you can rate and review, it would be great— but the best thing you can do for the book and for your friends to whom you share it with is to recommend it to a friend of yours. The book is fairly reasonable. Every once in a while Amazon, you know, does a sale with it and stuff like that, but it's like less than $30, no matter what. And so you have a friend of yours who's maybe, I don't know, struggling a little bit with the sport, struggling with their place in the sport and things like that, you know, for $30, you can make their life much better. [00:02:23.340] - Tony Roig So consider that and recommend it to them. That's the word of mouth is really the most powerful way to, to help others get to know the book. So, all right, let's dive into this idea, right? So let's, let's talk about two different scenarios. One scenario is, You had a really hard-fought game and you won it 12-10. [00:02:40.550] - Tony Roig Feels great. You have a really hard-fought game, you lose it 10-12. You feel terrible or you feel sad or you feel bad about it, right? They're both virtually the same thing. You've struggled hard in both games. [00:02:54.810] - Tony Roig You battled in both games. So did your opponents, right? The only difference is it's a 2-point swing between one game and the other game. How come one game you know, you feel elated, and the other game you feel bad, right? Or feel let down, or, you know, some negative emotion. [00:03:11.190] - Tony Roig The reason is it's because of how you are choosing to weigh that, how you're choosing to interpret the information that's available to you about those two games. But what I'm going to suggest to you is that those two games are actually the same. They're the same game. They're two sides of the same coin. And it's the same way that, like, you know, you have this sport called pickleball that brings you all this happiness, all this joy. [00:03:33.130] - Tony Roig But it also can bring you some negative feelings, right? That's just— it's actually the same thing happening. The excitement and the despair, the happiness and the sadness, all those things, they're identical. They're just two sides of the same coin. Now, what's cool is that if you understand that the importance of, of the scores, the 12-10, the 10-12, the importance of the, of the game and all of that, it's all created by You, you're the one who imbues pickleball with importance. [00:04:05.510] - Tony Roig You, you imbue the scores with importance. If you think about it, you know, we're really, we're just running around a pickleball court, right? A small court with a wiffle ball and a paddle. We're knocking it around to each other, right? I'm trying to win the rally, you're trying to win the rally. [00:04:17.930] - Tony Roig One of us is going to win the rally, the other one by extension will lose a rally. It really, that doesn't change anybody's lives unless you're a professional player, right? It does not change your life whether you won 12-10 or lost 10-12, it's not going to change anything, right? The only reason it matters is because you make it matter, right? You decide that this matters, and that's fine, right? [00:04:41.220] - Tony Roig I'm not trying to make pickleball not important to you, but what you can do is by using this idea that it matters because you make it matter, you now get to decide what to focus that it matters on. And when I came up with this idea of basically, this, I call it the I care beam, right? Pickleball matters because you care, right? You care about it. So right now you're flashing this I care about it light beam, if you will, right? [00:05:11.970] - Tony Roig The best analogy metaphor I've been able to come up with is a light beam. I think it works. And as we go through it, I think it'll make sense. If you come up with something better than a light beam, please let me know and I'll share that one. For right now, it's a light beam. [00:05:22.650] - Tony Roig So the idea is that you shine this I care beam on this sport called pickleball. Now, because the beam is yours, you control it. And because you get to decide what to shine it on, what to focus it on, what I want you to do is I want you to start thinking about maybe let's reduce the width of the beam. Let's focus our beam, right? Instead of just letting it hit all of pickleball, right? [00:05:48.230] - Tony Roig The same. Wins, losses, all those types of things. Let's focus it on what really matters, what really brings us excitement about pickleball. And the way that I— the way that I— what I listed here on this list that I have here is— so let's think about some positives, right? What hooked you on the pickleball? [00:06:04.950] - Tony Roig Friends is a good one normally, right? So, I mean, I can't think of— to me, there's not very many social outlets that are better than pickleball. There may be a couple here and there, but there's really not that many that are better than pickleball for social outlets, right? Number 2, health, right? Think about the health benefits that you've gotten from pickleball. [00:06:23.330] - Tony Roig My guess is for most of you listening, you're healthier because of pickleball. Even with— if you had an arm injury, a leg injury, whatever, overall, your body is healthier because of pickleball. Number 3, your growth and your learning, right? That's another exciting part of our sport. And pickleball always has something to teach you. [00:06:42.390] - Tony Roig Number 4, Challenge, right? It's a challenge for you. It's something that makes you think, it makes you work, it makes you— it stresses you, right? It puts you under these stresses, but they're good stresses because we want to be challenged as human beings, right? So the challenge is good. [00:06:57.200] - Tony Roig And there may be something else, one or two other things that I didn't think about here that if those are the reasons that got you excited about pickleball, put those down, right? Those are the exciting parts of pickleball. We want to take our I care beam and shine it on those parts. What we also want to do is we want to take our iCarabin and not shine it. We want to put it away from the potentially negatives, right? [00:07:19.000] - Tony Roig Missing a serve, popping a ball up, right? Those are negatives that, that, you know, if we give it the same weight as the other ones, that's because we're choosing to imbue them with, with, with importance. If you think about it, like, you know, popping the ball up, so what? So what? The pros do it. [00:07:36.690] - Tony Roig I do it. You do it. Everybody does. It's part of the game. But what do we do? [00:07:40.770] - Tony Roig We choose to imbue a pop-up with excessive value, right? And not only do we shine the I care beam on that, we make it like laser focus on the pop-up and go like, oh my God, I care so much about the pop-up that it's going to make me feel terrible now, right? Um, you know, hitting the quote unquote dumb shot, right? Particularly when you're up or something like that, you, you hit a shot that you'd wish you had hit differently. Don't put the eye care beam on that, right? [00:08:03.750] - Tony Roig You can choose. That's not important to me. You know, that's not— I'm not that, that invested in that. And obviously the win-loss, as I mentioned earlier. Now, a little side note here. [00:08:13.050] - Tony Roig This is not to say you cannot notice the pop-up. You cannot notice the missed shot. You can notice it. Question is, how much of your eye care beam are you going to dedicate to that event in the manner of, oh no, I missed a shot. I can't believe I did that. [00:08:28.530] - Tony Roig How bad a player am I, right? How much focus, how much How much energy are you going to impart into that? Because it's your choice how much energy to put into that versus how much energy you're going to impart into, you know what, I got to see my friends. And I'll share with you guys a personal story. I play in a couple of different formats here in my area. [00:08:50.860] - Tony Roig There's a format that for me is more social than anything, right? One of the formats that I go to, and there's a lot of players who I don't get to see if I don't go to that format. Now the games there are kind of like at our level of play, they're difficult sometimes because you're moving around different players and we have different ways of maybe coming at the sport, different strategies, different approaches. And so it can be challenging from an execution standpoint, from a delivering your best product on the court, if you will, standpoint. But I'm not going to stop going to those events because of that. [00:09:21.950] - Tony Roig Why? Because I choose to shine my I care beam on the friends who I get to see, on the joking, on the messing around, on the lunch if we have time afterward to get together and go to lunch, those types of things. That's my I care beam. And it's I care, I care beam, beam, light beam. So I'm focusing it on that rather than on stuff that really isn't my reason for going to the courts. [00:09:46.860] - Tony Roig To, you know, like, I, you know, I lost a game. Okay, I lost a game. So what? That means my friends got to win a game. Good on that, right? [00:09:54.210] - Tony Roig So, but the cool thing is you get to focus on where you, you get to choose, I should say, you get to choose where you focus your beam and how much of, how much you, how much energy you deliver into, how much lighting you put into that. Are you laser focused on it? Laser focused on your friends? Laser focused on the growth? Laser focused on the exercise you're getting, right? [00:10:18.430] - Tony Roig Don't laser focus on pop-ups. Don't laser focus on missed shots. You know, I've heard multiple stories of folks who either don't play as often as they would play otherwise, or even consider quitting the sport over something like not being confident in their serve. Now, I'm not trying to diminish the feelings. I get it, right? [00:10:37.890] - Tony Roig I get that you can feel, you know, it can give you insecurity. It can give you, you know, you're upset, you feel embarrassed, all these things, right? Because you can't get your serve in. But to abandon or to not play a sport because you're missing a shot, again, I think is, is a misallocation of your eye care beam. Remove it from the miss serve. [00:10:59.840] - Tony Roig Still work on your serve, still understand what's happening. Just don't put that like heavy-duty laser focus magnifying glass on the sun kind of an out, uh, lighting onto your miss shot. Instead, reserve that level of energy for your the other aspects of the sport, the ones that give you joy, the ones that bring you happiness, the ones that are positive to your life, and reduce the amount of light, the amount of energy that you're bringing to the side of pickleball that is causing you angst. Because as I mentioned at the beginning, they're both— they're two sides of the same coin, right? The two things that are happening, the thing— so let's go back to 12-10, 10-12. [00:11:41.500] - Tony Roig You know, you win 12-10 or you lose 10-12, two sides of the same coin. Potentially enjoy the 12-10 more than you feel negative about the 10-12, because you can choose not to weight them the same, not to shine the light on them the same, not to give each the same amount of energy. That's your choice, because neither of those results, the 12-10 or the 10-12, amount to a hill of beans in terms of your overall like real life. It's not the same thing as like, you know, I need food. I can't just think about food differently and then it goes away. [00:12:17.240] - Tony Roig I need food to live. So not eating and just thinking about it differently ain't gonna do me any good. But something like pickleball, right, which is a voluntary activity that I engage, I choose to engage in, right, that gets all of its importance from me. And in your case gets all of its importance from you, you get to decide how you allocate that importance. So you can make the 12/10 feel great and the 10/12 just be a fact of life, no big deal. [00:12:49.470] - Tony Roig Your choice on how you interact with those pieces. And the cool part is you have control over that if you choose to use it. So, um, so think about it a little bit different. I'm going to keep, I'm going to keep coming at this topic, this two sides of the same coin. I think it's a really interesting and important aspect to our mental interaction with the sport of pickleball. [00:13:09.600] - Tony Roig And I think it's one of these areas that merits much more discussion because of the potentially negative, harmful impacts of having too much— of paying too much attention to the negative side of something that is something that we are creating ourselves in our own mind and we have more control over. So I think it's an area that I'm going to continue to explore, but hopefully this will help you get down that path some, understand, starting to understand that you are the one who are in control of how important both the good and the, and the could be bad or the not so good aspects of the sport are. So consider, consider that as part of your thinking. All right, let me pull up the story here. So I'm going to read a little bit from Jess and Iris's email they sent us. [00:13:59.990] - Tony Roig We asked for permission to use it. They said it was perfectly fine. And then I'll paraphrase a couple of things in here to summarize some of it, but I'm going to read it. It's a long email, but I think you're really going to like the story. So, so this is again from Jess and Iris. [00:14:11.350] - Tony Roig They were students. They've been— they're students of ours. They've been studying with us for about 3 years. They've done both the Pickleball System and our camp. So, and Jess and Iris, it's, you know, it's, it's a pleasure for us to be able to train students like Jess and Iris. [00:14:25.330] - Tony Roig And, um, and hear their, their story, right? And how, how we've impacted each other, right? Student and coach. So, all right, so here goes the, the message or the story. Uh, let me tell you about a rec game we played this morning against two younger, stronger women that I'm still on cloud nine about. [00:14:41.790] - Tony Roig Just have to say that these rec games are super competitive and most of us are very evenly matched. Game started and these two young ladies came out banging and on fire. Points were mostly hard-fought, but they couldn't miss, and we found ourselves down 8-0. And you ever hear that? You're down 8-0, down big in the game, right? [00:14:58.740] - Tony Roig And then, so this is me talking now. So Jess and Iris called the timeout and they talked about how they, and this is their, their, their words, they quote, we're going to turn this around TPS style. Remember I mentioned the pickleball system that they've been a part of? TPS style. I love that. [00:15:15.740] - Tony Roig Their idea was to stay in the game and minimize mistakes. The strategy was to let some balls go long and slow things down with more drops and dinks. And their focus was to focus on get past 4, one of the metrics that we use inside our coaching. So the focus was to keep the rally going for the first 4 shots. So now I'm going to go back to their email to us and read that to you to close out the match. [00:15:38.740] - Tony Roig So they banged the first day, their opponents obviously, they banged the first shot after the timeout and Iris let it fly out. I started dinking to their backhands, which forced a couple of pop-ups that we could quickly put away. Before you knew it, the score was 8-8. Then they went up 10-8. We fought off the first game point, and then we actually went ahead 11-10, but they fought off our first game point. [00:16:02.310] - Tony Roig It then went back and forth with them getting another game point that we fought off and us getting another game point that they fought off until they were up 13-12. Opponent to my right hit a beautiful aggressive dink to my left that they were sure was a winner to end the game. I am a righty with a decent backhand, but occasionally I switch hands. This part I really like because it talks about slowing down. I anticipated the wide dink, so I went after it, and I'm telling you, my mind went still. [00:16:27.600] - Tony Roig I waited until the last second, looked at my target inside of the line, reached out my left hand, and hit that ball with a perfect follow-through, hitting the prettiest ATP— which is around the post if you know what that means— prettiest ATP that even Ben Johns would be proud of. My opponents looked at each other thinking, did that just happen? We got the serve back and Iris hit one of her patented left— I'm sorry. We got the serve back and Iris hit one of her patented lefty smashes down the right sideline for a clear winner to tie the score at 13-13. And we knew we had them. [00:16:58.570] - Tony Roig Won the next 2 points for a hard-fought come-from-behind win. The score obviously was 15-13, which is a crazy score in a game to 11. Those are my words. Back to their words. It was so much fun, an amazing high. [00:17:10.030] - Tony Roig I know it's crazy to feel this way, but thank you again. Iris and I decided to barbecue with a bottle of wine, and we still can't stop talking about that game and how much we love this wonderful game. We don't know how much longer we can compete against the young'uns, so we continue to enjoy it for as long as we can. And then a big smiley face. So Jess and Iris, thanks for sharing that story. [00:17:28.960] - Tony Roig So it's a great story, right? It's a great come-from-behind battle, sticking to the plan, focusing on the get past 4, having clarity, and sticking with the— just continuing to fight and fight and fight and fight and fight. And sometimes like this, great things happen, right? You have this beautiful back and forth between the two teams battling. You know, I take the lead, you take the lead. [00:17:51.540] - Tony Roig I take the lead, you take the lead. And then finally, Jess and Iris are able to break through. But the other thing I want to point out about this is like, it's awesome for Jess and Iris to have this, you know, feel like on cloud nine, as they said about this match. This game, right? It's great. [00:18:07.870] - Tony Roig That's their choice to engage with that that way. But I'm going to suggest to you that even had they lost this game 13 to 15 at the end, they should still feel very, very good about their battle, about coming back from 0-8, about tying it up, about going back and forth, right? Yes, I get it. It's better to be 15-13 than 13-15. But make it your choice, not because the score actually means something, because it doesn't. [00:18:33.850] - Tony Roig At the end of the day, as we talked about earlier, what matters is how you decide to engage with that information because it's in your control. So anyway, so just stuff to keep working on, stuff to keep thinking about and growing as players and most importantly, as human beings. I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Back next week with another regular podcast, regular episode, I should say, of Pickleball Therapy. As always, if you have a minute to rate and review it, appreciate you doing that. [00:19:02.930] - Tony Roig But more importantly, consider sharing the podcast with your friends, particularly if you have a friend of yours who's feeling a little bit too down about, about the game. I have a— one of our team members shared with me a story about a friend of theirs who's, you know, kind of struggling right now. And so our team member shared some of the information with that player, and it's helped that player. So consider sharing the podcast or a copy of the book with your friends. Because if you enjoy the podcast, if the podcast resonates with you and helps you, it probably will resonate, help, and they probably will enjoy it as well. [00:19:37.000] - Tony Roig So have a great week, and I will see you next time on the next episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.