Ep. 299 - It's YOUR Journey PLUS Avoid Distraction

[00:00:04.930] - Tony Roig Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement with a focus on your mind. Hope you're having a great week. My name is Tony Roig. I'm your host of this weekly podcast. This week we're going to be covering two topics. [00:00:18.540] - Tony Roig We're going to be covering first a topic that I think bears remembering, bears hitting every once in a while on this podcast to remind ourselves about the control that we have over our own journey as pickleball players. We're going to touch on a few different subjects, different minutiae in there, detail I should say. But at the end of this presentation, the idea is about taking agency over your pickleball journey, your pickleball experience. And then after that, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about distraction, about how we can get distracted as pickleball players. And I've been thinking a lot about it, and I think there's a cause for why we get distracted perhaps more than in other sports in our improvement journey. [00:01:05.070] - Tony Roig So we're going to cover both of those in this week's podcast. Before we get into the podcast, we do have a few spots left at our camp coming up in New York City at the end of this month. It's a 2-day camp in Gotham City right across from Manhattan. It's going to be an awesome experience. We have a— it's a small facility with 4 courts. [00:01:22.450] - Tony Roig We have all 4 courts reserved.. We have a few spots left if you want to check that out. If you've been thinking about a camp, don't let this opportunity slide by because New York camps with the— what I would submit to you is the best camp in the business does not happen that frequently. So check that out. All right, let's dive into our first subject for this week's podcast, which is this idea of your pickleball journey and your agency and how you manage your own journey. [00:01:51.220] - Tony Roig And I'm going to say some things during this part of the podcast which are, uh, which are going to seem like does, like, duh, I, I know that, right? Why are you telling me something that's so obvious? I think sometimes in life what happens is those ideas that in hindsight, or when I say them, seem so crystal clear, get a little obscured, right? Get a little out of focus. Uh, perhaps they get a little worn down over time, right? [00:02:15.520] - Tony Roig We get, you know, we, we're going, we're not bad, we're in a bad pickleball run, we're having some bad experiences on the court, you know, somebody says something to us you know, 2 days ago that we didn't like on the whatever, something like that, right? We're not invited to a group, things like that. That can cause us to then start to doubt our pickleball journey, right? And to undermine our pickleball journey. And the big— we're going to go over some detail in this, but in the big picture idea here is that it is at the end of the day, it's your journey, it's your experience, it's your relationship with pickleball. [00:02:48.720] - Tony Roig And remembering that, right, being reminded of that, which is what I'm going to hopefully try to— hopefully going to do in this podcast episode— will help you anchor down better, right? Will help you, you know, understand that you have much more control over your management of your journey, but also how you interact with certain experiences that you don't necessarily have control over the interaction itself, but you do have— or the event, I should say, or the circumstance— but you do have control over how you choose to experience or interact with those, those activities, right? Those circumstances that are outside of our control sometimes. So I'm going to start with some very obvious statements here. Bear with me. [00:03:28.220] - Tony Roig We're going to work through this because I think it's really powerful stuff by the end so that you can, you know, again, anchor down in your relationship with pickleball and in your ability to control that. So we're going to start from this premise here. Even though I've been involved in this game for over 10 years, I host this weekly podcast. I have a YouTube channel. I do coaching. [00:03:50.430] - Tony Roig I am not the owner of pickleball and not the owner of your pickleball experience. The other players who are on your court when you're playing do not own pickleball and do not own your pickleball experience. The other players at your facilities do not own pickleball and do not own your pickleball experience. There's only one person who owns your pickleball and your pickleball experience., and that person is you. Super important for you to really get your arms around that. [00:04:22.540] - Tony Roig Your pickleball journey is yours and yours alone. Now, there are certain things that we cannot control in pickleball, right? I cannot control an invitation to a group who you want to play with that for whatever reason you can't get an invitation to. May happen. I can't control players on your courts who behave in a way that is not, you know, supportive, positive, uh, you know, that make you feel bad. [00:04:49.560] - Tony Roig All those, I can't support, I cannot, uh, control that, right? Uh, but there's a lot that we can control relative to those things as well as to how we react to those things. So let's go ahead and work through some of those. So in terms of group, a group, let's say there's a group that you want to play with that just for whatever reason, whether it's a number on a piece of paper, you know, on a card, that's your number, doesn't match their number, so you can't play on those courts in the facility. Or it's just, you know, personal things, stuff like that. [00:05:17.550] - Tony Roig Nothing we can do about that directly. Maybe you can— we can continue to, to see if we can get in the group. But, um, I'll tell you guys a story one day. Not today, I don't think. We got too much stuff to cover. [00:05:27.170] - Tony Roig I'll tell you guys a story one day about how my friend Tom and I, uh, weaseled our way into a group by, by creating circumstances that allowed us to, to be in front of that group in a way that we were then invited to play with that group. But we'll save that one for another day. But what you can control, you can control your, your interactions. You can request to, to be, to join the group if you believe that it's a group that, that you want to play in and that's reasonable for you to play in. Um, but you can also create your own group, right? [00:05:53.110] - Tony Roig Nothing's stopping you from creating your own, finding your own tribe. I was reminded of that the other day speaking with a friend of mine here locally who we've known each other for a long time in this, in the world of pickleball. And she was going through that for a little bit where like, just couldn't get invited to certain groups. And so conversation was, well, you know, create your own tribe. And she's done that now and she's so happy that she has her own tribe. [00:06:12.510] - Tony Roig So you can create your own tribe, right? You can, you can, if you have players in your community that make you feel negative, right? That make you feel less than, don't play with them. Okay? You don't have to step out on the court with someone who's gonna make you feel bad about your day on the pickleball court. [00:06:28.880] - Tony Roig We cover that more in depth in another episode, No Thank You. Also wrote a blog about it. But basically, you can excuse yourself from playing with someone who doesn't make you feel positive about the game. So you have control over that. You also have control over how you want to play. [00:06:45.680] - Tony Roig Other players cannot tell you how to play pickleball. You know, they may disagree with your strategy, they may disagree with the way you're playing. I played the other day in a group. There was— there were, uh, they said they were intermediate, so intermediate, let's say. Um, and there was 3 players on the court and I was filming, so I offered to play one game with them, so they had a fourth. [00:07:03.140] - Tony Roig And, um, one of the players didn't want to— didn't feel comfortable volleying, right? So you could tell she wasn't comfortable hitting volleys, and that's fine. So I told her, I gave her permission. I was like, hey, let's just— we'll play back here. We'll play— I'll play back here with you, and we'll play in the middle and the back. [00:07:16.920] - Tony Roig And we just put enough balls in play, we ended up winning the game. And I'm not telling you that because that justifies what we did, because we should have been able to do it win or loss. But I know that winning is a powerful signifier, right? So I use it here because, you know, we were able to win the game playing— actually, I think it gave us a better chance to win by playing back as opposed to playing up there because again, I'm playing with a player who's not comfortable volleying. She was more comfortable hitting groundstrokes. [00:07:37.760] - Tony Roig So fine, we'll play that way. So you can choose how you want to play pickleball as a player. You can also choose how you want to play based on who your partner is, like I did there, right? I had a choice to either play up at the line and be stubborn and say, no, this is how you got to play, and then tell her you got to come here and, you know, create adversity. Or I could choose to look at her, see that she's not comfortable volleying the ball, and say, you know what, let's let's just play back here and have more fun. [00:08:00.250] - Tony Roig And it also happened to give us the best chance to win. So that was my choice on how I wanted to play. You have a choice of how you want to play. You also have a lot of choice about how you choose to experience the events that happen on the court. And what I mean by that is everything that happens, you can choose how you want to experience your wins, right? [00:08:18.590] - Tony Roig Those are easy because everybody likes wins. But what about how you experience your losses? You realize you have control over that too, right? And we address that more in depth last week's podcast. We want to check that out about the I care beam. [00:08:29.880] - Tony Roig You choose how much, how bright do you want that beam to be on the loss side. Actually, I got an email from a good friend and mentor, Coach Peter Scales, who wrote the book Inner— no, it was called Mental Emotional Training for Tennis, Compete, Learn, Honor. Compete, Learn, Honor is the trilogy that he developed and is super powerful. And he's been one of my mentors in this journey of mine. So he reached out and he had this same way of thinking about it, the I care beam. [00:08:59.780] - Tony Roig He calls it like the Goldilocks zone, right? You can choose how much do you want to, how much focus do you want to give to things like losses and even wins, right? That's your choice, how you want to experience that. You know, you also have control over how you choose to behave on the pickleball court. You know, are you a welcoming player? [00:09:18.540] - Tony Roig We talked earlier about, you know, groups that don't, that may not invite you to play. You know, is that you? Maybe something to think about, right? Are you, are you doing that to others, right? Or are you welcoming them to play? [00:09:32.030] - Tony Roig And it doesn't mean you have to play all the games all the times with all the players, but are you a welcoming player? You know, like for instance, I went over and I played on an intermediate court the other day, even though I don't have to, right? It's not required of me. But, you know, there were 3 players. I thought it was a good thing to do. [00:09:46.850] - Tony Roig So I went over there and introduced myself and offered to play with them. And I played at a level that was— we all had a good time on the court. Is that something that you're doing right? And you have a choice. Are you supportive of others? [00:09:56.790] - Tony Roig Right. Not just in the way that I described, but also, you know, when you're partnered with somebody and let's say the player is having difficulty with some shots, are you a supportive player, a supportive partner, or are you a negative partner to that other person? Right. The other human being who's trying to do the best they can out there. And you do have control over how you receive and how you interpret information. [00:10:18.690] - Tony Roig That's entirely up to you. You know, sometimes, you know, you'll have a player who maybe they're acting in a way that is not, not doesn't make you happy, right? In that moment. Now you can go as far as saying no, thank you. That's, that's an okay option for you. [00:10:32.690] - Tony Roig That's a very extreme option. And I would recommend saving those for like, you know, the really negative actors. But you could also have a situation where you, where you just have a normal person you play with and maybe they're just having a bad day, right? You can choose to interpret that information in a way that is not as harmful to you. For instance, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. [00:10:52.800] - Tony Roig Maybe they're just having a bad morning. Maybe they had a phone call that was troubling them last night. Maybe they didn't sleep well. I don't know. So there's a number of reasons why other players may behave certain ways, right? [00:11:03.480] - Tony Roig And so you have a choice on how you interpret that information. And you have entire control over how you manage and experience your pickleball journey. And the key is to remember how much power you actually have, how much agency, authority you actually have. And I really like the, uh, I really like the idea of Sondra. We've talked about it in prior episodes. [00:11:26.080] - Tony Roig You're welcome to check those out. It's also— we talk about it in the Pickleball Therapy book to some, uh, in some depth. But the idea basically is that every human being is, you know, has their own, uh, path to walk, right? And this is a bigger picture than a bigger picture concept than just pickleball, but it applies to pickleball too. We all have our journeys, we all have our experiences, we all have our, again, our paths to walk through life, and we're all entitled to those paths. [00:11:49.280] - Tony Roig That's the Sondra idea. And so Sondra applies externally, meaning when you look at another human being, you know, consider that they have their own path and be respectful of their path, right? Be respectful of their right to walk their path, but also apply it internally. What that means is you have the right to saunter, right? You have a right to your path. [00:12:08.670] - Tony Roig You have a right to decide whether you want to stay back at the baseline or go up to the non-volley zone line, or whether you want to go to the left or go to the right, or you want to drive, or you want to dink, or you want to lob, or you want to, you know, uh, reset. Whatever it is you want to do, right? You have, you have rights just like your partner has rights. Your opponents all have rights. Everybody has rights here, including you. [00:12:26.630] - Tony Roig And I think it's important not to, uh, not to, not to lose sight of that. And I'm gonna repeat what I said at the beginning about, you know, some of this may seem obvious, right? Well, I'm, I'm telling you basically, you know, what's yours is yours, right? So your journey is your journey. Seems circular, right? [00:12:41.450] - Tony Roig But as I mentioned, we can lose contact with that idea, right? It can become obscured for us sometimes, particularly as time elapses and things happen in life. Um, and you know, outside events, internal doubts, and just basic human insecurity can all conspire, right? To make us forget the truism that our journey is our journey. And that's why this type of lesson, this type of conversation is important to remind us, all of us, right? [00:13:06.810] - Tony Roig The truth that your pickleball journey is your pickleball journey. It is yours to have. It is yours to experience, and it is yours to enjoy. All right. So that's the first part of this podcast. [00:13:19.790] - Tony Roig Come back in a second for the second part of the podcast where we're going to discuss this idea of distraction and where it may come from. Welcome back to part 2 of the podcast. In this part, what I want to talk about is an area that I think affects a lot of pickleball players, which is I think pickleball players are particularly susceptible to being distracted. And what I'm talking about here more specifically are pickleball players who are looking for improvement, right? Pickleball players who are earnest and want to improve as players get distracted often, right? [00:13:49.850] - Tony Roig They go down these side paths, side quests, just all over the place. Trying to find this magic bullet. So I was asking myself, why does it seem that pickleball is so ripe for that type of misdirection? And there's a couple of things that I was thinking about that I think help frame this out for us. And I think it's important for us to be aware of them because the more aware we are of these types of tendencies that are inherent in our sport, the more vigilant we can be about our own journeys to avoid these distracting side roads, if in fact you want to improve. [00:14:29.590] - Tony Roig So a couple of— there's 3 reasons why I think that there's— we're particularly susceptible to magic bullets, right? These like, you know, magic salves that I can take, snake oil, if you will. One is that much pickleball is self-taught, right? We're still a young sport. And so a lot of pickleball is, you know, your— the friends at the court tell you things, you watch some YouTube videos, things like that. [00:14:49.730] - Tony Roig And so you gain your information from these sources. Other sports are already much more established. You know, you think about like, you know, think of like a, let's use baseball for example, right? If you watch like a baseball practice, they go through certain routines, certain, a certain formula, if you will, right, of progressions and things that they do. Probably the same thing that the coach did when they were younger and then their coach did when they were younger. [00:15:14.250] - Tony Roig It's matured, right? These things have matured over time. And so, you know, you'll see them practicing the same stuff, you know, basically like, you know, hit, you know, infield hits to the players to get them out, you know, fly balls, moving around, just throwing back and forth, you know, just the quote unquote basics, just a lot of the basics, right? Same thing you think about basketball, right? I mean, basketball is practice a 12-foot jumper, practice a 15-foot jumper, practice a layup, practice some dribbling. [00:15:40.910] - Tony Roig Yeah, you don't hear like a basketball player, you know, saying, hey, you know what I need? I need a half-court, you know, skyhook jumper or a baseball player saying, you know what I need to do? I need to learn how to throw between my legs, you know, to the home plate or something like that. I mean, it's just they don't really focus on that kind of stuff. They focus on the basics and on getting better on the basics. [00:16:00.590] - Tony Roig Same thing, frankly, from tennis. You know, I came from a tennis background and I remember when I was younger, we practiced. I spent hours practicing just the ball toss for my serve, hours just with a funnel, just throwing it up into a funnel. I couldn't hit the funnel. But I need to go inside the funnel without clanking the funnel, right? [00:16:15.560] - Tony Roig It was, I mean, that level of, of, of, of a detail for such a small thing, right? A ball toss. Because that's how important it is to the serve. You know, I wasn't spending time like learning how to hit, you know, a reverse spin serve to the left or something like that. It just never, never even occurred to anybody that that was something that we needed. [00:16:34.600] - Tony Roig So I think a lot of it's because pickleball is, you know, we're still young and a lot of it's self-taught. I think for a lot of us too, like, you know, pickleball is a new adventure, you know, late in life adventure. This has to do more like with paddles because I think, you know, like that's another thing that I find fascinating is, you know, I played tennis with the same racket for I don't know how many years, you know. So my brother still plays with an older model racket. I mean, a lot of players just, they find a racket they like, they just keep playing with it. [00:16:59.620] - Tony Roig They don't even experiment that much with strings. I mean, in tennis you can get involved, like strings are pretty, I got into it a little bit 'cause I bought a stringing machine at one point., one of those weight stringing machines. Anyway, I started doing my own strings. I researched it. It was fascinating for me, and I was testing some things. [00:17:14.150] - Tony Roig But, but we don't do that all the time. It's not like in pickleball where, like, you know, the latest paddle comes out and then it's like all of a sudden everybody thinks that the paddle is going to solve my game. Paddle's not going to solve your game once you're in a certain type of paddles. Uh, and then the other thing is it's circular, right? But we are also— we're constantly tempted with this magic bullet, right? [00:17:30.470] - Tony Roig With the— and I think because we're already kind of— we're already kind of like that baseline susceptible to it. Then you start, you see the YouTube, you know, content creators lean into like, you know, you need this one shot, you need these 3 strategies, this one shot beats everybody, things like that. I did spend a little bit of time earlier looking at some tennis, some tennis thumbnails just to get an idea how do, how do tennis content creators attract views. And there were a few that had like, you know, these 4 strat— you need these 4 strategies, stuff like that, right? So kind of similar to pickleball a little bit, but a lot more of the thumbnails that came up in tennis were things like, you need these basics, you need these fundamentals, you need, you know, and it wasn't for beginners. [00:18:14.200] - Tony Roig It was just these are like the things you need. So you could see how in tennis the language has matured more because fundamentals is— everybody needs it. You need it. I need it. All pickleball players, if you want to get better, fundamentals is the key. [00:18:26.570] - Tony Roig But you can't use the term fundamentals in a, in a video. You put fundamentals in a video, everybody thinks you're talking, you know, to like the brand new beginner, which— so there's like a disconnect there in the language. Pickleball thumbnails, a lot more, um, snake oily, a lot more. And I don't mean that as criticism of content creators, they're doing what they got to do. Algorithm is what it is. [00:18:45.250] - Tony Roig The sport is where it's at. So I'm telling you this because I want you to be more, uh, self-aware perhaps of this seeking a magic bullet, understand that there is no magic bullet, not a paddle, it's not a strategy, it's not a shot. Better Pickleball is all about can you do the quote unquote basics? Can you do the quote unquote fundamentals better than you did yesterday, better and better tomorrow than you did today, and so on? That is how you become a really good pickleball player. [00:19:12.990] - Tony Roig The same way that the good basketball player is the one that can shoot the 15-foot jumper, the good baseball player is the one who can reliably throw the ball where they need to throw it again and again and again. Pickleball, no different. You know, repeated execution, repeated, consistent, reliable execution of shots, understanding some of the basic strategies and how they work, and just being able to implement them is how you succeed as a pickleball player. So if you want to improve, be mindful of the magic bullet. Be, be not— be aware of it. [00:19:43.640] - Tony Roig You know, have like a sensor that whenever you get promised, hey, this one, just this paddle, this paddle does it, you got it, this No, this one shot, just no, not going to happen. You know, get a paddle that's comfortable for you. Get a paddle that within a range of paddles, that's a reasonable range of paddles. You're going to be fine. Focus on the fundamentals and that's how you improve. [00:20:05.920] - Tony Roig So I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, consider rating and reviewing it. If you haven't read our book yet, Pickleball Therapy, the book, pick up a copy. Barnes Noble, Walmart, Amazon, wherever you like picking up your books. It's also in the Kindle. [00:20:18.180] - Tony Roig Unlimited space. So if you have that, that plan on Amazon, it's included. You can just open it up. Pickleball Therapy, the book. And as always, consider sharing the book and/or this podcast episode with your friends, because if you enjoy the podcast or the book, they probably will too. [00:20:34.900] - Tony Roig I hope you have a great week and I'll see you on the next episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.