Ep. 304 - Tap Your Flow

Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball Improvement. My name is Tony Roig. It's a pleasure to be with you on this weekly podcast, which is the only pickleball podcast dedicated to your improvement with a focus on your mind. This podcast has been going on since 2020, so we were over 300 episodes into this podcast. And during that time frame, myself and you have come a long way in our journey together, exploring the mental side of pickleball. And this next phase of pickleball that we're in, that I'm in, and that hopefully you'll come a long way, I should say, is it's going to allow us to continue to go in deeper in both our play, but also our understanding of the mental sides of the sport.. This episode, it's a regular episode coming on Friday, but it's really kind of a special episode, too, because this episode, I'm going to be talking about this concept of the state of flow and how to get into flow which is going to go hand in hand with a project that I'm doing over at Tony Work Pickleball.com. It's a totally free project. You're welcome to join us over there. There's no cost for being a part of this flow project that we're doing. But the idea is to help you tap into the state of flow that already really exists inside you. The thing that maybe you don't know how to do or that's missing is how to unlock it, right? How to tap into the flow that already exists inside you, right? That's already there. And so we're going to be going over that at Tonyworkicwell.com for the next five weeks or our emails, communications. We're going to be sending out chunk chunk, chunk. Sorry, bite-sized chunks. chunks bites didn't work. Bite-sized chunks of a flow project to allow you to slowly tap into this flow idea specific to your mechanics, right? Specific to how you interact with the ball, which is obviously a critical piece of our sport, because our sport is an activity that requires a physical manifestation of your intentions. So even if you know the best strategy, you know, oh, I'm going to hit the ball to the left, you know, halfway halfway up the court to the angle. Now you got to do it. Right. So that's the physical manifestation part, which is where you need mechanics in order to really fully express yourself as a pickle ball player. And so this idea of flow will allow you to, will allow you to, actually, the idea of tapping into your flow, I should say, is going to allow you to really unlock a lot of potential that's already again reserved inside inside of you just seem to be let out. So if you want it fully participating in that, you're going to make sure that you're on the, on our email list. That's the only way you're going to get the information. I don't know how else to get it to you right. I need to get you the written information. And then if you go inside the community, we're actually are going to have some video lessons in there, some follow alongs that we're doing. It's a really exciting, new way of kind of coming at a, maybe an age- old problem or age-old limitation that players have in our sport and in other sports as well, which is how to tap into potential that already exists inside you, how to let it out. We're going to explore that in this five-part series. So if you're not already on the email list, make sure you go over and check that out. If you're not getting our emails yet, you could also go into your email system and just make sure that we're in there as a contact. I'm pretty sure it comes from Tony at Tony pickleball.com. We'll put it in the show notes anyway, just in case, but I'm pretty sure the emails are coming from my email address, which is Tony at Tonyroy pickleball.com. So add us as a contact, and that way it won't unintentionally go into your spam folder. All right. So let me, let's talk about this idea of flow. What are we talking about here? The easiestiest way to think about it is think about like, like being in the zone. You've probably heard that phrase before. You know, Sometimes people are in players are in the zone. Athletes are in the zone. You're a lot with basketball players, football players, something like that. They just get into the zone. Everything slows down, you know, around them, and they're just able to perform at a really, really, really high level. That's what flow State is. Flow State is basically moving and acting more instinctively than having to think about every little piece of it. And think about it, you know, think about it in terms of pickleball. Think about like how a pro player moves. If you ever watch pro pickleball, it looks like they're gliding out there, right? It looks like they're just so effortless with their movement on the court, knowing, you know, how to move from the right to the left at the right time. And then, you know, they always seem to be where they need to be right at the right moment. Again, it looks like they're just kind of flowing through the, through the rally, flowing through their shots. When you look at amateur play, not so fluid, right? Not so flowy. in their play. And so what we want to do is we want to tap into this concept of flow. We want to get more flow into our games because flow will allow us to allow us to play better, right? To just be more fluid out there, be more airfulless out there. So let's talk about a little bit about, do you already have some flow in you, and then, I'll I'll tell you about the next steps that we're going to take on the process. And then in the riff, I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about Tony R Pickleball, what we're doing there. There's a couple of misconceptions out there that we've been hearing about, so I want to clear those up in the riff about what we're doing next. So let's talk first about, you know, do you have flow already? Right? Is it in you? And I'm going to suggest to you that it is. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm the way I'm going to hopefully convince you that you already have it, I should say, is, I want you to think about right now, the way you play right now, when you go back to return surf. Okay. So picture yourself there. You're at the baseline or hopefully behind the baseline, but, you know, near that zone and you're looking across the net waiting to receive surf. The serve gets hit. What do you immediately do as soon as serve gets hit? You start moving your body to a place in space, right, floating on a planet through the universe, right? You're just running a nook on this court. But you're taking your body into a place in space where you expect that that ball that's traveling toward you through space will arrive at a moment in the future in time, where you then will be able to hit that ball, hit that shot from where the ball is going to be, again, in space, in the future, and hit your return to surf. Now, you do that all the time, and you do it with minimal training. You were probably doing it even before you took your first, you know, lesson if you've taken a lesson before you watch your first video. You just went out there, they hit a ball, you moved your body, and you hit the ball. Maybe you hit it perfectly, but you hit it. And I just want you to reflect on that for a second, right? That you're already able to do that without, you know, going to university forward or anything like that. And so you have this innate ability already built into you. It's already like pre-programmed. It's like pre-packaged software, right? That just resides in your hard drive already. It's already there. And you can use it sometimes. You tap into it sometimes and you do these amazingly complex mathematical calculations in your mind, believe it or not, to get to the ball. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get to it, right, to figure out where to go. And what we're going to do here, right, is we are going to continue to build on that. Basically, we going to we're going to free more of that up. And if you want to think about it, going back to the idea of software and hard drive it, if you want to, we're going to free up more bandwidth, right? We're going to allow you to tap into that more and allow you to experience more flow in your play. And much of what we're going to do actually is we're going to be removing interference. We're going to be taking away noise. We're going to be taking away some of the obstacles that are stopping you from having more flow and from feeling the rally more. And that might help some of you, you know, conceptualize this a little bit. It's like playing by feel, more than by thought, playing by heart, more than by mind, if you want, right? It's It's moving and sensing what's happening without overthinking every little detail of what's going on. And I'll give you like one quick example, you know, and we get this question a lot. And whenever I I challenge these ideas, I want to be clear. I'm not criticizing anybody who asks the questions. I think it's very natural as humans to wonder, and I think it's interesting to formulate these ideas in different ways. But we get asked a lot about, like, you know, the players want to learn how to read paddle angles of their opponents so they can see where the ball's going. Okay. So this idea that like, if I look at my opponent's paddle, I can see where their angle is, and then based on that, I'll know where the ball's going. And I get that some coaches out there may be teaching that, but I got to tell you, that is a very small, that's a very limited way, I should say, of trying to approach that. Just think about it, like, like in a, in a, in a practical sense, right? You're going to be, you're on the court. You're trying to like get yourself in position. You're trying to see what's going on. And you're trying to actually look at a paddle angle, pick up an actual paddle angle of your opponent right at the point of contact to see where the ball's going. I'm going to suggest to you that there's a better way of doing that, which is this flow idea, this flowing with the rally idea, where you start to get a sense that when the ball travels over to this side, more likely than not, the ball is going to travel in this other direction. That's why sometimes you may get surprised. Sometimes it may go the other way. But you know what? That'll happen once, maybe twice. And then your brain will adjust to that. And you'll say, oh, okay. So this player likes to do it the other way. So now the sense will be that the ball would likely go the other way now, right? So you start to get a feel for how the game is played. And we got prose, that's mostly what they're doing. They're not, you know, they may look a little bit at how the body is over time, but even when they look at the body, I got to tell you, it's because they're sensing it. They're tapping into a flow and they're picking up tells that are just flowing with the rally more than their brain is going like, oh, okay, I see player so-and-so has moved their, you know, left foot back, you know, two inches. That must mean that absolute nightmare, right? It's more of a flow situation that they're in where they're reading kind of the movement of the rally. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a sneak peek into what we're going to be doing in the course. Pickleball is very similar to dancing. It's very similar to music. It's a musical kind of thing where there's a rhythm to it. There's a rhythm to a rally. And if you learn how to listen to and react to the music that's playing when you're out there, you know, in a rally, that's when you're going to be able to really unlock this state of flow because you're going to be moving with the rhythm of the song, with the rhythm of the dance that's going on on your chore during a rally. And that's what we're going to be using during this flow series idea. Now, the flow Series idea, I mentioned this already, but we're going to basically be focusing on mechanics, right? Because there's also a bigger picture flow that we can talk about later, but, you know, in the future in your growth. But right now we're going to be tapping on into mechanical. And the idea here is what we're going to do is we're going to break it down into those bite-sized chunks, right? Five bite-sized chunks on your mechanical flow so that we can build. We're going to start with the one and then go to the second one, go to the third and the fourth, and then the fifth one. And then by the end, you'll have a better sense of how to flow with your shotm. And it's a really powerful way of approaching it. And if you want to think about it this way, it's kind of like we're coming at it sideways if you will. We're coming through the side door, because my guess is you've already tried, right? Most of you listening to have probably already tried a lot of frontal approaches. You know what I mean by that is like, you know, you, you, you want to learn how to hit a better dirt shot drop, let's say. So you've watched, you know, 87 videos and taking 32 clinics on the third shot drop. Great. Why don't we look at it from the side? Let's come at it from the side and let's say, okay, what if we think about your approach to the mechanics, your approach to the shot from a different angle, from the side? And that may very well be the key to putting all the pieces together for you and to unleashing that flow, to removing that interference, tell out your natural self, your natural state of being to flow better during the rally, which, as I mentioned earlier, is already there. We just need to tap into it better. So make sure you're on our email list. And I mentioned, as I mentioned, there's no cost to you for participating in this, so take advantage of it. Why not? Let's do do it from the side. A little bit of flow. All right, let me dive into the riff. Let me talk a little bit about Tony W pickleball, what it's about, and what a one or two misconceptions that are out there that, that, you know, just clear clarify some misconceptions. These are normal, right? Because we's a new, it's an X phase. It's a new project. And so, uh, you know, it's normal to have questions and, you know, some players out there, you know, you talk to each other and maybe there's, you know, like that, uh, what's that thing called where you do the, the phone thing? You know, one person says, grapefruit. And by the time it comes all the way around, it's, I don't know. It's record player. And you're like, what? How'd that sound grapefruit? So, so let me, you're going to hear it directly from the horse's mouth. So here's what Tony R pickleball is about. It's about you. It's about a pickleball player who is interested in growing in the sport. Full stop. That's what it's about, right? And we're going to continue to do that work. We're going to continue to build curriculum and do things that are designed for that. Now, there's some confusion about. There's some confusion about, uh, you know, whether I'm not going to be working with the same players I've been focus on since before even better pickleball, since 2018. Um you know, and, and I think one of the confusions has to do with, I've been doing some pro work, right? I've been, I've been coaching some pro players. I've been doing some commentating on Major League pickleball and on the PPA, has no impact on, it has no negative impact. It has an impact, but it's a positive impact. It has no negative impact on my ability to coach who I want to coach, which is the pickleball player, the amateur pickball player, who wants to grow in the game. What doing this work does, this work, meaning like the Major League pickball and PPA commentating as well as some of the coaching I'm doing, is if you think about it, right, it pushes me as a coach more, right? It makes me go deeper into the game because I'm having a I'm looking at it at that level. It also keeps me current, right? With the latest trend, because I'm literally sitting in the booth, watching it and happen. I know, I'm watching like Tom Shimbakuro, 15 year old player, Cam Chfe and 15 year old player. You know, they have a different way of seeing the game because they grew up in pickleball, right? So I'm watching that live, and then I can bring this back to you and the coaching, right? So it really does allow, allow for more, for more depth, right, in the process and also for more currency, staying more current with the events than I would be able to do otherwise. And so when we go back to the idea of like, you know, am I pivoting away from what I've done for the last eight years now? The answer is no. In fact, not only am I not moving away from it, I'm doubling down. I'm going deeper on it, right? And as an example, you know, like this flow idea that we just talked about for a few minutes, it's a perfect example of that, right? You know, like, not, you know, and some of you may know, some of you may not know, for instance, like in the past, for instance, you know, I'm responsible for a lot of the concepts that you may hear out there. Respect the X, get past past forward, the framework objective strategy, shots or pros, foster approach, things like that, and a lot of others. This is what I do. This is what I love doing. I love coming up with concepts to try and help you as a pickaball player, uh, form a a stronger bond with a sport, right? Through knowledge, right? Through understanding, through ability, because this is an expressive activity, right? This is an activity where you express yourself on the pickleball cord. And I view my job as a coach is is to empower you, to feel better about your expression, right? To feel better about how you express yourself on the pickleball cord. And I'm going to continue to do that, and I'm going to continue to go deeper in the game and continue to be continue to do my best if I can, to help you, accomplish your pickle, right? Whatever you want for your pickle, whether it's a goal, whether it's a growth, whatever it is, I hope to help you with that. So, I recommend if you haven't done it already, check out 20work pickball.com. We have four mini courses on there that are absolutely free. We have an awesome community that's starting to grow there. It's still small because it just started right. I think a week ago or something, two weeks ago when you hear this. But it's growing by leaves and bounds. The players in there are starting to populate it with their ideasas, comments, questions, things like that. So go in there. And there's no cost for any of things, for the courses, for the mini courses, or for the community. Eventually, yes, there will be some paid coaching inside the, you know, paid online online coaching inside the program. That's just, you know, I got to pay for this studio that I'm in. And and for the work that goes into bringing you, these, these episodes and things like that. So, but right now, all the stuff that's in there, there's no cost to you. And those will remain in no cost anyway. So those are no costs. You can check them out whenever you want, and see, and see what Tony R Pickerball is all about. I, for one, love being on this journey, a pickleball journey as a coach. I love, the opportunity to interact with you on this on this podcast on a weekly basis, interact with you inside of our community, interact with you in our online trainings and also at our camps. You know, we have several camps that we've listed down with Turner Pickball, so I'm happy to to coach you. And it's my honor to be able to be a part of this journey alongside with you. And I am excited to see where we take everything with Tony R Pickball. So happy to have you here, and I hope you will continue to join join me, or I would say, allow me to be a part of your pickleball journey as we move forward. So look forward to seeing you over at Tony R Pickleball Community, TR.RP Community, as we call it for short. And if I don't see you there, then I will see you here on our next episode of Pickleball Therapy. Until then, be well.