Ep. 310 - Silence Before Sound

# Pickleball Therapy Ep. 310 — Silence Before Sound ## Transcript Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. It's the podcast with you in mind. My name is Tony Roig. I am your host of this weekly podcast. I hope you're having a great week. This week's podcast, we're going to talk about a concept that I've been getting interested in a lot recently based on some work we've been doing over at Your Pickleball Coach, which has to do with empty or negative space. It's a little bit counterintuitive when you first start hearing about it and thinking about it, but once you understand it, it really clicks and you say, "Oh, okay. So there's this negative space that's really going to help me find pauses in what's happening on the pickleball court, which will help me not just perform better, but also see everything much more clearly because I'm allowing for this negative space to manifest. I'm allowing myself to see the negative space that's happening." I think you'll find it a really interesting way of slowing yourself down out on the pickleball court. Which will help you feel better and also play a much better form of pickleball, because you're really focused on what matters, allowing the other stuff to just occupy that negative space. As we dive into the podcast, we're in the last week or so of early registration for our Your Pickleball Coach course. It's a really, really good course. Early registration gets you obviously immediate access. Who doesn't want that? And it also gives you a few more months toward the end of it since you did an early registration. You also become a founder of the Tony Roig Pickleball Project through your subscription to the course. So if you want to check that out, we'll put a link in the show notes. You can also just go to tonyroigpickleball.com, click on the button, and find out more about the course there. All right. So this concept of negative space came up during a project that I was working on, a coaching project that I was working on in Your Pickleball Coach, right? As part of that, which had to do with tapping into your flow, right? Flow being like when you hear about athletes being in the zone, they're just, everything slows down. Most of you have felt that at some point. If you haven't felt it at some point, believe me, it's there. Sometimes it could be that you're not recognizing it. That could be the case. But this thing exists, right? Where you basically, everything slows down and the ball looks like it's traveling one mile an hour no matter how hard it's hit, because you're just in a different frame of mind. And it's a really interesting experience, right, to have that flow experience or the zone experience. Curiously, it's available to everybody, right? It's not like you need to be a certain level player. You don't need to be a certain level of Zen master, any of that type of stuff. Flow resides within each of us. And the way we approached flow was through using music and dance to tap into it, right? To allow us to reconnect with the flow. Think about yourself when you were a baby or a small child. They put music on, you could bob to the music, right? It was a natural instinct to kind of react to the music. Something happens along the way. I'm not a psychologist or sociologist or anything like that, but something happens along the way, right? As we get older, whether they're barnacles build up or personal interferences build up, whatever it is, that connection, that magical instantaneous kind of connection to the flow gets interrupted. So this project that we undertook, which was five parts, had written materials, videos to demonstrate and things like that, was designed to help the players tap into their flow. And "tap in" was really intentional. It was titled very intentionally as Tap Into Your Flow, not learn how to flow, because you don't actually need to learn how to flow. You just need to reconnect with that child state of yours, that flow state of yours. And so that was the project, and we had five parts to it, and then there was a live call at the end. So what happens in my coaching is I'll spend time thinking about how I want to wrap everything together, or there's a corollary piece that would make sense. And maybe it's fortunate, I'm not sure if the universe just does its thing, not clear to me. But the week before the live call, I went to an art exhibit here at a local art museum, and they were talking about this concept of negative space. The name of the exhibition was called Silence Before Sound. And I'm going to repeat that again because I think it'll land a little differently. Silence before sound. So the premise of this negative space or empty space is that you want to find a balance between, and this is in art, you want to find a balance between the sound or the full space, and that would be the brush strokes or the item being exhibited, and silence or empty space, which is exactly what it sounds like. Space around the sound, or space around the exhibit, the piece of art that's being exhibited. And so, as an example, in the museum here, they had a very large room. If I had to guess, I would say it was maybe 100 by 100 room. So big room, almost size of a small house, just one room. Tall ceilings in it. And that room had three pieces of art exhibited in it. It had a very large painting that curved along a wall. So it's two walls basically curved around them. Then it had one big piece of ceramic about the size of the biggest human you can imagine, and then another piece of art maybe like 5x5, something like that. And that's it in the whole room, right? So the vast majority of this room was actually an empty room. That was done very intentionally. Not because there weren't other pieces of art they could have put in there. They could have brought in a bunch more art and just filled up the room. But it would have defeated the purpose of what they were trying to accomplish in that room, right? Which was to exhibit the pieces that they were exhibiting, in the way they were exhibiting them, in a way that we as viewers could experience them in a full way, right? And not be overwhelmed, not feel distracted, not feel like we're trying to take in too much. That's intentional use of this empty space, this negative space. Another example that we used during the live call that we had was some Japanese art. And if you've ever seen this type of art, it's very wispy. It's basically like the trees and things like that, but just a limited number of brush strokes on a large space, creating almost this frailty to the image, this delicacy to the image, really highlighting the strokes that are on the painting itself. And so in those paintings, there's a lot of empty space, right? So that empty space is not there because the artist ran out of ink. It's not because the artist couldn't think of what else to paint. In fact, the empty space there is intentionally placed by the artist, or left there by the artist, because it's necessary for the entire image that they're trying to create. So let's talk about how that would apply then to your pickleball. What happens when we play pickleball is oftentimes we get accelerated, right? We feel rushed. We feel like we can't really capture what's happening because we're trying to capture everything, right? And there is a lot going on in a pickleball game. I mean, you have four players usually on the court, right? Four players playing. You have several rallies happening. You have a lot of different variables happening during a game, right? Whether it's the lob, then maybe the dink hit to the outside, maybe it's a banger or hitting it hard, maybe you got messed up on the forehand backhand on a volley. All these different things are coming at you, right? And my guess is if you're like most players, what you're doing is you're trying to take in all of it, right? And not just take in what's happening. You also have that conversation going on in your mind that's just running roughshod over you, right? Where you're basically asking all these questions of yourself about everything, right? Whether it's the shot you hit, the court, your partner, the opponent, the score, the illegal serve. All these things are happening all at the same time. There's no place for empty space, right? There's no silence. It's just sound. It's just a cacophony of noise going on in your head. And I submit to you it's debilitating, right? As a human trying to get through something, trying to process information, it can be very debilitating to have that level of overwhelm going on in your mind. That's where this idea of negative space, empty space, silence, if you like that better, comes in. And there's a practice that you can start to use, right, that I'm starting to develop inside my coaching, that you can start using in your play. And I'll share with you what I've gotten so far. And I'll continue to work on this as part of my coaching journey, right? Because that's one of the beauties of this project. You improve as a player, I'm going to continue improving as a coach. That's my promise to you. So your practice would be, try to find some silence before you step out on the court. Right? This is going to be the easiest one to do, because here you're finding a moment to reset, to just come back to a nice quiet baseline, and then from there you can step out onto the court and to the cacophony and to the noise. I'm going to take a little side detour here and I'll come back to the practice on empty space in a second, because I want to tie this into some of the feedback that we've gotten in the Tap Into Your Flow series. As I mentioned earlier, we're using music as part of that process, right? So using music to tap into the flow. And we were using the waltz. The Blue Danube by Strauss was the main piece that we used. We used other pieces of music as well, but that was the central piece. And the feedback that we got from the players who were part of this project was that they felt much calmer when they played if they remembered the song. Right? So basically they tied into the song, and everything calmed down for them, everything quieted a little bit for them. I'm going to suggest to you this is very similar, right? So if you think about empty space being complete silence, a song like The Blue Danube, which is da da na na na na na na na na na na na na na na. Right? That song, that rhythm of that song calms you. It just soothes you. It brings you away from the noise, from the cacophony, for a moment of respite, if you will. Same concept as empty space. Empty space obviously would be more extreme because it's silence. That's the concept anyway, right? Of complete silence. But you can see how there's gradations to this as well, where you could use music to soothe you, right? Whether it's you get to the courts, you don't get out of the car yet, maybe you put on a song for 30 seconds or a minute, right? It'll be maybe a little stressful at first, right? Because your body's resisting that. You're so used to just, you get out there and it's like, they need a player, you jump on the court, everything's hectic, right? That hectic nature of getting there, that spills over, that carries over right into how you're processing your day, how you're dealing with the situations that occur on the pickleball court, because you already started in kind of a manic hectic way. That'll probably carry over. So if you can take a moment, and it's intentionality, same way that the artist left empty space on the canvas as I mentioned earlier with the Japanese art, the same way that in the exhibition I was telling you about, the curator and the artist actually consulted on it and they decided to leave these huge empty spaces of rooms intentionally as part of the exhibition. Right? Do the same with your play. Before you start playing, take time to either go complete silence, which will work great too, or put on a calming song, something that relaxes you, something that gets you reset before you step out into the noise. After that, a suggestion that I would have is while you're playing, see if you can focus your attention only on things that actually matter. And what I mean by that is it'll depend on where you are in the game, right? If you're one of our students, you'll have a priority list, so you know what you're focused on, right? So you'd be like, "Okay, that's my," whatever your focus is on your priority list with us. That's what you want to focus on. Don't focus on shot 82 after that, right? Focus on where you need to focus. We've used in the past a metric that we still use. It's called Get Past 4. It's a really good metric that provides some focus as well, right? In terms of, this is what I'm going to focus on. Then what you do is the other stuff, you let it be empty space, right? You let it be silence. I'm not going to focus on those things. And going back to the exhibition that I described, there were only three pieces in that room. So you could only focus on one of three things, right? There was one huge piece, one medium piece, and one smaller piece. So you could focus on one of them. But there weren't 53 things in the room, where you basically can't focus on any of those. One day maybe I'll get into my idea of how museums, some museums I visit overseas and in the US too, but some museums that I've visited just seemed so overwhelming. You don't see anything actually, because it's too much. But same thing with your game, right? If you're trying to see everything, my guess is you're not really seeing any of them. So try and focus on something during your play, and then after the play, take a moment to reset as well, right? Don't have carryover from your day on the court. If you had negativity and stuff like that, just reset that, right? Maybe try and find some good things that happened that day and then take that with you. If you have a good day, you can still pause, enjoy the day, right? Reflect on what a great day you had and then carry that forward. But it allows you to modulate what you decide to carry forward by using a break, by using this empty space. Where I recommend you start is on the front end though, right? Before you start playing. That's really where you have the most control, before things get too crazy on the court and before the mind just gets away from you. Start a practice of resetting, of centering yourself with some empty space, with some silence, before you step out onto the court. Remember, if you're interested in coaching like this or other coaching, because we do also teach things like volleys, third shot drop, serves, returns of serve, and the mechanics that you need as well as the strategies that you need to play. Check out Your Pickleball Coach. You can go to yourpickleball.coach and learn more about that course and see if it's the right one for you. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a minute to rate and review it. And as always, consider sharing it with your friends, because if you enjoy this podcast, they probably will too. I hope you have a great week and I'll see you inside our next episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.