Ep. 311 - Don't Drop It! PLUS Know Your Block

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'm your host of this weekly podcast. Pleasure to be with you. Hope you're having a great week. This week's podcast, we're going to cover an area that might be robbing you of some joy, and it has to do with the way that you're framing out your expectations for your day, what you're trying to accomplish from the sport that day. And in the riff, I'm going to talk a little bit about improvement frustration. Those are two different potential sources of, you know, hindrance or of lack of enjoyment with our sport. The first one is in terms of the goal setting while you play. The other one is goal setting and also expectations on your improvement journey. As we dive into the podcast, currently have registration available for Your Pickleball Coach. It is a really good course. It has a lot of really good materials in it that will help you improve your play. I should know because I designed the course and also provide the information in there. So I can vouch for it. So check that out at yourpickleball.coach. All right, let's dive into this idea of setting expectations. What I want to do is I want to share with you a little video here from another content creator. I'm going to share that video so she can explain her experience, what happened in her world, and then we'll come back here and we'll talk about it in our world of pickleball. [Clip] Today in ceramics class, our instructor had to stop our wheels, stand up, and catch a ball. No explanation, just catch the ball. We tossed it around without thinking twice. Then he replaced the same ball with a ceramic vase and told us it was the first piece he'd ever made. Suddenly catching it didn't feel so casual anymore. We were stiff, hesitant, and terrified of dropping it. But we hadn't suddenly forgotten how to catch. We just became afraid of what it would mean if we dropped it. And after we all had successfully caught it, our instructor told us the vase wasn't actually his first piece. He'd made that part up. But the point had already been made. How often do we make something harder simply because of the meaning we've assigned to it? And I realize I do this all the time. I take something that could be simple and I immediately attach expectations to it. What if I fail? What if I'm bad at this? What if I embarrass myself? What if it doesn't go the way I had imagined? I spent so much time thinking about my next career move, where I want to live, what goal I should set for myself, and how I can become more successful, that I've forgotten how to just experience my life while it's happening. I've been so focused on figuring out where I'm going that I've forgotten to pay attention to where I'm at. That's something I've been trying to work on. And it's the whole reason I started the things I said I'd do someday. Get out of my head and back into my body to try things that don't need to be profitable, productive, or perfect. And yet, even in a literal ceramics class, I'm still overthinking. Still trying to anticipate my failure, still assigning consequences to things that haven't even happened yet, and still worrying about the outcome instead of just being present in the moment. And maybe that's what I'm actually learning here. Not how to make the perfect pot, but how to stop being so afraid of dropping it. [End clip] I thought that was pretty interesting, right? How you change the object and all of a sudden the whole tenor of the room changes, right? Everybody's more tense. Everybody's, you know, more nervous about what's going on, right? And what it is is a change in expectations, right? It's like one minute you're living in a world where the object that you're tossing is just fun, right? You're just having a good time. And the next minute, all of a sudden it's like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Oh my God, I better not drop this. I better not mess this up. Think about that in pickleball, right? And, you know, if you think about your pickleball journey when you first started playing, maybe you're a little bit nervous at the beginning, right? That can happen. But there's a phase early on where it's just so fun. There's no expectations. You're just out there, you know, oh my God, I won a game. I lost a game. I don't even know what's going on. I don't know what the score is, you know, everything's good. And then all of a sudden, one day, this thing happens where it switches, right? All of a sudden, maybe, you know, my experience is maybe you've had a good run, right? You've won several games or the other players are starting to say, oh my God, you play really well. And now all of a sudden, you better not lose, right? You better not drop that precious ceramic object that was the instructor's first piece of ceramic, right, that they did. Changes from, you know, tossing a tennis ball around the room to tossing around a priceless artifact, right? And that's that mental shift, right? Changes how we interpret the information that's happening. So when you didn't have any expectations and you missed a shot, not a big deal. When you have expectations and you miss a shot, now it becomes a big deal, right? When you didn't have expectations and you hit, you know, a pop-up or something like that, I didn't even notice it. Now with expectations, now you notice it. And you think everybody else is noticing it too, right? Which is another conversation about bandwidth. But focusing on ourselves, right, how we interpret the information, we can have an influence over how we interpret what's happening based on the baseline, based on the expectation that we set. So what I'd recommend to you is give some thought to that before you start playing. Last week's podcast, we covered this idea of empty space, right? And having a journey where you basically set some empty space for you at the beginning of the journey. Why not use that time also to set some expectations for yourself for your day? Remember what you're doing, right? You're engaging in a game. Give it your all. Try, do your best, right? But at the same time, put it in context. Even if you drop the pickleball, you're not dropping what was perceived to be a priceless artifact at the time, right? The instructor's first little project. Whatever happens on a pickleball court, it can't be that bad, right? There's nothing you can do on a pickleball court, absent a fall or something like that, that is going to be damaging to you or damaging to anybody else. You know, missing the shot, making the shot, not going to change the world, right? And again, I'm not trying to diminish the activity itself. Enjoy it. Have a good time. But don't let it become such a level that it's detrimental to you. And in fact, I would submit to you that the fun and the enjoyment is what makes pickleball so powerful. In other words, if you want to assign value to the sport, if you want to give it, like, this is why pickleball is important, pickleball is not important because of the results that we may or may not achieve when we're playing. Pickleball's importance actually stems from the fun and enjoyment that we get. Health benefits and the other stuff as well, right? But the fun and enjoyment, that's what makes it so captivating, right? So enticing to go back again and again and again to play the sport. Let's not lose that by assigning unrealistic or improperly weighted value to those results, because the results themselves don't really matter. What matters is the enjoyment. So reframe your focus before you go out there. Maybe remember this tennis ball idea, right? That's what you're doing out there. You're tossing the tennis ball around a ceramics facility. And remember that the very reason for playing pickleball could also be your personal development, right? Just like the young content creator said, this idea that learning how to let go, learning how to just enjoy the moment, is a great lesson that we can learn using the sport, just the same way as using ceramics, to work on that. So hopefully that'll help you avoid some of the potential frustration and, you know, lack of enjoyment with our sport from setting those expectations unrealistically or putting them in the wrong place. So, all right, I'm going to dive into the riff. Before I dive into the riff, quick word of, not word of warning, but you can sign off here if you're not interested in your improvement, you know, if that's not a thing for you. And listen, there's never any judgment from me. Everybody should partake in the sport in the way that you want to partake in the sport. I just finished the whole section here on how fun and enjoyment is what matters the most with the sport of pickleball. I think that's great. So if that's your jam, pleasure talking to you this week, and I'll see you next week. If you're on an improvement journey, meaning that part of your engagement with the sport is your personal growth as a pickleball player and as a human being, because that's very important, I think, not to lose sight of, then stay tuned for the riff, because in the riff I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some frustration that can happen when you're on an improvement journey. All right, if you're still here, then you're on an improvement journey, so I'm going to talk to you about the improvement journey. And I am going to talk about the coaching that I do. Reason I talk about the coaching that I do is because I believe in the coaching that I do. I know the coaching that I do works. And I want to explain to you a little bit more about how that would work with your improvement journey and how it would help you with your journey. You can also take some of these ideas and just use them independent of this, but I'm going to tie them to my coaching because that's A, what I know best. B, what I do. And C, I know it works because I've been doing it for years and I have the receipts to prove it. So one of the things that can happen, I think, in an improvement journey, right, that creates frustration is floundering, right? There's so much out there, right? And not knowing what to do. Not knowing, okay, what do I do? What do I do to improve? And then chasing this and chasing that and chasing this and chasing that and just not feeling like you're making advancement. Good example is the third shot drop. I've been writing and talking about this recently a fair amount. And there's nothing wrong with the third shot drop. Perfectly fine shot. Right? And is it an important part of our sport? Sure, it is. Yeah, of course it is. But is it important for most players right now? The answer is absolutely not, right? It's not going to change your game. So what happens is if you don't have a perspective of where it fits inside your improvement journey, right, you spend a bunch of time on the third shot drop. You master the third shot drop, and you're like, what's up? What gives? Where's my payback for all this work I put in? The answer is it's not here yet, because the shot has a lot of other pieces that are still missing, probably from you, almost 100% from your partner, because you need both to work with a third shot drop in order to get the benefit of it. And so now you spend all this time on something that's not giving you results. And so it feels weird, right? There's a disconnect. If you want to avoid that kind of disconnect, right, what you want to do is understand, okay, where I am right now, this is the next thing that I need to continue to advance in my play. And I focus on that thing. Well, you need to know what it is. You need to know how to do it. You need to put in some time, right? And then you get the benefits and then you go on to the next thing. Then you go on to the next thing. That's how every time there's this loop that gets created where you identify the thing that you need, you then work on the thing that you need and you know how to do it, right? You need that piece. That's where I come in as a coach, right? I tell you, this is what you need right now. I give you the tools to do it, right? And then you do it, and then you have the positive result. What happens is you generate a positive loop, right? So you study it, you train it, you get the benefits of it. What are you going to do? What's next? Let me study, train, and then what's next? And then you keep building in a positive way with a positive loop without these gaps in, like, okay, I put in the work, I did the thing. And I'm like, where's the result? Not going to be there yet, right? Because it just doesn't match where you are in the game right now. That's why as part of the coaching at Your Pickleball Coach, we have a builder program that we've put together. It's literally step by step. We're calling them blocks because, you know, basically you're building your wall of pickleball. So it's block one, block two, block three, block four. Once you get that bottom row set up, hey, you're killing it. Let's go up to the next row of blocks. Now, the next row has three blocks. So it looks better on the graph. And then the next row will have four and three. If you complete all, and this is still the final steps, the final blocks, I should say, I haven't put on the wall yet, it's going to be 20 to 24 blocks, something like that. If you complete all those blocks, you're playing 4.0 amazing pickleball. Okay. Now, the key is, A, you'll know what block it is. B, you'll have the tools to complete the block. Now it's up to you to lock it in. This is, you know, where your agency is important, because you're going to be the one putting in the work, right? And improving along that block or building that block. You're also going to be the one not to leave the block prematurely. And that is, not to say, okay, I saw the videos. What's next, right? Which is another source of common frustration for players, because they don't ever see the improvement. They're watching all the videos, right? I've seen 800 videos, but I still play the same way I did. And I'm not trying to call anybody out here, but I know players. I've been playing 11 years. I know players who I've known for eight plus years here in my local community. I could video them today and I could video them eight years ago, roughly the same player, right? About the same. Right? And again, not a criticism. They're perfectly entitled to that. But remember what I said at the beginning of this riff? If you're listening, it's because you are on an improvement journey. So I'm going to guess that if you played a certain way eight years ago and I video you today and you play identical, that's probably not you. You don't want that, right? For yourself. So if you don't want that for yourself, how do you go from where you were to where you want to go in the future? It's by having these different steps that you're going to do and locking it in, right? Lock the block. Maybe that's what we'll call it. So you basically lock into your block, right? And you work on it until you complete it. And then once you set that one, then you go to the next one and like that. That's how you're going to have improvement that is meaningful, that's going to make sense to your game, and going to be long lasting, right? Not some shoddy kind of a thing where, you know, as you move up, the next group of players you play, you're like, oh, man, you know, my whatever is faulty. No, because we built a nice block there. You may have to refine it a little bit because of the level, but the block's going to be solid. And then building on it is going to be fairly simple for you. So, if you're interested in this approach, right, I can assure you that Your Pickleball Coach is going to provide you the tools that you need in order to have a nice improvement journey and to build the positive feedback loop where you're locking it in, putting in the work, getting the result. Locking it in, putting in the work, getting the result. Keep building block by block. Build up your wall. Then once you build up that wall, the world's your oyster. You do what you want. You'll be able to learn everything else. You want a roll volley. You want to have a heavy topspin cross-court drop, whatever you want. You can build on top of a solid foundation for your game. You're already playing amazing pickleball in any event. So if that's of interest to you, again, go to yourpickleball.coach, check it out. And I hope to see you inside the course, because as a coach, the reason I do this is to hopefully connect with players who are interested in their improvement journey and provide them the information that they need to accomplish what they want, right? Which is this improvement journey, so that the video eight years from now does not look like the video from today. One other quick note on Your Pickleball Coach is we've made the pricing of Your Pickleball Coach as friendly as possible because, you know, we are in this to work with each other. You know, you probably see behind me here, I have some lights on, I have equipment, recording equipment. We have costs that we pay. So there is a cost to being a part of Your Pickleball Coach. That said, if the cost of Your Pickleball Coach is not doable for you right now, for whatever reason, we don't ask questions. All you have to do is reach out to us. You can send an email to us, support@tonyroigpickleball.com. Support@tonyroigpickleball.com, and let us know, hey, I just can't do that. This is what I can do. And we'll get you in the course, because finance should not be an impediment to your improvement as a pickleball player. So I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. I hope to see you inside Your Pickleball Coach. If I don't see you there, I'll see you here next week on Pickleball Therapy. Be well.