Hello and welcome to pickleball Therapy, the
podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement.
More specifically, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball mind.
I am your host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig.
It is a pleasure to be with you this week and every week, bringing you
content to help you with that part of the game that is sometimes
overlooked, your mind.
A part of you that will radically improve how you play pickleball, how you feel when
you play pickleball, and not just pickleball.
Also, how you feel throughout life.
In this week, what I want to talk about is I want to talk about competition.
I want to reframe how we think about competition so that we can see what's
really happening out there and how we can use that information in
terms of how we feel about what's happened during a contest, and also
how we can view it in terms of our trajectory, our journey
as pickleball players.
Before we dive into Before that, a couple of housekeeping notes.
Number one, in the next few months, you may see some changes to the structure
and delivery of the podcast.
The content of the podcast will remain this content, the content that you've
come to hopefully enjoy and be beneficial to you, and I'm still going
to be the host of the podcast.
But there are some changes that we're making to the podcast to help
us continue to grow the podcast.
Then the second point of housekeeping is that we have our Better Pickleball Academy
a subscription model launching in a couple of weeks.
If you're on an email list, which I assume if you listen to this podcast, you
are, you will get notified by email.
Be on the lookout for that.
If you are not on the email, you can join the email at betterpickleball.
Com and simply subscribe to the email.
All right, let's talk about competition and how we view it and what is, I would
submit to you, a more beneficial way of thinking about it.
The way that we view a pickleball game is it's a contest
between us and our partner against two other opponents,
and then there's a result.
You have the input in the situation is the pickleball game that's going on.
The factors that affect the outcome of the game are us, our partner,
and our two opponents.
And so you shake that all up, and at the end, you have either we won
the game or we lost the game.
And what we end up doing is we end up looking at it in terms of
we lost to our opponents, or we beat our opponents, or our partner did this, or
our partner did that, things like that.
What I'm going to submit to you or suggest to you is that
what's really happening when you play pickleball is it's really a
contest of you against you.
Now, against there is not meant to be any a negative fight a thing.
It's simply a fact that when you're playing
pickleball, It's really, at the end of the day, a contest where
you are testing yourself against yourself.
To help explain that, let's use an analogy/metaphore.
By now, you probably know I don't distinguish between those two because
I can't remember which one's which.
What we're going to do is we're going to use an analogy metaphor where we're going
to go into a laboratory, and we're going to test the
impact of four factors on the outcome, on the results,
given the inputs that are put into them.
We're going to have our inputs go in, we have four factors, and we have our output.
Now, we want to know how factor A of the four factors, A, B, C,
and D, so I have factor A, factor B, factor C, factor D.
I want to know how factor A impacts the results based on the
inputs that we're putting in there.
If I allow all four factors to run free, in other words, to have an impact on the
results, I cannot tell how factor A impacted the results.
Because it could have been that if the results were, say, positive,
it might have been B, it might have been D, it might have been a combination of
some A and some C, or some F, A, B, C, and D.
I can't tell.
The only way to isolate factor A and the impact of factor A in this
lab experiment is to restrict factors B, C, and D.
Now, quick side note here in case you're either in science or you remember
your science well, normally the term that's used for that is
I want to control for B, C, and D, and let A run free.
The reason I'm using the term control here is because I'm going to come back to the
term control later and talk about it in terms of our control.
I don't want to mix those words up.
We're going to use the term restrict here.
In our...
Going back to the experiment, I have my four factors.
I'm going to restrict B, C, and D, and I'm going to allow factor A to run
free, to basically be the only factor that's a variable.
Then I can apply inputs into my experiment.
I have my output, and then I know that the output was the result of
factor A's influence on the inputs, or the inputs acting on factor A
will give me my output.
When we play pickle ball, it is going to be the same situation
where we have four factors.
We have factor A, that's going to be us, you if you want to
think about it that way. So factor A is our person.
Factor B is going to be our partner.
Then you have factor C and D, those are our opponents, our two
players across the net.
So we're on a pickleball court playing a pickleball game.
We have four factors.
The input in a pickleball game is going to be the game, the rules, the ball, the wind
conditions, all the things that are happening, all the things that are
going to playing a pickleball game.
The court size, which is a standard, but still you have a You have the court size,
you have the court conditions, all those things.
Those are inputs.
Then you have the four factors, A, B, C, and D, and then you have an output.
The output here is win the game or lose the game.
What you want to think about is you want to
think about the fact that if you want to know
how well you did or how much influence you had
on the inputs in order to get the output, whether it's a win or a loss,
you have to restrict B, C, and D.
In other words, the only way you can know for sure whether you had a good day or a
bad day or whether the win was because of you or the loss was because of you,
is to control or restrict B, C, and D.
Let me run through some scores so you get a better sense of the idea
I'm talking about here.
Let's assume that you played four games in a row, and the score of the games are,
first game, you lost 5 to 11, second game, you lost 9 to 11,
third game, you won 11 to 9.
And the fourth game, you won 11 to 5.
So you go from a 511 loss to a 911 loss. Titer, right?
Better result in terms of being closer.
Then you flipped it, and now you won 11-9.
And then the last game, you won pretty decisively 11-5.
If you think about it in terms of everybody on the court,
if you allow for A, B, C, and D to be variable, then how
can you deduce anything from those scores?
In other words, when you went from 511 to 911 to 119 to 11,5,
was that because of your play?
Or was that factor B?
Or was that your opponents, factor C and D, you have no way of knowing, right?
Whether it was you or your opponents or your partner
who were the actual causes of some or all of those results,
including the trend that you see there.
Now, let's go back to the lab experiment and restrict for B, C, and D.
I'm going to restrict B, C, and D.
We're going to make your partner and your opponent's constants.
What that means is they're going to play identical every time.
They're going to make the same basic decisions.
They're going to play the same way every single game.
If we could do that and we had the scores of 511, 911, 119, 115,
first, we would know that all of those scores are the result of
your play as factor A.
So it's you as factor A are the cause of all those scores.
The second thing we'd be able to tell is that you were playing better over the
course of those games because you went from a loss of 5:11 to a
win of 11-5, and the two nines in the middle.
But you basically went from losing, not that great, to to losing pretty well,
to winning pretty tight, to winning really well.
And if factors B, C, and D are restricted or constants,
then the only difference in those games and in those scores is you as factor A.
Now, in the real world, we can't do that.
In the real world, we can't make B, C, and D constant.
That's just not how the real world works.
But we can do is we can say, the only thing that matters, the only thing that
I can control, and this is where the term control comes back in and the way I want
to use it for this podcast, the only thing that I can control is what?
It's a factor A.
The only thing I can control is me and my play.
Now, I can't look at the results of the game to determine how I played.
You see?
That's the beauty of thinking about it this way.
The results of the game are a result of a combination of A, B, C, and D.
All those factors played into the outcome of the game, the result, the win or the
loss, and the score, whatever it was, a blowout by us, a blowout
by them, or a tight game.
That is all dictated by four factors all working in sync.
Or not in sync, but at the same time.
They all have an effect on the result.
Because that's the world that we live in, it doesn't make sense to look at the
result and then impute that result to one factor, factor A or ourselves.
Instead of viewing the result
and saying, That's because of me, or something I could have done better,
the only thing that makes sense is evaluating how factor Factor A did,
that's you, relative to what?
Relative to what factor A can do.
In other words, what is it that you...
What are you able to do?
Within that, there's some nuance in the sense of you're having a bad day.
You didn't get good sleep last night.
You have something going on with your family, whatever it is.
You don't feel well physically Basically, any of those things.
Well, you can't expect that you're going to play at your baseline level or at your
top level if you're not in tip top shape.
You would factor that in there.
Let's assume that you're in great Everything's fantastic.
Everything's great. You're focused.
Everything's wonderful.
Even there, you still have a baseline where you say to yourself,
I'm a human being.
I'm a human being, so I'm going to make mistakes when I play.
I'm I'm going to make silly decisions.
I'm going to do all sorts of things that I wish I had done otherwise, or in a
perfect world, I could have done otherwise, because you're human.
So you have your baseline in any event.
And so you want to evaluate factor A, u, relative to factor A.
So every time that you go out to play, it's not a contest where
you're evaluating the results.
You're not attributing the results to you.
All you're attributing to you is how you did relative to
you, relative to your baseline, relative to what you're able to do,
relative to what you can bring that day to the court, and nothing else.
Not extrapolating from the scores onto you as a player, because that, as
you've seen, makes no sense, because you cannot control factors B, C, and D.
You cannot restrict, you cannot make constant factors B, C, and D.
B, C, and D are going to run free.
They're going to go up and down, play better, play worse as games move along.
In that a world, in that environment, which is the real environment that
we inhabit, it only makes sense to evaluate factor
A relative to what factor A can do.
What that does is then it makes the pickleball contest
about how you perform relative to how you can perform
with the caveat of, or not the caveat, but the qualifier of as well as you can
under your current circumstances.
So this approach then allows you some peace of mind
because you don't need to worry about the score, because there's
three other factors that you cannot control that impact the score.
And it also helps you in terms of your development as a player,
because the fact that maybe you went from, let's say, you started with a winning
streak that day and ended up losing three games at the end,
is not indicative necessarily of your play or of your improvement as a player.
What you need to do is look at your play and determine whether your play is
improving or not improving during a session and also over time.
As an example, if you're working on a specific part of your game,
say you're inside the latest You're one of the students inside our
latest TPS class, the pickleball system class, and you're focusing
on your punch following.
In that situation, at the end of a game, if you want to
think about, how did I do that game?
Focus on on what?
Focus on how you were hitting your punch volleys, if that's what you're focused on.
Knowing that the better that I hit my punch volleys,
the better I'm going to play.
The better I'm going to play, the better my factor, factor A,
is going to have The more positive impact my factor, factor A, is going to have
on the results of the game.
It doesn't mean we're going to win, but everything that I do inside my factor,
the only one I can control to improve my play,
the best chance I give our team of being successful in that contest.
So hopefully this way of thinking about it might resonate with you and give you a way
of framing your impact on the game or lack of control over the result of a game
and focus you on the areas over which you have actual control, which is your
play and your performance, again, with the qualifier of within the best that you
can do under your circumstances that day.
I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast.
These messages, these thoughts take some time to
sink in sometimes or to make an effect, but I can assure you that the cumulative
effect of these conversations that we have, of these
concepts that we share, can have a definite positive impact on your approach
to the game, on your performance as a player, how you feel as a player.
Also, you can then take these ideas and then apply them in your life at large,
including the one we talked about today.
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I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you next week on a regular
episode of pickleball Therapy.
Be well.