Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to
your pickleball improvement. A happy 2025 to you.
I hope you enjoyed 2024.
Not everything can be perfect all the time, but I hope you had a
generally good 2024 or at least a perspective on 2024 that
makes you appreciate just having it.
There is something to be said for just enjoying the ability to
be here, the ability to experience, the ability to have it.
That's a deeper conversation than directly deeper, I guess.
We do approach that in this podcast, incidentally, from time to time, these
ideas, but that may be for another podcast where we get into the depth of that thing.
But in any event, I hope that you had a good 2024 and are looking forward to a
2025, which is the year we will be passing through, coming up.
Actually, we're already passing through, right?
We already started. So by the time you listen to this podcast.
Anyway, so I hope you had a nice one and I hope you have a good year in 2025.
This podcast, I want to talk about your journey.
The folks at the Better Pickleball Coaching team said, Hey, we
need a piece on the journey.
I said, All right, let's do it.
I prepared a written piece, and then I said, You know what?
Let's have that as part of the podcast.
I think it's helpful to how we approach our steps along the way
and how we deal with maybe the frustration that sets in
sometimes when we're not getting to where we want to get to as fast
as we'd like to get there.
Then in the Riff, I'm going to talk about a piece of the game that I think merits
your attention in 2025 if you want to continue to grow as a pickleball player
and play pickleball at its highest level possible.
When I say highest level, it doesn't mean necessarily pro-level, even though
if you want to do that, that's fine.
But it just means that you're playing it in the way that
is the highest way of playing our sport based on how the sport is constructed
or based on its framework.
As we get into the podcast, I want to mention to you that we have an
event coming up on January 16th.
That's going to be a really fun live event.
We're going to give you things that you can do right now, including off-court.
That's an important detail, meaning if you're somewhere in the north
or you just don't have access to courts right now for whatever reason,
these activities that we're going to share with your activity, you can do off-court.
Then when you get on-court, you're going to be like, What happened?
How did I get so much better off-court?
You'll be surprised at how much you can actually do.
But it's this idea of 10 minutes a day to a better pickleball player.
We're going to work on that on January 16th at our live event, so
make sure you join us for that.
Then the live event also includes access to materials post-event
that you'll be able to access to put in the work
so that you get the benefits of the knowledge that you gain on January 16th.
So make sure you're on the look out for that.
All right, let's dive into the main subject of today.
What I want to talk about is your pickleball journey.
The piece that I wrote, I entitled it, Are We There Yet?
Now, hearing those words, probably just hearing, Are We There Yet?
Causes blood pressure to go up a little.
It's basically like, Oh, no. What do you mean, are we there yet?
I'm already stressing about it.
It's the common trope, if you will, of kids asking their
parents on a road trip, Are we there yet?
The thing about asking, Are we there yet?
Is that it undermines our ability to enjoy and have a more positive experience
with the process of going to where we're going.
There's basically three things about it.
One, it undermines our ability to enjoy the growth process.
Two, it places undue pressure on us, this idea of, Are we there yet?
Because we believe we're not getting it quickly enough.
We're not getting there quickly enough.
In any event, it's a flawed premise, as you're going to see, because
where exactly are you going?
What we want to do is, as we think about our progress journey, our
traveling through pickleball as players, and
hopefully seeing the game better, playing a little better each day,
each month, each year.
Avoiding this potentially being held back by this are we there yet mentality
that can definitely creep in.
It's very natural as humans, We want the end result.
But understanding that the end result really isn't a thing will help us avoid
it, avoid the downsides of asking this question.
When you think about it, it's basically...
When you think about your journey through pickleball,
it's not like there's these waypoints along the way
that will be these repositories of happiness for you, and then between the
waypoints, you should be unhappy or frustrated or upset with improvement
because you're not yet at these waypoints.
Better to think about the journey itself as worth experiencing and enjoying.
And Similar to what I said about 2024 at the beginning of this podcast,
your journey through pickleball is something to be savored, right?
It's something to enjoy not just this, okay, now I'm hitting
this particular shot a little bit better than I was six months ago,
it's the first time you do it.
It's even hitting it the wrong way, but realizing, Oh,
now I see what's happening, right?
That little moment of clarity that you get that's the building
block for the next block.
Then maybe making contact with the ball a little differently than you had before and
going, wow, that feels a little different, but I see what's happening.
I feel better about it.
Those little moments as we journey down this path towards growth,
or not towards growth.
Even when I say it, I just said, journey down the path towards growth.
That's not correct.
It's we're journeying down the path of growth.
It's not toward something, it's of.
It's the process itself that we want to be able to enjoy.
We want to be able to enjoy...
I would say it's a more fulfilling experience
to be in a position to enjoy those steps along the way and not just
waiting for the magic line to be crossed so that we can then at that point
go, Oh, okay, now I've gotten there.
Now I have my five minutes of happiness.
Because here's the thing.
There really is nowhere to arrive at.
Here's the best way to really hone this in for you.
I would take it to to wrap your arms around it.
You are currently at a certain place as a player.
Just take a minute to imagine yourself as the player who you want to be.
Picture this player in the future.
It could be a six months from now player, it could be a six year from now player,
however long you want to do it, and however much you want to
add to yourself as a player.
Picture that player for a moment.
What does that player look like?
How does that player hit the ball?
How does that player make decisions on the court?
How does that player anticipate, see the opposition?
All the characteristics that you want to impart to that future you
that is the idealized version of you.
I'm going to have a sip of coffee while you're thinking about it,
because I think it's... Take a minute to think about it.
Place yourself in the future you and who you want to be as a big of a player.
Okay.
Now, we have your future you.
Let's fast forward to future you.
Do you think future you is going to be sitting there going like, Okay, I've
arrived everything's fantastic, and I can be happy now for the rest of my pickleball
career, for the rest of my pickleball journey?
Probably not, right?
Don't you think future you is going to think about a future player again?
Or He's like, Okay, I'm hitting the ball. Fantastic.
I get this shot in an 80% consistency.
I understand what to do in all these situations.
I understand I'm playing amazing.
Don't you know that it's going to be something else after that?
There's going to be 85% consistency or 90% consistency on that one shot.
There's still going to be another situation that's risen that you're not
really sure how to handle that now you have to figure out.
And that's the beauty of pickleball.
There's always something new.
Even the best players in the world, the pro players, they're never done.
So if we know that that future us, the one that we think right
now, if I can just get there, then I'll be satisfied.
That player, too, will have a future player that they will want to get to.
And then that future, future player will want a future, future, future player.
It just keeps going.
And it's infinite.
If you can understand that today, you can avoid the trap of
just hoping to become that future player and then expecting to
be happy at that point.
Be happy now.
Be happy with your current player.
Because here's the other thing, go backward now.
Perhaps you're not satisfied with where you're at right now as a player.
And there's nothing wrong with...
Let's change the word satisfied in a second.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to continue to grow, to knowing that there's
more, and I would like to continue to grow.
That's fantastic.
That's what keeps us going.
That's perhaps the reason why we even exist on the planet, arguably,
is just to do that.
And so There's nothing wrong wanting to grow, and wanting to grow is great.
But the thing we want to avoid is being dissatisfied with where we are now because
we want something more in the future.
It's the same way if you look backward.
My guess is either...
One of these things is true.
Either you hit the ball better than you did a year ago,
you understand the game better than you did a year ago, you can compete at a
higher place than you could a year ago.
Pick a thing, any of those things, you can always say there's something you do now
that you do better than you did a year ago.
But if you're currently dissatisfied with where you are,
then that proves the point, doesn't it?
Because a year ago, you wanted to be where you are now, and then you'd be happy.
But you're where you are now, and you're still waiting for the next
iteration of yourself to be happy. Well, that doesn't make any sense.
And it robs you of the joy.
It robs you of the happiness you can gain from those moments as
you go along, from those small experiences that you have, some good,
some not great, as you go along.
It robs you of the ability to just laugh at yourself when you go out there and
you're working on something and you're just like, Oh, my God,
I can't get this serve in.
No matter what I'm doing, I can't get it in.
That's going to happen sometimes.
You got to be able to laugh at it and just go, Oh, my God, that's just...
Okay, that's silly, but that's just part of being a human being.
And just enjoying those moments that pickleball has, that pickleball
gifts you, that pickleball has for you.
It's a shame not to be able to miss out on those moments.
The metaphor/analogy that I use in the piece I wrote is you're in the car with...
You're the adults in the car with children, and the children
keep asking, Are we there yet? Every two minutes.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Again and again and again.
You're driving through beautiful lands in your countryside, beautiful landscapes and
barns, and just picture whatever you like outside the window of the car, and you
can't see it because you're just like, Are we there yet?
And you're just stressed out about the, are we there yet?
So don't be that little kid to yourself.
Don't be in the back of your brain going like, How come I can't get there?
Why am I not there yet? What's going on?
I need to get there.
This is not a race.
There's no Timer, and there's no magic place to get to, because when you get
there, there's going to be another magic place to get to and another
magic place to get to.
So once you understand that, you go, You know what?
It doesn't make sense for me to ask myself, Am I there yet?
For me to stress myself out about something that I should otherwise be
enjoying about something that I love to do, i.
E.
Play pickleball, hit balls, enjoy the game, grow as a player, all those things.
Embrace those and enjoy those and understand that your journey as a
pickleball player is as long as you choose it to be.
You are in charge of how much you want to grow as a pickleball player, because
pickleball will always, always have something to teach you.
You will never exhaust it.
I mentioned this earlier, not even the pros exhausted.
The best players on the planet have not exhausted pickleball.
Nobody has.
And that's a beauty of sport, of any sport, is we can always continue to grow,
always continue to push ourselves and our understanding and our ability to perform
in the sport of our choosing, which in our case is pickleball.
So in the back of your mind
again and again and again.
Infinite, embrace it, and enjoy every moment.
In the RIF, I'm going to give you an area of the game that I highly recommend
that If you spend some time on in 2025.
You don't have to do it all the time if you don't want to.
It's your choice, but I can tell you that it's from a playing pickle ball.
I'm going to use the term IQ here, but yeah, I'm not even going to use it.
But From playing pickleball at a high pickleball IQ level, it is
going to pay huge dividends for you if you decide to add that to your
repertoire in 2025 as your focus.
As we dive into the RIF, please consider
your paddle and equipment and pickleball item using Pickleball Central as your
primary resource for those items.
We have partnered up with P pickleball Central.
We've known P pickleball Central for years.
They're a fantastic provider.
They're number one for a reason.
And you also get to support this podcast as well as our other content efforts to
share with your knowledge about P pickleball.
So if you go to betterpickleball.
Com and just click on the Resources tab, you'll get the most The recent code that
we have, and if there's an applicable discount, you'll get it.
There's no reason not to type it in.
So you type it in, get your discount if it applies, and by using the link, pickleball
Central will know that we sent you to them.
So appreciate you doing that.
All right, now that we're in the RIF, I want to talk to you about one area of the
game that you should at least consider adding to your
work or to your improvement process in 2025, and that is the soft game.
I mentioned it in a couple of things that I've written
recently, but basically, there's a lot of noise out there.
You can't get away from this idea that the soft game is dead.
That's what you keep on hearing.
Frankly, to be fair, we do expect that the game will continue to get harder,
meaning there's going to be players trying to do more with hard shots because of
paddle technology and things like That's going to happen.
That does not translate to the soft game is dead.
They're two entirely different...
Not entirely different, but they're two sides of the coin, if you will.
There's the hard game.
The hard game is going to continue to get harder.
That does not mean the soft game is not valuable and useful as a
tool when you're playing.
When you think about pickleball, I've been watching some Padel lately.
Padel is the sport where you play inside the four glass walls, like a
tennis with four glass walls.
This ball is a little bit mushier.
But they have a strategy they use for lobbying.
They use a lot of lobbying in Padel.
And the reason they use lobbying is they don't have a non-volley zone.
So The players can stand right at the net.
Their belly buttons can be almost like touching the net.
They're just standing there waiting to smash balls.
So they use lobs to push those players back, and then they come in, and it's the
sea salt, back and forth to see who can control the front.
A dinkable, however, has a non-volley zone, right?
And that is the most relevant feature of the construction of our game.
It's the non-volley zone.
If we did not have a non-volley zone, we would play an entirely different game.
We would never talk about dinking.
Third shot is a dink, right? It's just a long dink.
But we would never talk about those shots because they'd be nonsense, right?
How are you going to dink a ball when you got a player standing at the net, they can
just smash it or drop it or do whatever they want, right?
He'll drop it or angle it.
You can never hit a ball like that.
But we do have a non-volley zone.
So the idea that we're going to play a game that does not use a non-volley
zone makes absolutely no sense.
So in 2025, I highly encourage you to look at the
soft game, part of your overall game, and consider adding that
into your game or working on it more if you haven't worked on it in a while.
It's nice to have roll volleys and sexy shots and hard shots and all that stuff.
That This is not going to let you play the best pickleball you can within the
framework of the sport of pickleball.
If you want to get more advice in this area, you can join us inside
our Pickleball System course. We have a class opening up in March.
I know it's a couple of months away, but it's nothing in real-time.
If you're as old as I am, you know that two months will be tomorrow.
So be on the lookout for our system course in March.
And then in the meantime, the Better Pickleball Academy will get you started
down that path as I'll be it without the depth of the system.
It's just a different type of experience.
The system being a year-long course, like for reels, reels, reels, and
the academy being more like a do it yourself, but knowing that the content
that you're getting is the highest quality content you can get online for your
pickleball knowledge.
You can check those out at betterpickleball.
Com.
Whatever you do, do not sleep on the soft game in 2025, would be my advice.
The more that I study the game, the more that I think about the game, and the more
I teach the game, the more apparent it is to me that the soft game is the central
feature of our game and continues to be the most reductive form of our game.
If you were going to play any part of our game at its highest level,
it would be the soft game. Just watch the pros.
That's what they do.
All right, that is this week's podcast and the first podcast of 2025.
I hope you enjoyed it.
If you enjoyed it, as always, consider rating and reviewing it
and share it with your friends.
Remember, if you enjoyed this podcast, they probably will, too.
To a great 2025, because it will be. Why?
Because we'll be in it just experiencing it.
Be well, and I'll see you next week.