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The podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We are here to help you achieve your pickleball goals, with a focus on the mental part of your game. Our mission is to share with you a positive and more healthy way of engaging with pickleball. Together let’s forge a stronger relationship with the sport we all love. With the added benefit of playing better pickleball too. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your pickleball journey, Pickleball Therapy is here to encourage and support you.
[00:00:04.980] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to PickleballTherapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickle improvement. Hope you're having a great week. My name is Tony Roig. I'm your host of this weekly podcast. We have been in camps the last three weeks. It's been a pretty hectic but amazing three weeks for us to be able to coach so many players. We're right now in the midst of our super camp, really enjoying the experience. We have 24 amazing players on the court, four four coaches on the court, one coach helping admin and also run some stuff. It's just a really amazing... A lot of energy, some eyes opening, some connections being made. That's always a wonderful thing. Last week's podcast, we touched a sensitive subject. We talked about something... When I say sensitive, it's not sensitive in the way that shouldn't be talked about or anything. It's just something that is maybe a nerve, and received a a lot of feedback so far about the podcast. If you haven't listened to it, it's How's Your Sister Doing? I highly recommend you check it out. It's intended for listeners of all genders. And one thing you can do with an episode like that, if it lands, is you can always bookmark episodes like that, right?
[00:01:19.240] - Tony Roig
So you bookmark it, and then in the future, if it's going to be helpful to you or you want to share with somebody else who might benefit from it, you can do that. So that's just an idea for you there. I'm going to dive right into this week's podcast. This week's podcast was one of our students. I won't share her name because I just haven't had a chance to ask her if it's okay to share it, but I appreciate you sending this question in, and I appreciate, obviously, the opportunity to coach you as one of our students. But the question was that had to do with playing, basically, mixed doubles with your spouse or life partner. It's something that I've played a lot of mixed doubles in my life, and I've played many years with my wife, Jill. For many years, we played mixed doubles together, and so I have some insights on it, and also I've studied it with other players. But what's interesting is that I title this Mixed Troubles because it's not called mixed troubles for nothing. It can be a point of stress, right? And oftentimes, when life partners also play pickleball together, what transpires on the court, the things that are going on the court, oftentimes may have nothing to do with what's going on on the court, may have everything to do with what's going on off the court.
[00:02:37.440] - Tony Roig
So it presents its own set of challenges. But I am of the opinion that if you That pickleball... If you listen to the podcast, you know that I have this idea that using pickleball as a canvas for yourself, for your growth, mental growth, emotional growth, physical well-being, all those types of things. So the same concept would apply to interpersonal relationships, including with your spouse or life partner, where you can work on becoming stronger as a couple through a pickleball, assuming that you do it in a constructive way, not a negative, toxic way, but in a constructive way. So I have a few suggestions that I'm going to share with you this week, and let me know in the comments to the podcast. I believe Spotify has a comment section If you're on YouTube, I know there's comments. So if you have comments or ideas that you've dealt with, let me know in the comments. And maybe there's enough of those, I'll gather those and share those in part two on this, because I think this is really valuable stuff. I will tell you that these ideas aren't exclusive to life partners. If you're playing with a partner regularly in pickleball, these ideas could help you as well.
[00:03:54.300] - Tony Roig
All right, the first suggestion I'm going to have for you is to have a communication plan. We talk a lot about In pickleball, in general, we talk a lot about strategic clarity. You have clarity with your partner. This is how we're going to come at the game. This is what we're going to do. But what about a communication plan? What about a plan where you know clearly how you're going to communicate with each other, what's acceptable and what's preferred, things like that. For instance, you could have a conversation, obviously, before you get on the court, and this should be a process over time that you really lock this down, again, with a lifetime partner, which is you can or cannot make player strategic suggestions to me when we Some players are open to it, so the players, it locks them down. Just having that understanding can help. You can have your preferences communicated. I prefer that you communicate to me in this manner, and I prefer you not speak to me in this manner. So a different thing. And then you have a trigger word or a safe word that locks it down. I put in potato chips on the thing that I wrote here.
[00:04:53.920] - Tony Roig
So any term that isn't like, why did you miss that shot? Or why did you hit the ball there? That can shut it down. I'll tell you, this wasn't a... I was a friend that I was playing with. It wasn't a life partner of mine. But I can tell you that a friend of mine who I was playing with who had a very effective way of communicating to me during the match though, but just to give you an idea, during the match, we were in a competitive mixed doubles match. It was a nice match, very tense in a good way, meaning it was a good match. It was a contested match. I remember that we were going to take a time out, and as soon as I take a time out, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go, Okay, here's what we're going to do. And she looked at me and she said... She'd already figured that out about me. She looked at me and said, I need 20 seconds, and then you can come talk to me. I thought it was a very cool way of carving out the space that she needed for herself, to regroup, and then come to me and have the conversation.
[00:05:50.530] - Tony Roig
So you can use any of those things, but I think it's really important to have an agreement before you get on the court, because if things start going sideways, this is... Obviously, what we're talking about here is when things go sideways, because if things are rosy and everything's great, then you don't need this podcast, or this episode of the podcast, I should say. But when you have that moment of, they don't think you're going sideways, then it's very powerful for one of you to say to the other one, Hey, remember we agreed, and then you fill in the blank, whatever the agreement was. It's very powerful in that moment, because as human beings, I think we have this, it's built into us to say, Oh, yeah, we did talk about that. So I'm going to abide by that as opposed to like you're throwing a new curve ball at me. So communication plan is helpful. Second one is to have a strategic plan, which is basically the better you can understand what each one of you is going to be doing, I'm be kicking the thirds, you'll be going up to the net to attack.
[00:06:48.380] - Tony Roig
I'll go back for the lobs. Let me take behind you on the short lobs. I'll come behind you. I'll handle the middle of the non-volley zone. All those types of things, strategically, will really make it easier for you to play together. I think this one's really powerful, everybody. It's that you will, and all caps on will, you will miss. I'm going to let you sit with that for a second. I mean, you will miss. And guess what? Your partner is going to miss, too. And in this case, it's your life partner, your spouse, your life partner. That player is going to miss as well. So having that understanding that you're going to miss and going into the game understanding that they're going to miss, will reduce the angst that you feel when that miss invariably occurs. And we have this idea that we came up with this Oops Bucket idea. I'll put a link down in the show notes. If you listened to the episode before, go back and check it out again. We'll put a link in the show notes to that episode, and you can check it out when you're done with this episode.
[00:07:57.560] - Tony Roig
If you're not sure how to handle those misses and how to put them in that Oops Bucket. The next idea is to play selfishly. I've gotten to a stage in my life where I don't use the term selfishly in a negative way. It has no negative connotation the way I'm using it. Here, I'm using the term selfishly here is, think about what you want. What you want, and I'm talking now specifically to the game you're playing, not what you want in life and peace on the planet and all those types of things, which is a great thing to want. But in this match, in this game that you're playing with your partner, what is it you want? I'm guessing you want to give yourself the best chance to be successful. You're playing in a team sport with another player who in this case happens to be your life partner. But looking If you look at it selfishly, you want to win. Give yourself the best chance to win. And there's nothing wrong with that, with striving to win. We've talked before about how winning as a metric isn't good, but that doesn't mean you don't give it your all.
[00:08:55.660] - Tony Roig
I mean, you try. So if you are going to work toward giving yourself the best chance to be successful in that situation, you need your partner. You need your partner to play their best. You need your partner to feel that they can play their best. So work through that for a second. What's the best way to get the most out of your partner in a positive, in a way that they're going to perform the best that they can perform that day? Probably not if you're rolling your eyes, slumping your shoulders, going, What was that? Probably not going to play great. And the pressure is going to continue to mount, and the pressure is actually coming from you, their partner. So if you look at it just selfishly for a second, I think you can also look at it saunder or empathetically, Hey, I want the best for this person. I love this person. I care for this person. I want the best for this person. But even setting that aside for a second, if you want to give yourself the best chance for winning, play selfishly. And the way to play selfishly is to support your partner, is to be a positive impact on your partner, because then you're more likely to get the best out of partner, which in turn gives you the best chance to win that game.
[00:10:04.580] - Tony Roig
And then the last piece of advice I'm going to give you, and there's a YouTube video that I'll link to down below, but you can also search it on the IntuPickle channel. Intupickle is always I am the number two pickle. It's what I've I refer to as the Hackenberg Rule. These are friends up in Michigan that are super senior, like top super senior players. They're Hall of Famers in pickleball. They're just an amazing couple, Jim and Yvonne Hackenberg up in Michigan. They've been at this for a minute playing pickleball, and they've been at sport for a minute, both of them. And they play mixed levels together at the highest level, at the super senior level, and they're very successful doing it. So I watched them at the US Open. This has to be seven years ago now or something like that. And I remember watching them play, and they always had physical contact between them after every rally, win or lose, right? Now, winning rally is easy, right? Everybody's happy. We're going to might even hug or whatever. But the tough ones are when you lose the rally, right? Or when, not just lose a rally, but maybe one of you did something that the other one maybe thought could have been done differently, right?
[00:11:11.740] - Tony Roig
And so that's the moment when this rule shines. I noticed, I started thinking about it and I go, there's a ton of research on this, by the way. This is not a new thing. Physical contact between teammates increases chance of success. They've done studies with basketball, probably other sports, too. But I know the basketball one I've seen now before, where Basically, high-fiving teams generally perform better than non-high-fiving teams. It's that physical connection with your teammate, super powerful. There's also the research in the non-sport side, where you talk about looking at your significant other in the eyes, and when you're upset or hugging them, it diffuses everything. So this does both for you, because you're playing with your life partner. So the idea here is, it's not a paddle tap, folks. It is literal physical contact between you two, and there needs to be a general. There needs to be someone who's in charge. In Jim and Yvonne's case, it's Yvonne who's in charge. Yvonne will stand there with her arm out, and until Jim touches her arm, she's not moving anywhere. They can forfeit the match, no matter, because their relationship is more important than whatever is happening on the pickleball court, and she understands that.
[00:12:17.680] - Tony Roig
So the Hackenberg Rule, check it out on IntuPickle. Again, I'll put a link in the show notes to it, but it's a powerful tool that you can use. It doesn't cost you anything, and it gets you to more physical contact with your life partner. So I hope this helps Let's answer or give you some ideas to help you become stronger partners with your spouse or life partner. You can use these tips as well in non-spouse, non-life partner situations. Physical contact, we have this, I don't know, it's not taboo, but it's like limitation on it in our society a little bit, but I don't see any problem with it. But certainly, you can paddle tap if you're not comfortable doing that. I'm a big paddle tapper when I play. Players who play with me for the first time, and we have some open place down here that I go to, it freaks them out, but I'm out there tapping paddles, man. Tatten paddles, tatten paddles. I don't care if they miss a shot. I'm like, Guys, tap paddles, man. Let's go. Keep it going. So show the love out there, whether it's your spouse or life partner or not.
[00:13:15.720] - Tony Roig
That's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. As always, if you have a minute to rate and review the podcast wherever you're listening to it, really appreciate you doing that. If you haven't yet picked up a copy of Pickable Therapy, the book, highly recommend it to you. And as always, if you enjoy this podcast, if it does something for you, for your game, for how you feel about the sport, please consider sharing it with your friends because if it helps you, if it makes you feel better about the sport, it's probably going to help them, too. I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you all on the next episode of Pickleball Therapy. Be well.