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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.
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. We are all about helping you achieve your Pickleball goals with a focus on the mental part of your game. No matter what you're trying to accomplish in Pickleball, Pickleball therapy is here for you. My name is Tony Roy, I am your host and it's a pleasure to be with you here for this episode.
Last week we talked some practicality, right? We talked about what do we do in open play when we are partnered with a player who may be, create a little bit of an imbalance on the court in terms of being a quote unquote weaker player on the court and being targeted. How do we deal with that? We have a chance to check that one out.
Go back and check that one out, give you some tips on how to deal with those situations. And it's not all, all hope isn't lost when you're playing in an imbalance situation out there. This week, we're going to shift gears back to the back, to the mind, and back to how we perceive our relationship with this sport, right? When we're playing and there's,
it's a common trap that we fall into, which is, what did we do wrong there? Right? And we're gonna talk about that 'cause, you know, we did something wrong. We always do something wrong. Ah, we don't. But we're gonna get into this week's podcast. Before we jump into the podcast, a couple of quick notes. Number one,
we have a course in our academy that deals with unforced errors. So if you're worried about hitting, making unforced errors, and listen, we all make unforced errors. It's part of the game. What we, all we can do is reduce the unforced errors in our game. If you wanna learn some really good tips on how to reduce round force errors,
check out that course inside the Pickleball Academy, we're trying to bring you some courses that will help you, in particular parts of the game, specific parts of the game. And these courses are supplemental or adjunct, if you want to think about it that way. To our Pickleball system course. Pickleball system being everything you need to know to play awesome Pickleball,
step by step. And the academy being, you know, more specialized kind of detail areas that, that we explore a little further. You can think about almost like, you know, you go to college, you get your degree, that's a Pickleball system. You wanna go get a PhD course or a master's degree or something like that. You can go check out courses inside the academy,
and Unfor services is no exception. So you can check that one out at better Pickleball dot com. And if you have a second, it really helps us out. If you rate and review the podcast, if you've already done it, we appreciate it. If you haven't done it yet, take a minute. If you have a moment of your time to rate and review it,
it really helps us reach other players who just like you may benefit from hearing the words in our podcast. Alright, let's dive into the subject this week, which is, I kinda like the title of it, right? So, you know, what, what, what you did wrong, right? What you, because you certainly did something wrong, right?
I mean, that's how we're always seeing things out there. And, and I, I'll tell you a a a funny story that, that a funny educational story, right? That learning story that happens in every camp that we teach. You know, we're, we're in our Tampa camps right now, and if you're ever interested in one of our camps,
we have have, this year, we're gonna have more camps than we did last year. We're doing some camps in Folsom. I know we have some camps in Tahoe, obviously, and there may be some other ones out there. We'll see. But right now, those are the ones that you have available to you. You can go check that out at better Pickleball dot com.
But what happens at all our camps is we'll have a coach play session on day two. And coach play means, you know, we, we give instructions. We, we play very controlled the deliberate games that are intended to teach the subject that we're working on, right? To focus on that and to see how players are doing with it. And,
and CJ myself and the Better pickle, better, better Pickleball coaching team will walk around and, and, and assess right, what's going on and get feedback. So what'll happen is towards the end of day two, I'll walk around and I'll see a situation where the play, the play was awesome, right? I mean, it was nice rally, good rally,
you know, 10, 12, 13, 14 shots, rally ended, right? All rallies have to end and I'll walk onto the court and I'll bring everybody to the net. By then, the campers already know that, that's part of the process. So I'll come out to the court, everybody comes out to the net, and I'll just ask open ended. I'll say, alright,
what, what went wrong there? What happened? Right? And it's almost without, without fault, without exception, I should say that all four players on the court say, they look at me and they're like, what did I do wrong? So their initial reaction, right, of all four players is, I did something wrong. I wonder what Coach Tony's gonna tell me I did wrong in that rally.
And it's an interesting psychology, right? That all four players are thinking that each one of them did something, must have done something wrong, right? Because of course they did. That rally ended and something, some mistake was made in those situations. What I'll tell the students is nobody did anything wrong. Everybody was, everything's fine, rally ended, right?
So, you know, certainly someone missed a shot or, or there was a put away or something, right? But that doesn't mean that somebody had to do something wrong. And it's, it's a framing kind of a thing, right? It's, it's, it's trying to always find fault in what we do and how we play. And I'm here to tell you that many times when you think that you did something wrong,
you may not have done anything wrong. Okay? Now, I'm not saying that mistakes, you're not gonna make mistakes, okay? That's, that'd be silly. And part of this process is accepting that mistakes are part of the game. And we're gonna commit mistakes. And I'm gonna talk about those in a second and give you some tips on how to process that information when you do,
when you do make a mistake. But I want you to start from the premise that oftentimes when you're thinking I did something wrong or I made a mistake, it's a decent chance that you did not in fact make a mistake or do anything wrong, okay? And, and in these situations that I'm describing to you at the camps, these are situations where there's nothing to point out to any player.
Everybody battled, everybody did their jobs. The rally just ended, yet all four players for a lot of times, sometimes it's three, but it's oftentimes all four are sitting there going, okay, I know I did something wrong. I I'm sure I did something wrong. And so there's this negative tendency or negative bent to it immediately. And that's something that can be damaging because if you're always looking for something wrong,
that you did something wrong, every rally, it's just really difficult to play that way, right? And to have a good time. So start from the premise that was, I, did I really do something wrong there or not? And I'm gonna give you a quick, an easy example of one that's oftentimes not the, not something you did wrong.
And that is when you say to yourself, I needed to have my paddle ready. And I'll give you a, a quick real life example that happened a week ago when I was playing in that group. Good players, all four, five plus players, you know, solid group. And there was a, a, our opponents popped the ball up,
one opponent popped the ball up, and the other opponent got smashed, got obliterated by my, my partner just smashed the ball and, you know, won the rally against the oth, not the player who popped it up, but the partner. And the partner's reaction was, I need to have my paddle ready, I gotta have my paddle ready. He kept on,
you know, like he was upset at himself. And so me and my partner look at him and go, man, it nothing to do with you. That was, that was a slam ball at, you know, point blank range. And even his partner, I was like, you didn't do anything wrong. I fed him a, a pop-up and put it away.
But the, in the instant reaction of the player who got slammed was, I needed to have my paddle ready. That's a really easy one. That's almost like, like just, it's almost like a trap plant. I don't know. Now I'm get into gardening, but it's like, it's like it, we're attracted, it's so easy to conclude that,
right? That I needed to have my, I should have my paddle ready because I missed the shot coming my way, even though it was getting slammed at me at seven oh miles an hour at point blank range by a player. I had nothing to do with the situation that created that, but it's my fault because I didn't have my paddle ready. So that's a,
that's an easy one to, to really question yourself if, you know, whenever you say, ah, I need to have my paddle up, I didn't have my paddle ready. Was that really the, the, the reason? So, you know, give yourself some a break. Give yourself a little bit of a break here when you think you might've made a a mistake.
So I want you to start from the premise that you know, you, you're, you are gonna make mistakes. And then I want you to, the next step in this process is I'm gonna make mistakes, but did I really make a mistake that particular time? Or am I just projecting a mistake unto myself even though it wasn't really a mistake that I made?
And I'm gonna here to tell you that you can lose a rally and not have made a mistake, not a mistake that needs to be addressed, right? Or needs to be thought about. And my case for this is a very simple case, which is pro play. When you watch pro play matches, and these are the best players on the planet there,
rallies end, okay? Their rallies come to an end, they don't play indefinitely, right? And so if their rallies come to an end, does that mean by definition or by extension that one player, some player on the court is a knucklehead or they did something silly or s something like that. Oftentimes the answer is no. It's just nice rally.
It had to end and it ended and we're done having the conversation about it. Now, there's a lot of other, there's a lot of other ways to kind of approach this in our camps and inside the Pickleball system, we, we give you a bunch of different ways to kind of think more constructively about how to analyze post game, post rally situations to determine whether you need to think further or whether you're done with the,
with the analysis. But generally speaking, I'm here to tell you that there's a lot of times when you're trying to find fault somewhere yourself or anything or fault simply does not need to be found where everything is fine and the rally just ended. So, so start from those premises, okay? And then I want you to think about the fact that, that you know,
that, that you are gonna make mistakes. The question is when you make a mistake and when you, when it is correct to keep thinking about it, right? So I made a mistake and I need to give some thought to this mistake, then what you want to do is be constructive with that process. It does not help you to simply say,
I made a mistake, and then go down some path of I'm a terrible player, I'm an idiot. I can't believe I'm so stupid. Whatever, whatever damaging kind of language you may use, sometimes that's not helpful. I'm not gonna do anything for you. And it's certainly not gonna avoid you from making that mistake again in the future. You're just beating yourself up.
Then what you wanna do to be constructive is you can do, I'm gonna give you two ideas. One is if it's a mistake that you can fix in the moment, if you know how to do that right? And inside the system we call that, you know, knowing how to fix your, your, your errors in real time, because I'm gonna go back and repeat this.
Errors will happen, you'll make mistakes. There's no way to avoid that. Even the best players make mistakes in their game. If you know how to make, how to correct the mistake in real time, then correct the mistake in the, during the game. And what I mean by that is, let's say it's a mechanical error. So you missed a return of serve,
you know, missing a return of serve a lot of times, yeah, that's one that you gotta introspect, right? 'cause it's a return of serve. You know, unless something really weird happened with the ball bounce or something, you know, you have control over that shot a lot of control over that shot. So that's something that you can influence.
And if you miss return of serve, there's nobody else on the court who's involved in that other than you, again, assuming not a weird bounce or anything. So let's say you have a missed return of serve. So you're thinking, okay, I missed a return of serve step number one, I'm gonna observe, right? I observe that I missed a return of serve.
I've now made the decision. Okay, I need to think about that for a second because that is something that is something that I, that's a mistake that I made and that's okay, but it's something that I can, I can do something about. And if I can do something about in that game, then what I'll do is I'll think to myself,
okay, I missed return surf. Was it where I was standing? Was it my foundation? Was it my stroke mechanic? You go through a, a mechanical analysis where you break down the, the shot, and if you're a system member, you know how to do this. It's all inside your mechanical pillar. There's the steps in there. So you basically go through that,
those, that process of thinking through the shot, and then you say it, you know, work backward to figure out the problem. And then you try and, and avoid making the same error the next time that you go return serve. Okay? So that's one way you can constructively deal with feedback that you made a mistake. The other thing that you can do is if you're not able to correct it in real time,
meaning during that game, just make a note of it, right? Make a mental note, maybe after the game, make a little note on your phone or write it down on a pad or something, right? You know, I'm, I need to work on my return of serve. Then you will find the resources that will help you work on your return of serve.
You'll put in the work and you'll work on your return of serve. That's a constructive way of dealing with the feedback that will naturally come when you invariably make a mistake. Because you will invariably make mistakes, even the best players on the planet. Make mistakes. What we wanna do is we wanna not blow it out of proportion. Think of that we're making mistakes all the time,
because that is likely not the case. And we then wanna be constructive with how we deal with the feedback, or how we handle the feedback when we do in fact make a mistake. The key here is to not allow mistakes to become bigger than they are, right? That's why we keep perspective in terms of, you know, how often is this really happening?
And also not to allow mistakes to become a negative in our game and in our relationship with Pickleball. Because at the end of the day, what this is about, it's about having the best and most and the best and healthiest relationship that we can with the sport that we love, which is the sport of Pickleball. I hope this podcast helps you next time you play,
and if you're on your way to the court listening to it, fantastic. Try and apply that today. This is a podcast episode that you should probably bookmark because this is the kind of podcast episode. If you feel that you're a player that's always making mistakes and you're always messing up and you're just a disaster out there, and I, I say a disaster in terms of how you're viewing yourself.
It's nothing to do how you're playing, right? 'cause you're, you're not seeing things clearly. This is a really good episode for you to bookmark and for you to come back to more than once so that you can work on this process of being more constructive with your mistakes. I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. As always, share this podcast with your friends.
There's a lot of players out there who could benefit from having a better understanding of the mistakes that they're making and how they're not as many as they think, and how to deal with 'em constructively. And if this podcast is helping you and making you feel better about your Pickleball, I'm gonna bet you it's gonna help them. As always, keep enjoying this beautiful gift,
this beautiful game that we have that we call Pickleball. And I'll see you next time.