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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.
[00:00:00.580] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. Pickleball Therapy is brought to you by betterpickleball. Com. We are part of the betterpickleball. Com family. So this is where the podcast originates from. I have your host, Tony Reuig. I hope you're having a great week. This is a special episode of the podcast. There's a new book out on the market called The pickleball Mindset, which is written by my fellow senior professional, pickleball player, Dayne Gingrich, and his co-author, Jill Martin. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Jill Martin yet, but she's a fellow attorney, so I'm assuming we get along fantastic. Unless we're in court, I guess, and then on opposite side, then we have to argue with each other, as attorneys do. But I wanted to give you my thoughts about the book, and then at the end of the podcast, I'll give you my verdict on whether I think it's worthwhile to dive into this book, if you haven't done so already. I had a chance to read the book over the last 10 days or so. I had some time and was able to get through the book.
[00:01:04.800] - Speaker 1
Overall, I thought the book had some nice nuggets in it, and I'm going to share those with you. There's a couple of areas that I think maybe could have been developed a little more in-depth, maybe, or explained a little differently. Then I'll give you some thoughts in terms of who the audience of the book might be best suited for this book. Let's dive to the podcast. As I do, if you're listening to this podcast, anytime near its publication, we do have some camp openings coming up for a better pick-a-well camp. If you're looking for a camp opportunity. There aren't that many in the year. If it's your time for camp, join CJ, me, and our other awesome coaches at one of our camps. All right, let's dive into the book here in terms of what I thought was, and I'm going basically in the order that the book developed its concepts and then telling you what I think about it. One of the first concepts that Dayne and Jill address is they talk about Stop chasing the Wind and Finding your Purpose. If you listen to this podcast at all, then you know that we are big fans of that concept, which is wins, losses, and things like that just aren't how you should define your relationship with pickleball.
[00:02:28.850] - Speaker 1
It's a really limiting way of thinking about the sport and thinking more importantly about yourself inside the sport. I thought that was a really good starting point, good place to start from, finding your purpose in play. We asked the question on the podcast and in other teachings that we do, why do you play pickleball? Then once you're clear on that, then everything else becomes secondary, because as long as you're getting what you came for, you're in good shape. I thought that was a really good concept. This was my biggest takeaway, I think, from the book. I think this was the biggest concept These sorts of books tend to have a concept that's the big one. For instance, if you read Tim Galway's Book, The Enter game of Tennis, the idea of self-one, self-two, that was, to me anyway, that was the defining lesson from that book, Josh Waisen's book, The Art of Learning, the idea of being the anorexic hermit crab, I thought was a really good takeaway. This idea of pre-acceptance was a really good concept, a really A interesting way of presenting it, a really interesting way of coming at it. The idea basically is that you pre-accept any outcome.
[00:03:36.360] - Speaker 1
Now, Dayne and Jill are clear about this. They're not suggesting to you that you roll over and go, Well, I'm going to lose, so it's fine. It's not that pre-acceptance. It's just that he's pre-accepting that anything can happen in a pickleball game just like in life. Nothing is guaranteed. So pre-accepting is going to make you much more amenable to whatever the outcome actually is. I thought that was a really, really powerful concept in the book. Frankly, I'll give you my whole verdict in a second, but just to get that pre-acceptance concept alone, I think it's worth reading the book and reading that section on pre-acceptance, the way it's explained and the way it's brought. I think it's really valuable. Dayne has always been a very big proponent of visualization. I knew this from before the book, not just from his writings, but also I've played against Dayne at the US Open. I know how he carries himself when he plays, and visualization is a big part of his success as a We use visualization as well inside better pickleball, inside the pickle system, inside our athletic pillar, inside our camps, the ones I mentioned earlier.
[00:04:37.420] - Speaker 1
Visualization is super, super, super, super, super It just continues to... It's just a reminder of the power of visualization in your pickleball performance. The next one had to do with confidence and choosing confidence. I thought that was a fine idea in the book, choosing confidence. Obviously, that's great. I wasn't really sure that that one landed in the book, meaning the methodology for doing that. Let me be clear, I'm offering my position or my views on these things. It's not intended as a criticism of Dayne or Jill. I remember a few years ago listening to a gentleman speaking about how it's much easier to criticize than it is to create. The idea being that, say you write a poem or a play or a book or anything, that's hard. Creating from scratch a new product, that's difficult. Critiquing it, that's easy. But I promise you a review, so I am going to give you a review. But again, none of the things I say meant as a criticism. I think the idea of choosing confidence was a good one. It's sound. I endorse that. I'm just not sure that that approach is bear fruit for many players because if it was If we could just choose confidence, that'd be easy.
[00:06:02.930] - Speaker 1
That'd be great. Then the next one had to do with turning pressures to opportunities or reframing. The confidence in the next one, Instead of looking at it as pressure, looking at it as opportunities or reframing them as opportunities, again, it could be valuable. It may resonate with you and you may say, You know what? This really helps me out because I can take pressure and I can move it towards opportunity. That's fine. I would view this as a good middle step along your journey, your mental improvement journey. We believe that there's a bigger shift available to you beyond moving pressure to opportunity. There's another step in the process that will take you further with your overall mental growth. Again, if you've been a long time listening to the podcast, you've heard different episodes that talk about this, and we'll be exploring more in that and the book that we'll be publishing in the next, I hope in a couple of months. It just seems like never-ending. I'm sure Dayne and Jill would agree with that, that it just seems to drag on, just in terms of edits and things like that. But in any event, again, pressure and opportunity, good idea, but we would suggest that you can go further than that.
[00:07:14.950] - Speaker 1
Overall, the end of the book, I'm not going to review it too much because the end of the book, it was basically dedicated more to tournament play and partner selection. The partner selection stuff I thought was interesting, the idea of partner energy. He called it synergy or they call this energy, which is a fine concept as well. It's not sufficiently, I think, talked about the idea that when you're playing doubles, the energy between partners is absolutely critical to your performance. If you have If you have a drain, an energy drain by one partner, not just of themselves, but of the other player, that's deadly to your success as a doubles team. That concept, I think, exploring that concept is super valuable. The reason I say it's more for tournament or competitive to play is because many players, when you're playing in open place and things like that, you can't control who your partner is in that situation. Obviously, that partner selection isn't going to be useful for you. It's a good concept. It's a great concept, but it's not going to be a practical application to many. Then there was a lot of the book that was dedicated to tournament play.
[00:08:21.340] - Speaker 1
Again, not a criticism, perfectly fine. I mean, there's a lot of tournament players out there and having tournament concepts explained to you by I'm going to focus on Dayne more than Jill here, just because Dayne has been playing tournaments for a long time at the highest level with a lot of success. Obviously, Dayne's ideas about tournament play are going to be super valuable to tournament players. That's something that will help you if you're playing tournaments. Frankly, also if you're playing competitive play. It doesn't only have to be tournaments, but if you're playing a lot of league, team league, ladder league, any competitive play that you're significantly involved in, those sections of the book will resonate more with you and be more used to you as you try to be more competitive as a doubles team. One other thing I would mention about the book that may influence how you feel about it is it's written in two voices, and that's not a bad thing. It's just written in two voices. It's written in Dayne's voice and then in Jill's voice. For some of you, you may enjoy that back and forth where you have one voice and one perspective, one framing, and then you have a different voice coming in.
[00:09:34.070] - Speaker 1
They do something interesting, and I read it in a Kindle. I'm assuming that the print book looks the same, but the type is different. When you're hearing Dayne's voice is in one type and Jill's another voice, which I thought was cool way of presenting it. But you may or may not like that style. That's more of a stylistic thing for you. I would say overall verdict, I would recommend reading the book if you are on a journey of mental training, mental growth. I would suggest to you that with few exceptions, there's almost no book that is not worth reading. The way I said, it may sound like a slide. I didn't mean to sound like a slight on this book. What I mean to say is, well, let me put it this way. If the book didn't have anything to offer to you, I would say pass on it. But the book has plenty to offer to you. The idea of pre-acceptance, some of the concepts there. Again, even the switching pressure to opportunity may very well resonate with you and be that little push that you need in the positive direction. I find that all the books that I've read in this space have something to teach.
[00:10:48.890] - Speaker 1
I would say even a book like Brad Gilbert's book, Winning ugly, I felt was a book that was maybe the bent on it was a little bit too heavy, skewed towards the high-level competitive player like Brad Gilbert. If you're playing at the US Open, yeah, read Brad Gilbert's book. If you're not, I don't know. But even that book, I think, had enough in there to learn something, to add something to the conversation if you're on your mental process journey. I think this book has, frankly, more to offer you than Brad Gilbert's book does in terms of Winningugly, or the one called Winningugly, because I think this book has several concepts that I was pleasantly surprised to to read in there and to learn in there, like that pre-acceptance. Again, I won't come back to it because I think that's, to me, the biggest takeaway from the book was this idea of pre-acceptance and the way that Dayne and Jill explained that in the book. If you're on a journey, pick up a copy of the book. It's available on Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes, and we'll put it in our... If you go to betterpickupall.
[00:11:51.000] - Speaker 1
Com under Resources, we'll include it in our Amazon page so that you don't have to go hunting around for it. All right, I hope you enjoyed this special episode, Reviewing Pickleball Mindset by Dayne and Jill, and I thank them for adding their voices to this conversation. I would suggest adding their voices constructively and helpfully, positively, right in this conversation and helping all of us athletes who happen to play a sport called pickleball in our mental improvement journey. I hope to see you this Friday during our regular episode of Pickleball Therapy. Just so you have it on your calendars, make sure that you have July... I'm not going to remember now. It's mid-July. Just put that mid-July there. We're going to have our Pickleball Summit, so put it on your calendars. It's, in July. Put that on your calendars. Make sure you have it marked off so you can join us for our pickleball Summit. I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you this Friday during your regular episode of pickleball Therapy. Be well.