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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.
[00:00:00.250] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We'll be having a great week. This week in our regular episode, we are going to wrap up the series that we've been working on in terms of setting the right baseline for ourselves. The key here is basically it's grounding ourselves in reality. We're going to talk about it some more today. But the idea is, let's find a way to evaluate our performance. This is the key, performance in a way that is productive and healthy and good for us. That's what we're going to talk about in today's podcast. Every week, we've been encouraging you to rate and review our podcast. I'm going to do it again this week because, again, it's important to us to try and reach as many players as we can. If we can ask you if you haven't done it recently, if you have a minute, please go in there and rate and review wherever you listen to it. Also, if you haven't subscribed to the channel on YouTube and you happen to be a YouTube watcher or a viewer, please go on to the channel, pickleball Therapy, and subscribe there as well.
[00:01:00.350] - Speaker 1
Help us get that number up. The algorithm is all about numbers, and so we got to play that game so that we can get in front of other players just like you. In a minute, I'll share a shoutout that we received, but We're going to start jumping into the podcast. I'll share the shoutout before the RIF. Before we jump in, I do want to let you know, if you haven't yet signed up for it, we're in the middle of a live game study series. If you have never done a live game study, I cannot recommend it enough to you. You will be able to learn a lot more about pickleball. And in the RIF today, I'm going to talk about seeing the game, which is a concept that is maybe foreign to you, but when you're able to see the game, it just really changes how you engage with the sport of pickleball. So we'll talk about that a little more in the Rift. There's a link in the show notes where you can go and sign up for the live game study if you care to do that. I cannot tell you how much fun it is.
[00:01:54.950] - Speaker 1
That's why I keep on talking about it because I love doing live game studies. All right, let's dive into the main subject today. We are on episode 4 of a series. It was going to be a three-part series, but as I mentioned in the third part of this series, a couple of conversations that I had during the US Open, one with both fellow senior pros, but one was a senior pro player who I had not partnered with, but we were just chatting at the end of his day, and the other senior pro was my partner. In talking about this idea of baselines, there was a wrinkle that I I wanted to throw out there for you, a couple of traps that we need to try and avoid. But generally speaking, what we've done on this journey is we have identified the struggle. The struggle is dealing with our performance. We finish playing either a highly competitive match, like a tournament or a league play or a series of games during a session, whatever it is, you've concluded a session of play and your mind is ruminated. Your mind keeps on playing, going over the thing again and again and again.
[00:02:59.980] - Speaker 1
And is there a more productive way to maybe frame that? And we believe there is, which is this baseline approach. The second episode, which was the one a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the baseline. And there I gave you specifics on how to determine the baseline for yourself to find the baseline that is right for you. And that's key. It's the baseline that's right for you. Then in the third episode, as I just mentioned, we talked about a couple of traps that can arise in trying to use a baseline. So avoiding those. And also help you better understand this baseline idea. The more you think about it, the I think the more sense it will make to you, because I tell you one thing, it's making a lot more sense to me. The more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm processing it, the more I'm applying it, it's really helping me out. And then what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about the benefits of setting the baseline for yourself and using this baseline approach to evaluate performance. Before I get into the details of that, I did want to share with you guys a quick side story that I was reminded of that this thinking applies to.
[00:04:02.560] - Speaker 1
It has nothing to a pickleball, but you'll see how it ties together. I'm walking with Jill in an area near me called Dunedin that has some really narrow roads, diagonal. It's a cute little area, but the driving in the parking is weird there. We're walking on this one diagonal road that has parallel parking. It's a one-way road, parallel parking on one side of it. There's a car, literally, everybody is full. All the cars are parked parallel. One of the cars, not quite parallel, jacked in there a little bit. The back of the car sticking out, probably three feet or something like that, making it hard for the cars to go buy it. And there it is. Just there it is. That's the situation. And you look at that, right? So you look at this car that's parked not perfectly, not even well, if you think about it, and you say to yourself, Gee, whiz, that person not doing the right thing. And you can go down this path of thinking, of getting be angry, right? If you were driving. We were walking, so we were not affected by it. But if you were driving, you could go that way, right?
[00:05:05.870] - Speaker 1
And get angry, maybe get out of your car, maybe smack their car, key it, whatever. I'm not saying you would do that, but that's possible, right? Where you go down this path of feeling bad about how this person behave because it certainly was not consistent with how everybody else is doing it. But let me suggest you a different way of thinking about it. And the way of thinking about it is like this. Perhaps that driver in that moment simply did the best they could. And what I mean by that is that was all they were able to do in that moment. If I told you that was the case, and it could be for a number of reasons. It could be just a really bad week for that person in their life If some really heavy stuff is happening to them, or maybe their brain doesn't process spatial information the way yours and mine does. If there's a world in which it's possible that that parker, that driver, did the best they could, maybe it's a better world if we give them the benefit of the doubt rather than going to, Well, you're just an a-hole.
[00:06:11.100] - Speaker 1
You don't care about other people. You're inconsiderate, whatever. That could be possible. That's a It's a plausible answer. But without knowing, let's air on the side of the benefit of the doubt. This baseline approach is somewhat similar. Obviously, you know yourself, so it's not quite as, I don't know the variables of the person in the parking situation, but you know yourself. But set a baseline that is appropriate for you. Don't set a baseline based on, like we talked about the last week, based on others. Others park perfectly parallel park day, one shot, boom, they're in. Our good friend Tom, he's like the best parallel park I've ever seen. He can parallel park almost like closing his eyes. He can parallel park and things perfect. I'm an okay parallel parker. But my point is, don't Don't compare yourself to others. Do it the best way that you can do it in terms of your baseline. The key of this whole process is to ground our performance, our evaluation of our performance in your reality. Key, in your reality. That's your baseline. You can go back to the episode a couple of ago and check that one out in terms of setting the baseline.
[00:07:24.950] - Speaker 1
I'm not going to repeat everything here. That would defeat the purpose of having a four-part series. Ground how you evaluate your performance in your reality, A, B, right now, not in some hypothetical future, not in some past. The past is not hypothetical. Well, not in some past. In today. How are you doing today relative to how you can do today? That's the key to this process. You're not using some imaginary person that isn't you, some imaginary person that never misses a shot or whatever, makes all the perfect decisions when they play. You're also not imagining some hypothetical you in the future. After you put in 50,000 hours of drilling and you're going to be this amazing professional player, great, that's not you today, if that's not your situation today. I know sometimes the pros listen, so if you're a pro, that's a different bar. But if you're not a pro, that's fine, too, wherever you're at in the game. Now, let's talk about the benefits of using this process. Number one, it's going to be accurate. The first two are going to be... They're shades of the similar color. But one, it's accurate. It's going to give you accurate information about how you perform today.
[00:08:45.600] - Speaker 1
It's not going to give you erroneous information or inaccurate information because you are, in fact, comparing yourself to your baseline today. It's also, this is the other shade, it's grounded in reality. This is We're not a fantasy world where we're living in, where we're comparing ourselves to some fantastical creature that isn't you. It's grounded in reality, and we want to live in a real world. I think, well, maybe we don't, but we, generally speaking, we want to live in a real world. The third benefit is you're going to avoid needless frustration. Frustration is that gap. We've talked about this before between expectation and performance, expectation and what happens. If you're expecting yourself to never miss a shot, that's just impossible. You're setting yourself up for failure, just frustration and not happiness. You avoid need this frustration if you have a right baseline. Okay, today, I I slept only 4 hours last night. I had a lot on my mind. Things are going on in my house that I have to deal with, whatever. Yeah, I'm going to miss more shots today than I normally would. Because that's not... Normally what is in my baseline today, my baseline today is today.
[00:09:58.550] - Speaker 1
My baseline today is today, right? My baseline is based on, I slept four hours and I have a lot of stuff going on in my life. That's how I come to the court. That's life. So it'll avoid that needless frustration. And you'll have a calmer mind. Your mind will be much calmer because you'll know that You're doing the best you can. You're not comparing yourself to some arbitrary, not arbitrary, some fantastical thing. Setting up all this noise in your mind, all this pollution in your brain, brain pollution. You'll have much calmer mind. You'll feel better and you'll play better, as we always say. Here's the thing about the baseline. It's not a victim thing. It's not like, Oh, this is my baseline and nothing I can do about it. No, that's not the whole story. That's your baseline for today, meaning your performance needs to be judged against that baseline, but you can move your baseline over time. Let's Let's assume that you have... Let's just pick one shot. You have difficulty with a back-end volley. Back-end volley is you have trouble with it. That's your current baseline. So when you miss back-end volleys, what do you expect to happen?
[00:11:13.980] - Speaker 1
That's your baseline. You can move the baseline up or to the left or to the right, whatever you like. Generally, people think in terms of up, but you can move your baseline by working on the back-end volley. Now, if you spend 500 hours working on your back-end volley, and then you miss the same number as you missed before, now you can say, You know what? I did not perform up to my own baseline because it's the correct baseline based on the work that I've put in on that shot. That's okay. No one is saying that you're always going to perform up to your baseline. Meaning if your baseline is, I don't know, call it three feet off the ground, that's your baseline. Today, given everything today, and you performed it two and a half feet off the baseline, you didn't meet your baseline today. What we don't want to do is set a baseline that's 10 feet above the court, that crazy high baseline. But reality is that our baseline is three feet above the court. We have a three-foot baseline, but we're comparing ourselves to a 10-foot baseline. That's what we're trying to avoid through this process.
[00:12:15.060] - Speaker 1
You can move your baseline. You can move it, but you have to do it over time. You also have to understand that your baseline will be impacted by some factors outside of your control, including sleep, things going on in your life, other factors, physical injuries. Those things will impact your baseline as well. Set that baseline so you get the benefits of not comparing yourself to that 10-foot baseline that doesn't make any sense for, if not all of you, for most of you to set right now. Then if you want to work on moving that baseline from three foot to four foot to five foot. When I'm talking about feet, I'm talking about height of the baseline, obviously, so I'm just moving it up and down. Set the baseline that's right for you now or Determine it, compare yourself to that baseline now, and you'll get the benefits of not living in an imaginary world and creating that needless frustration for you. Hopefully, this process is a process. I would recommend this is resonating with you. Go back to the episode 3 before this one. I believe that'll be episode 186, I believe. I'll ask the folks who handle our podcast to renumber these so it's clear.
[00:13:28.430] - Speaker 1
This is episode 4 in this series, episode 1 in this series, I'd go back and listen to it again so we can tee it up, then go through the process, work through it a few times. If it resonates with you, if you want to use this baseline approach to keep you better grounded in how you're evaluating your performance when you play, because I think it'll really help you navigate that better and avoid this needless rumination in your brain, compare yourself to some imaginary perfect shot maker, which just isn't the reality for all of us, I would say, even the pros. All right, we're going to jump into the rift, where I'm going to talk about seeing the game. Before I do that, I want to read a shoutout that we got, one of the reviews that we got. Before I do that, I believe, well, we're just coming out of it, I guess, the National Month of Pickleball. I always say every month is the month of Pickleball to me. But here's the thing I'm going to challenge you to do is remember that pickle ball is beautiful. Well, you know that already, so I'm telling you already know.
[00:14:30.370] - Speaker 1
But I'm going to tell you this, this you may not know. Gift it. Gift pickleball to somebody. Find a friend, talk to a friend, really take an effort. Take a minute to yourself at the end of this podcast and reflect. A friend of yours who could use pickleball or a friend of yours who would benefit from pickleball Please invite them to pick a ball. All right, let's read. This is another shout out that we got, a review we got from OmeMemam. I like that name. I'm not sure what it means, but I like it. I find the discussion of the mental aspect of the game informative and useful in my play. That's the pragmatic aspect, right? It's good for our brain, but also good for our play. From simple concepts of courtesy and playing fair to more complex issues of strategy and competition, it is all presented in a clear, concise discussion. Easy to listen to and great information. It makes me think. Love it. Love making you think. Appreciate letting me know that. I even think about the episode about turning toward my partner after a play ends. It makes a difference. Thank you very much for the review.
[00:15:24.410] - Speaker 1
Again, if you consider reviewing us, that'd be awesome, and I would love to be able to read one of your reviews here on the podcast in the future. All right, let's talk about seeing the game. I want to talk about this because we're going into this game study series, or actually, by the time you hear this podcast, we will be in the middle of the game study series. But the game studies are where I tee up a match on the screen with you, and I walk you through it. We're watching it together, and I'm showing you what I'm seeing. We look at mechanical errors, for instance, like misreturns of serve, paddle angle problems, energy problems with shots, things like that. We look at strategy decisions that are made, good. We always like to say good could be better instead of bad. Good and could be better. This would be a better solution than that. Sometimes we see things that are just phenomenal. You're like, That's the perfect shot in that situation. But oftentimes, we're looking for areas that we could improve on in terms of our position on the court, the shot selection, everything like that.
[00:16:26.800] - Speaker 1
It's a really interesting way of learning pickleball because you're watching it with someone like me who I know how to do this. If I'm not the best at doing this, I'm top 10 for sure in the country doing this. Maybe top five, maybe top three, not the best, at doing game study, at doing like, breaking it down and figuring out, Okay, this is what's happening. We go back, we rewind it, we show it to you again, and they're live. Here we get to answer your question. So you have a question. But at the end of this process, whether it's through our game study or your own study, I could tell you that seeing the is just phenomenal because the beauty of it is it doesn't mean you're going to do everything perfectly. There is no such thing, but you see it. And by seeing it means you recognize the good that you do, you recognize the that you do, the not so good that you do, and you recognize the... Actually, I'm thinking about the audio editor we use may make that sound weird. We'll see what it sounds like later, the little rasberry I did.
[00:17:27.090] - Speaker 1
But you'll have your good shots and your bad shots, But you'll recognize him, and you'll recognize, Oh, I did this, and I shouldn't have done that. I'll give you a quick war story there. I was playing at the Nationals as my first time playing against... It was a mixed doubles, and the female player named Natalie Bagby, who was an amazing players. She and her partner Lily won gold at Nationals in the women's. I can't remember what happened in the mix for her in that tournament, but I know in women's that she and Lily won gold. Amazing players. She played in the French Open and the Wimbledon and everything. She's a high an adult athlete, and she's left-handed, which is unusual in the world of senior pro women players at the high level. It's her, Sherry Corder. I may be missing somebody, but those are the two that come to mind. Anyway, so I would hit balls to spots that would normally be decent, and she would make me pay for them, but I can see the game. I'd look across at Lily and I'd be like, Oh, I mean, not Lily, Natalie. I'd look across at Natalie, Natalie, I hit it to the wrong spot, didn't I?
[00:18:27.210] - Speaker 1
Immediately, because I can see the game almost like I'm out of the court as I'm watching what's going on during the rally. The other thing is when you're watching your friends play, you can sit there and figure out what's going on. It also helps you identify threats and opportunities when you're playing because you're seeing what's going on on the other side of the net. It's an amazing way to interact with the sport. So think about it when you're out there at your rec plays and open plays or you have a rest and things like that. Spend a little bit of time, talk to your friends, do your thing, but then spend a few minutes just watching. See if you can suss out errors that are common, because what you will find is you'll find a lot of patterns in play. A lot of pick-able is patterns. Your friends and your partners, you and your opponents all have patterns, shots that you like, shots you don't like, tendencies of hitting this ball there and this ball, whatever. So you get better at anticipating because you're seeing the game. Anyway, so that's the RIF. Now, here's the thing.
[00:19:25.250] - Speaker 1
This baseline thing, it's going to help your game. This is what we're talking about, last four episodes. Check them out again. Work on your baseline. Because what I want for you is this. I want you to play better. I want you to feel better. But next time that you're walking around and you see a car that's parked a little weird, I want you to ask yourself, maybe they just did the best they could that day. That's all we can ask for, of ourselves and of others. That's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, the rate and review already says three times. I'm not going to say it again, but I haven't said this. Share this with your friends, right? If you enjoy the podcast, they probably will, too. I hope you have a great week, and I look forward to seeing you in our next, Pickleball Therapy podcast.