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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.
[00:00:05.380] - Speaker 1
Welcome to the Pickleball Therapy podcast. It is the podcast that's dedicated to your pickleball improvement, and it is the only podcast dedicated to your pickleball mind. Today, we're going to talk about how to actually achieve your goals, how to take those New Year's resolutions that may be rambling around in your brain, and to actually achieve some of by the time we get to the end of this year. My name is C. J. Johnson. I am not your regular podcast host. Tony, Roig, is out on the pickleball courts. He's in Tampa. That's 20th hometown. We're hosting three Better Pickleball Camps in Tampa. Our team member, Kylene, is down there coaching players, helping them put together their goals and their vision for their pickleball improvement plan for 2025. It was time for me to grab the mic and talk about resolutions. Speaking of camps, if that is something that's interested to you, we are adding a couple more dates to camps coming up. I know we have some new dates for Florida. Tony will be doing an additional camp in Florida in February, and I am going to be in beautiful Phoenix at the end of February.
[00:01:28.090] - Speaker 1
If you are looking to to get on court with us, a Better Pickleball camp is the perfect way to do that. Go to betterpickleball.com/camps. All right, now let's get into pickleball resolutions and really how to make How to make those come true. I don't know that I've always liked the word resolution. It's not the word itself or the meaning of the word. It's the problem that it causes for many of us. When we think about a new year, I think that most of us are filled with hope and promise and a lot of excitement for the coming year. It really is a very natural time for us to take a look at our lives, or in this case today, we'll be talking about your pickleball game, and say, Wow, here's something I'd like to be different. I think it's a super natural time to do that. But unfortunately, for most people, we look at that, and then we never do anything with it. So we set New Year's resolutions, and then we either don't take any action or we take very inconsistent action. In short order, by the end of January or perhaps by the end of February, most of those are by the wayside.
[00:02:59.750] - Speaker 1
And we have forgotten some of those things that we said were important, that we promised ourselves that we wanted to change. Rather than look at it maybe as a resolution, let's look at what is it in your pickleball game that you would like to be different? We can call it whatever you want, but I like to call it my pickleball goals. Who do I want to be at the end of 2025. To me, the first steps to doing that are making it achievable. I think those, for me and for the players that I've coached, who I've seen successful with this, are that we take small, consistent steps over a period of time. And so somehow, it's a lot of wonder, I guess, in what happens, but those small steps add up to big change. I think when players set resolutions for the year or set goals, that it's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to tackle too many things at once. We can look around a pickleball court and we can say, Oh, I need this a serve, or I need this a third shot, or I need to execute this strategy better.
[00:04:37.040] - Speaker 1
Before you know it, in our minds, we have decided that there are 15 things, or maybe more, that we need to do better. To add to that, sometimes for some of us, we're a little bit older in our pickleball careers, in our pickleball lives, and we feel this real sense of urgency to get it all done and to get it all done as quickly as possible. I have to do it all now, so therefore, I have to do all these things at once. It has not been my experience as a coach or as an athlete that that has ever worked for me. I am far better off tackling one thing at a time and doing that consistently until that becomes a habit. I don't know if you've ever tried to lose weight. Back when I was 38, I weighed more than 250 pounds, and I made a decision to change my life, my physical life. It started with committing to eating correctly, and it started with a commitment to exercise. I started a program where I was changing my habits really one step at a time. I did not go to the gym seven days a week for an hour at a time.
[00:06:20.740] - Speaker 1
It started for me, it was three times a week that I went to the gym, and I went at the time for for 30 minutes a time. When I started with eating, I didn't change everything in my diet. I cut out some of the fat in my diet. I was living in Wisconsin, loved cheese. I made the decision that I was going to eliminate cheese from my diet for a period of time. As those habits solidified in my practice, I increased some of those habits and eventually lost the weight, lost more than 100 pounds and have kept it off for a long period of time, lost the weight based on those habits, but then successfully kept off the weight based on the habits that I built, really, it took me about a year, year and a half to lose the weight. Now, too oftentimes, what too many people do in the weight loss in the fitness is they go all in. They're like, Oh, I am going to just eat vegetables, and I am going to get to the gym for an hour a day, every single day. They go all in because the beginning of the year, we have all that enthusiasm for it, and they go all in, and in two or three weeks, they're burnt out.
[00:07:53.010] - Speaker 1
Pretty soon, they miss one day at a gym, and one day at the gym turns into three days away from the gym. Then pretty soon, it's like, Well, why the hell should I go? I'm not accomplishing. I'm not sticking to my goals. The same thing happens with eating. We change and we eat all these vegetables, and it's like, Man, I need something beyond what I'm eating right here. Pretty soon, maybe we eat something that's not on our plan. Once we eat something that's not on our plan, that leads to something else. Pretty soon, we're not following anything we did. Then we say, Oh, the heck with that? It doesn't work anyway. We're out of here. By the end of the year, nothing changes. Our pickleball journey can be much the same way if we try to do too many things all at once. If you're really going to make some changes in a game, I recommend that you start with small, consistent actions. Here's a way for you to do that. Begin by taking a look at your pickleball game right now. Pull out a piece of paper and just draw a line down the middle.
[00:09:04.990] - Speaker 1
On the left side of the paper, try and do an honest assessment of where you are right now as a pickleball player. Take a look at different parts of your game. Take a look at different shots. Oh, I serve the ball well. I have a consistent deep serve. I have a consistent return. My third shot could use some work. Just do an assessment of who you are today as a pickleball player. It doesn't have to take you very long. Then, fast forward and do a little visioning and think of who you would like to be as a pickleball player at the end of 2025. Write that all down as well. What would you like to have? Then, pick out one thing on the list, that most important thing on the list to That's the one thing that you're going to start closing the gap on. Let's say, I'm just going to use an example, I'm going to pick the first shot of the game, and that's the serve. Let's say that your serve, you want it to be consistently deep. In the pickleball system and the pickleball academy, we define consistently deep as 4 feet from the baseline in the center of the box.
[00:10:29.870] - Speaker 1
That is the type of serve that is going to give your opponents the most amount of trouble for a variety of reasons. But your serve is not deep, so you want a consistently deep serve. Begin by practicing 10 consistent serves. There are multiple ways that you can do this. You can go to the courts early before your open play and just hit 10 deep serves You could stay after your open play and hit those serves. We have a student in Toronto who a few years ago, she was working on her serve. She went out in her front lawn. If you're in Toronto and it's January this time of year, you know that there's snow on the ground, or chances are good that there's snow on the ground in Toronto. She practiced her serves in her front lawn, getting the depth on the serve. Maybe you can't do that. But I'm going to bet you have a mirror inside of your house, so you could position yourself in front of the mirror so that you could see your stroke and you could visualize the shot landing in the service box, 4 feet from the baseline in the center of the box.
[00:11:53.720] - Speaker 1
Start by doing that every day. Just 10 and realistically, how long would it take you to hit 10 serves? I mean, certainly less than five minutes. Ten focused, thoughtful serves. That's it. Total focus, total attention to it, and just 10 of them. When you commit to that and you start doing something small every single day, it starts to do a variety of things for you. The first thing it does is it starts to build momentum. I live in snow country. I live in Lake Tahoe. If you've ever seen snow roll down a hill, when it starts to roll down the hill, it starts as a very small snowball. But as it rolls and it gains momentum, it gains more snow, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Before you know it, it goes from a snowball that's the size of a softball to a snowball that's the size of a snocker ball to the snowball that's the size of a boulder, potentially, because of the momentum that it gains from rolling down the hill. You will gain that gain momentum by showing up for yourself every single day. Not only do you gain momentum, you gain confidence.
[00:13:26.110] - Speaker 1
You're out there, you're doing it. You're taking action, not not just towards the shot. You're showing up for yourself, potentially showing up for yourself in a way that you've never shown up for yourself before or never consistently shown up for yourself before. That, in turn is going to start to reduce some of the overwhelm and some of the anxiety that you feel once you get to the court. It's going to make improvement seem so much more manageable. But most importantly, just like I talked about in my weight loss journey, that's the habit that starts to create sustainable long-term habits. Because that's what's going to get you from wherever you are at the start of 2025 to wherever you want to be at the end of 2025 is sustainable habits, showing up for yourself. So even though it doesn't sound like a lot, 10 consistent serves, whatever it may be, and maybe it's 10 consistent third shots, maybe it's you want a different style of dink. Maybe there's a certain strategy that you want to put in play. It doesn't matter what the item that you choose is. What matters is the habit that you're building.
[00:14:58.910] - Speaker 1
And by consistently showing up for just a small period every single day, make it five minutes, make it maybe 10 minutes, showing up for yourself every single day, that's what's going to build those long term havens. Now, for those of you who have decided that you would like to change some of your physical fitness around pickleball, we do have an eight week fitness challenge coming up at the end of January. We're going to have our kickoff on January 23rd. The fitness challenge is built in... We do small, short sessions, and it is specific to pickleball fitness. It's really specific for players who are over 50, and we want to improve our health and fitness in a way that's manageable. It's designed for all types of fitness levels. If that's something that you want to improve, we've got that program for you. It also has a coaching accountability component to it, everything you need if you really want to change your pickleball fitness. If that sounds like that's something that's interesting to you, I'll put the link down in the show it's below, but go to betterpickleball 8-week challenge. It's 8-week-challenge. We'll put the link down in the show notes below, and you can get all the information about the 8-week challenge inside of the challenge.
[00:16:29.900] - Speaker 1
Inside of the challenge, we will teach you how to build those small habits over a period of time that really do change that part of the game for you. Even if it's not fitness, make sure that you get out there, look at who you are at the start of 2025, who you want to be at the end of 2025. Pick one thing and start taking small, consistent action towards those goals. Now, if you found value in this podcast, chances are your pickleball playing friends will find value in it as well. We would ask that you share this with them because together we can help to grow each other as pickleball players. Next week, your regular host, Tony Roig, will be back in this seat. Until then, have fun out there, and I hope you reach your pickleball goals in 2025. See you on the courts.