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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. It's the podcast with you in mind. I'm your host, Tony Roy. Hope you having a great week. As you know, week to week in this podcast, we try and bring you content to make you think a little differently about your relationship with Pickleball, about how you think about it,
and hopefully give you a more productive way of interacting with this sport and and for yourself personally, right? I mean, one of the beautiful things about anything we do in life, but you know, obviously we're focused on Pickleball here, but one of the beautiful things about Pickleball is that we get to use it as a, it's kinda like a test lab writer as a kitchen where we can grow as humans,
right? So we get to develop ideas, develop thoughts about how we approach Pickleball, how we interact with Pickleball, and then we use those when we, you know, when we outside of Pickleball. So, you know, I always, like I always mention road rage rides because that's a common thing for, for something. But it's basically like, you know,
or upset because the person in front of you and the checker line has a checkbook or something. You're like, I gotta get outta here. Some of these concepts that you're learning through the sport of Pickleball are concepts that you can then use in those situations as well, just to help you navigate life in a more constructive and hopefully positive way. So, we're gonna hit send you that this week.
And this week we're gonna be talking about language. And here's the thing about language is a quote that I wanted to share with you, and it's about the impact of language in I know. So this is an old Japanese Samurai proverb. My wife Jill and I are watching the Shogun series. I don't know if you watched it when it was in the eighties,
I think it was. I remember watching it as a child. I watched it probably, I don't know, six times or something. We added on the, the old cassette tapes. And it made a lot of impression on me. I read the book and now watching the new version of it. So there's some, there's some good, good, good good kind of philosophical concepts that you learn in those things,
like the dream within the dream, but that's for another day. Then what I wanna focus on today is an old Japanese samurai proverb that says, do not speak bad of yourself for the warrior within, hears your words and is lessened by them. So, you know, the idea is that language affects us, right? And that shouldn't come as a surprise that,
you know, language is important. It's how we interact with our mind. And, and we did a, a prior episode, I'll look up the episode number in a second here, but we did an episode a week or two a few weeks ago, dealing with mental plaque, and there we dealt with specifics about, about, you know, like how we talk to ourselves after a game.
Like, you know, like that game sucked and things like that. The negative talk there, and it's just not a good way of doing it. It's episode 180 2. You know, it is just negative talk like that for ourselves is not a good thing. But what I want talk about this week is how we reference loss, right? Losing sporting events.
And what has me thinking about it is, you know, March Madness is going on and you know, you, so you're hearing about upsets, right? So you're hearing like Kentucky Lost, you know, blue chip team lost to, you know, a lesser team in quotes. And, you know, it's considered an upset. It's considered a big thing,
right? But the, the, the way we use the words that we use whenever there's a loss involved, those two things. One, it over, it overplays the, it, it's hyperbolic, right? It's like hysteric really what you consider the big picture. And I'll talk about that. And the other thing is that really diminishes our real losses because as human beings,
we will experience real loss in our lives, right? You know, friends, loved ones. I mean, there's real loss that happens and we start using the same terminology to describe a game, right? A lot the loss in quotes of a game. And, you know, I think it's problematic and it confuses our mind, and it, it,
it, it needlessly could lead to excess negativity and to, again, mental confusion, which is never a good thing. So some of the words that, that I was thinking about were, you know, like the one I mentioned, upset, right? We talk about when the, the team that is not supposed to win or has a less chance of winning,
right? I shouldn't say not supposed to win. 'cause that's incorrect, right? It's the team with the less chance of winning wins. We refer to that as an upset. So think about any, any, any competitive situation, right? The two teams that are out there, barring some really bizarre circumstances, it's not 100% team a's gonna win, and 0% Team B's gonna win.
There's some range of percentages that team a's gonna win, and Team B's gonna win. Even in the, even in lopsided situations, it's, it's gonna be, you know, some percentage that Team B can win. I would suggest that in March madness, you know, it's, it's never, you know, 5% for Team B, it's, it's,
you know, it's a reasonable number. A basketball game, basketball games, you know, what happened in that game was a player from the other team got hot, scored a bunch of points, and that was, that was how Kentucky went down. But to say that it's an up upset, right? Suggests that, that there was something else that was supposed to happen and it didn't,
not really, not really a good way of thinking about it. You know, it's sort of like, think about like, if there's a 30% chance of rain and it rains, what happened? Just the 30% happened, right? The 30% came true. If the Team B has a 30% chance of winning the game and TB wins the game, what happened?
Nothing. Just the 30% came true, right? And so, you know, when we think use words like upset when we use words like we suffered a loss, imagine that language, right? We suffered a loss in a sporting event, you suffered. That's, that's unfortunate. You know, we use terms like it's a heart that was a heartbreaker,
a heartbreaker, or, you know, it's a sporting event, folks. I mean, you know, sometimes the team with a lower percentage wins. That's how statistics probabilities work. It's not, you know, again, anytime you ascribe a percentage to something, right? 20%, 30%, 40% to something that means that it's gonna happen. Sometimes it's not zero.
You know, we talk about recovering from, bouncing back from, right? And I think the, the, the problem with using that terminology is that it, it, it sends our brain a message that whenever we do lose, and we will in fact lose that it is worse than it is. Okay? And these two concepts kind of relate to each other,
right? Because the reason it over it, it, it, it over amplifies, right? Or it over stresses The quote unquote loss in a sporting event is because we use the same terminology when we suffer a real loss. And a real loss, again, would be like the most extreme would be, you know, losing a, a loved one,
losing a close friend, right? Losing a dear pet. I mean, there's, there's serious losses that we have in our lives, right? And that's part of being alive. And when we start conflating, right? Or, or, or mixing up these, this terminology, right? Of, you know, a loss of a Pickleball game or a loss at a tournament or a loss,
you know, in that context with a real loss, our brain can't differentiate, right? Our brain hears the same words. And so, I mean, it's realistic, it's reasonable, right? For your brain to say, okay, well this must be the same as that, right? Because it's the same word was used. And, and it's the same kind of terminology going around the,
the, the event, right? So again, if you, if, if you lost a loved one, right? You suffered a loss, and that could be a heartbreaker. I done no doubt about that. Right? You know, we've all lost loved ones and, and, well, maybe not all of us, but most of us probably have lost a loved one or somebody close,
and that's one, that's a loss. That's big, right? You know, we go to play Pickleball against, you know, to Tom, Dick and Harry, right? On a Tuesday, and we lose, we didn't suffer a loss, okay? Not the same thing, not even in the same ballpark, you know? And even if it's like,
you know, the, the best basketball team in the country losing against the weakest basketball team in the country, it's not the same thing. It's not the same magnitude. And I think it's important, going back to like the mental plaque, episode 180 2, and this, this kind of concept, I think we need to be guardians of the language that we use.
We need to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about the language that we use. I gave you the quote before from the, the Sam, the old samurai proverb. There's another book that I've read, I believe it's called, I don't have it in front of right now, but it's called The Four Agreements, I Believe, and one of the most important agreements in that book.
It's what, basically the idea of the book is that there's like these four agreements that you enter into with yourself. And if you enter into those four agreements, you'll live a better life, right? You'll be happier and everything will be better, right? Because you're, and there's some censor, right? If you can stick to the four agreements, and as I recall,
I know it's at least one, at least as important, if not the most important agreement is your word. And by word, it doesn't mean like your promise, it means the words that come out of your mouth. So you need to be careful with the words that you use and choose, because words have consequence to them, okay? And, and,
you know, it's, it's, it's takes a minute to really reflect on this. You know, I, I, lemme put it this way, I guess it would be easy to, to write this kind of podcast off, right? And just say, eh, Tony just kind of lost his mind a little bit. You're right. He's like,
what's he talking about? You know, it's just, just words. It's a big deal. I, I would suggest that it merits some reflection. And, you know, that book, the Four Agreements might be something to look at. Actually, I'll pull it up while we're talking here so I can give it to you. But, you know,
because I, he articulates the author Articulates a, there it is, it's the Four Agreements. Yep. A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, and it's based on the toltech, the Toltech traditions and, and stuff from the, I'm probably misstating this either Aztec or my, I can't remember which one it is, but it's Don Miguel Ruiz is the book,
the author Dawn Miguel, M-I-G-U-E-L Ruiz, RUIZ, if you wanna check out the book. But this concept isn't new, you know, I'm not pulling this outta the air. That language is important. Excuse me. I'm just highlighting it in terms of our journeys as Pickleball players and as humans. So, you know, you know, I don't, I don't,
I don't have a, I don't have a proposal yet. I might percolate in my brain, not come up with something, but, you know, whether we call ourselves non winners or opportunity brackets and things like that, those are all fine. But the, the main thing I wanted to point out was just be cognizant of when you hear terminology like that,
like suffering a loss or being upset, that when you're out there in a competitive setting, the fact that the favored a team did not win that contest is not an upset and does not mean that anybody suffered a loss. It just means that the contest ended and one team had more points, or more runs, or more, whatever the defining Characteristic or measurement of that sport is,
then the other team. And that's all that happened. Nothing else. Anyway. So hopefully that'll help you as you go through your process, just guarding your, guarding yourself, guarding your mind against those apparently are on face facially insignificant things that are still going to affect you, even if they don't seem to be a big deal, because they build that kind of plaque or that kind of resistance inside your mind to events that at the end of the day,
are nothing more than normal expect events in the activity that we choose to engage in and that we love, that we call Pickleball. All right, that's this week's podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. As always, please consider rating and reviewing it. Share with your friends. As always, if you, I think I said as always, twice, that's a lot of,
always. If you enjoyed the podcast day, probably will too. Have a great week and I'll see you next time.