[00:00:04.180] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement, specifically your pickleball mind. I'm the host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. It's a pleasure to be with you this week, and I hope you're having a great week as well wherever you are. This week's episode is particularly special because what we're going to do this week is we're going to basically condense three of our top ideas, three of the ideas that have most resonated with you and helped you and other players all around the world improve their play and also improve their relationship with this game. And we're going to address the three different parts of the mental aspects of pickleball. Before we get into that, I'm going to tell you what the three parts are, and then we're going to dive into each one of them more specifically. These are condensed versions of these topics that we've covered in other podcasts and over several podcasts in some cases. We're going to be talking about a bowl of ice cream, which is one of our biggest or most impactful ideas that have been around for a long time. We're going to cover the Oops Bucket.

[00:01:11.100] - Speaker 1
If you heard, I banged the microphone there for a second. That's an Oops Bucket situation, which is a fairly new concept for us, but something that has really resonated quickly. It's gotten a lot of legs quickly. And then I'm going to talk to you about the pickleball Treadmill, the improvement treadmill, and how to avoid it, because it's a source of a lot frustration out there. As we dive into the podcast, we have our Better pickleball Academy, which supports a lot of our efforts, including being able to bring you this content like this is supported by our academy. And the academy is a place where you can go and get really good coaching. This is not content creator stuff, and there's nothing wrong with content creation. Content creation is fantastic. But we aren't just content creators at Better pickleball. We're actually pickleball coaches, full-time coaches, certified, trained. We study it. And so the Better Pickleball Academy is an expression of that. And I don't know when you're going to be hearing this podcast, but in the not-too-distant future, we have an initiative coming out on the academy, which is based on the idea that we know that a lot of our community, a lot of players out there right now have a lot of uncertainty with what's going on in the world.

[00:02:25.500] - Speaker 1
And so we wanted to address that and not have that be an impediment to improvement. So be on the look out for that. If you're not on our email list already, make sure you join our email list and you'll get notified of it before anybody else, because that's part of being our community. All right, let's dive into the three areas of the mental aspect of pickleball. And I would suggest to you it's broader. It's the three aspects of any sport, and you can even apply it to life, obviously, in terms of these ideas. So when we think about the mental, as I've been working on the mental game, in the mental parts of pickleball, one thing that keeps coming up is there's a lot We're going to focus on play. And play is important. And what I mean by play, that's like, think about the idea of giving 110 %. Think about the idea of maintaining focus while you're playing. I have the tiger, all that type of stuff. It's good stuff, and it's part of what we do, and it's one of the three areas we're going to cover, but that's just one of the three areas that are relevant to you as a pickleball player.

[00:03:22.240] - Speaker 1
So we call that one play. Then the other one is called progress or improvement. We use progress because it has a P. You'll see in a second, all three have a P. It's good for alliteration. But progress or improvement is another entirely distinct area of the mental side. It's learning how to learn. It's dealing with frustration or feeling like you're stuck and things like that. That's an improvement or progress concept, different than the concepts that will help you while you're playing. Those are two different areas. And the third one is my personal favorite. I think it's the one that has the biggest reach, the broadest reach for you as a human being, as a player, but also as a human being, which is perspective. So you see this three P's, play, progress, and perspective. And perspective is much bigger picture. Perspective is how you view your relationship with the sport, how you feel when you play, how What pickleball means to you, all those types of things all go into perspective. And to me, perspective is amazing because improving perspective in pickleball allows you to also improve perspective in your personal life because you take those concepts that you're learning in pickleball and then you apply them in life.

[00:04:34.750] - Speaker 1
So we're going to cover each one of those today. And let me give you the order we're going to do them in. So first, I'm going to give you one that you can use for play, which will be the Oops Bucket. Then we're going to go into... We'll do perspective second. That's the bowl of ice cream, which is, again, one of the concepts that we developed here at the Pickleball Therapy podcast and Better Pickleball Coaching that has really resonated with players. And then lastly, we'll cover improvement or progress, and I'll give you an idea there on how to avoid that treadmill that exists in your learning, potentially. All right, so let's start with play. So the idea of the Oups Bucket is this. The idea is, and if you want to listen to the full episode on that, I'll put it in the show notes. I don't remember the episode number off top of my head, but it's basically the 85, 15 concept. So you can go more in-depth if this really resonates with you. But the idea of the Oups Bucket is that When we play, remember, this is a play concept. So when we play, we will miss shots.

[00:05:37.400] - Speaker 1
And that is a 100 % certainty. There is no way to get around that. I don't care how much you practice. I don't care how good you get. And the reason I can say that is because the best players on the planet, the very best players on the planet, miss shots. And not just difficult shots, they miss easy shots, right? Shots that would be objectively easy. And so if the best players on the planet who play professionally and who train as much as a human being can train, are going to miss shots, then I would suggest that we, as non-professional players, I laugh because it's interesting when you go through this process, because when you articulate these things, they just seem so obvious, don't they? When you just hear them out loud, when you hear them spoken. But basically, as nonprofessional players, then if professionals are missing, okay, we're going to miss. But here's what happens. So when we play, we miss, which we just agreed is going to happen 100 %, right? Certainty, you're going to miss. Even an easy shot, the easiest put away in the world. But we get upset at missing.

[00:06:44.160] - Speaker 1
And the reason we get upset at missing, I would submit, is because we're putting it in the wrong bucket. We're not putting it in the right bucket, I should say, or in the correct bucket. And the idea is this. So take any shot that you want, and just think of the next hundred of those shots. And you can just think easy put away. If you want to have a shot to think about, serve any of those. Out of the next hundred, how many are you going to miss? Now, if you say zero, that's nuts. That's just right, because not even the best are going to be a zero. And it doesn't matter what number you picked. We used 85, 15 in the podcast because it gave us a nice number to use, but you can use any number you want. The number of misses is your 'oops' bucket, and the number of makes is your yay bucket or your good bucket. Now, realistically, you're not going to use the yay bucket. You're going to be happy when you make them, but you're not going to put them in a bucket. The bucket is really there for when you miss and you're upset that you missed.

[00:07:46.220] - Speaker 1
What you do is when you miss the shot, you know that you have an OOPS bucket. You know the certain number of shots go in that bucket anyway. So when you miss a shot, you take the shot, the miss, and you And you drop it into that OOPS bucket, and you forget about it. And once the OOPS bucket fills up, and if you're one of our system students from our most recent class, you got to see this because, again, this is a new development for us. As coaches, we grow like you grow. And So we had this video of a bucket of water basically getting poured onto a young tree. And you can think about it that way. When you fill up your bucket, you can dump it out. But every time you do this process, you're growing. That tree grows, your mind grows. So So use the oops bucket when you're playing and when you miss a shot, which again, I believe you already agreed, will happen. A hundred % of the time, you're going to miss something. Not a hundred % of your shots, but a hundred %, you're going to miss something.

[00:08:42.840] - Speaker 1
When you miss that shot, rather than trying to wrestle with it and kill yourself over like, Oh, how did I miss? I can't believe I missed that shot. I shouldn't have missed that shot. Any of those expressions, whatever it is that's your personal flavor for that. Nope. Okay, cool. I got my Oops Bucket in right there. I'm going to take that shot. I'm going to drop it in that Oops Bucket and carry on. You'll feel better and you'll play better when you do that. All right, so that's play. I'm leaning over a little bit here because the computer wants to pause for a second there. Plus, I got to grab a little sip of tea here. I should have tea every once in a while. It's good stuff. I was going to make coffee, but I'm probably over-caffeinated already, so tea is better for me. All right, so now we have... That was play, Oups bucket. Use What is that? Let's move on to perspective. So remember, perspective is the bigger area, the bigger playing field where we can do a lot of work for ourselves. And the concept that we developed is this idea of a bowl of ice cream, and it works like this.

[00:09:45.910] - Speaker 1
Every single time that you go out to play pickleball, you've already won. I mean, you've already gotten great value. And it doesn't matter what happens. So it doesn't matter whether you win one game, 20 games, zero games. It doesn't take anything away from you. Reason? You got to play pickleball. You got to go out to the court and you got to play the sport that you love. You got to see your friends, you got to get exercise, you got to get out of the house. All of the benefits, everything that comes with pickleball, the health benefits, everything that comes with pickleball, you got it. If you didn't win a single game, frankly, if you didn't win a single point, you still got pickleball. You were able to pickleball. And I like to play with it sometimes where you imagine a conversation between you and a friend of yours. And so you go see a friend of yours at, let's say you have lunch afterwards or something, with a friend who doesn't play pickleball. And you look down. You lost all your games, right? So you're upset and you go to the lunch and your friend's like, wow, what's wrong?

[00:10:55.030] - Speaker 1
You okay? Is everything okay at home? Does something happen or healthy or something? And And you're like, No, no, no. Everything's fine. And then your friend says, What were you doing before you came over here? And you're like, well, I was playing pickleball. And your friend goes, You were playing pickle? Yeah, I was playing pickle. Your friend goes, That sounds amazing. I mean, you love pickle. And did you get to your friend? And you're like, Yeah, I got to see my friends. And did you get exercise? Yeah, I got exercise. And were you at the courts and you got to hang out? Yeah, I got all that. Why are you upset And you're like, I lost all my games. Loss of games? What does that mean? Was some part of your body amputated or did they take your money away? No, no. The scores, they were like, They got 11 and I got nine. And I got 11 and I got seven. And your friend said, they're going like, you're kidding me, right? Come on now. What were you doing? You just spent two hours playing pickleball. You're having lunch with me and you're upset.

[00:11:56.040] - Speaker 1
Come on. And so that's like, it's a way of reframing the perspective of what happened. You got your base of good. And the idea of the bowl of ice cream is it allows you to get that. Plus, you can feel better when you win. Because we also want to live in the real world where we've been conditioned our entire lives to celebrate the wins more than our losses. It's hard to just rewire ourselves overnight and say, Okay, an 11: 9 loss is effectively relatively the same as an 11-9 win. And you can take it to another extreme. You could say, let's say you're playing to 11, but it goes into overtime, where you keep going. If you lose that game, 1917, versus winning in 1917, It's the same basic thing has happened in terms of everything else that you got other than one thing, the score. There's other conversations we can have. We can go deeper on score over life and things like that. But at the end of the day, those events are substantially the same because in all of those events, you're doing what? You're playing pickleball. That sounds like my puppies are here or barking.

[00:13:09.860] - Speaker 1
But basically, you're playing pickleball, right? And so if you're getting the benefit of pickleball, That's your bowl of ice cream. So every time you play pickleball, you get a bowl of ice cream. And it's not some crappy ice cream you don't like. It's not some flavor you don't like. It's not a quarter bowl of ice cream. Every time that you play pickleball, you get a full bowl of ice cream, your favorite flavor, all the ice cream that you want in that bowl. Now, if you win, okay, now we're going to throw some sprinkles on there, some fudge, some whip cream, nuts, cherry, whatever you want. You get the toppings. And I guess if you want to go further, the more you win, the more toppings if you want, you can play with it however you like. But the real key takeaway is this, is that Even if you lose all the games that you played that day, you still got a full bowl of your favorite flavor of ice cream in that exchange, in that activity. So that's a bowl of ice cream in perspective. And I think it'll really help you think about players who like it and who play along with it, they'll communicate with sprinkles, which is cute.

[00:14:24.460] - Speaker 1
They'll basically say, I got to play pickleball today. I didn't get a lot of sprinkles, but I got to play. So they're telling you what the results were, but they still got the bowl of ice cream. So they're starting from the premise of the bowl of ice cream. And then if they win a tournament or something, then they'll say something like, I got fudge, whip cream, cherry ice cream. And that's great. Add to it. But don't take away. Don't take away from the experience because of the losses. We have a baseline that's a full bowl of ice cream. All right. And then the last subject that we want to cover is progress or improvement. And so let's talk about that, because what happens to players is that we'll get in a run, or we'll feel like we're just spinning our wheels. And the treadmill helps with that. It's a spinning thing where we're not really advancing, we're just on a treadmill. You can also think about it. Cj likes to think about it in terms of a hamster wheel, which I think is a super good explanation as well. Basically, you're on a wheel. You're not moving, you're just stuck on the wheel.

[00:15:15.860] - Speaker 1
And so how do we avoid getting on a treadmill or hamster wheel or spinning our wheels in our progress, in our improvement? And a concept that's really worked for us inside all of our coaching, camps, pickleball system, everything that we do, academy, is this concept of closing the gap. And the way to think about it is, I'm going to relate the story to you that I relate when we're at camps, which is this idea that Let's go back a few years. Humor me on this because I think it'll drive the point home much better. So let's go back into the mid-1800s, and you're a farmer in the middle of Oklahoma. And I'm assuming there was farming in Oklahoma in 1800s, but let's play with that. And so your good friend, a childhood friend who lives in Texas, is traveling through Oklahoma, heading up to Nebraska somewhere. And so they, I I think my geography is correct there. If it's not, let me know. But so they stop at your farm, and they share with you this amazing new irrigation technique that's been developed in Texas that all the farmers down there are using. And It's much more...

[00:16:31.050] - Speaker 1
It's better than the one that you have because for whatever reason, it just does a better job. And you receive all the information. It's amazing. Your friend spends a couple of days with you and then continues traveling. Now, you decide that you want to have this new irrigation technique. And so you start implementing it. Think about how long you have. Remember, it's like in the mid-1800s or late 1800s. How long do you have to implement that technique, that new irrigation technique before you hear about another one? Probably years, at least two, three, four, five years, something like that, that you get to work on this new irrigation technique. And so what that allows you to do is it allows you to lock in the new technique, the new thing that you want, in this case for your farm, and close that gap. So install the new systems, do all the things you need to do to get the new irrigation technique. Let's now fast forward to today. In today's world, it's great to have access to information, but there's also a dark side to it or a downside to it. And that is that you get a new irrigation technique today, and then not even tomorrow, in three hours, you open up your phone and there's bing.

[00:17:48.850] - Speaker 1
Another content creator has a new irrigation technique. And then eight hours later, bing, and tomorrow morning, bing, you get the new video, the new idea, the new idea, the new idea. So what happens is you never have time to install the irrigation technique that you already learned about and that you want to use. Think about that with your pickleball. How many videos on YouTube, Friends at the Court is giving you advice, newsletters that you may subscribe to, Whatever it is, that just hitting you with this and this and this and this and this. So what happens is instead of closing the gap, which is where you lock something in and then you ratchet up your game to the thing that you want, to that idea, that technique, that strategy, that mechanical part of the game. What happens is you basically lock in the thing, the mechanical idea, whatever, or the strategic idea or the athletic idea. And then it doesn't even last three hours there because there's another idea. And then that might last a day and there's another idea. Maybe this one holds for three or four or five days, maybe even a couple of weeks.

[00:18:56.740] - Speaker 1
But there's another idea. What happens is if If you think about it in terms of if you want to do this, if you're listening to it on the podcast and not visually, think about, put your right-hand up and say, This is what I want for myself. And then take your left hand and put it underneath that, like a foot or so, 12 inches, 14 inches underneath that. So you're The left hand represents you right now, the way you're playing. And your right-hand, which is the one above it, 12, 14 inches above it, that's where you want to be on this particular thing. Let's just take something like the serve. So you're having You're having trouble with your serve, or you're having trouble with a volley, or you're having difficulty with a strategic concept. And so you're the left hand down here. And so you've identified this right-hand thing up here. And let's assume you can do that. I'm not going to get into this podcast on how do you know to trust it, how do you know it's right? How do you know it's right for you? All those sorts of things. That's why having coaching either in the system or academy solves that because you know that we're going to give you good stuff.

[00:19:54.230] - Speaker 1
But let's assume that that's the case, that this is really valuable for you on the right-hand, and now you have the The left hand is down here. What really matters is the left hand, because the left hand is you and how you play pickleball. The right-hand is where you want to go and the ideas that you want to learn and that you want to implement. If the left hand stays where you currently have it and never moves up, then you're going to continue playing that way. You can replace the right-hand a thousand things, 5,000 things, a million things. That does not change Change the left hand, which is how you play. So the idea of closing the gap is to leave the right-hand locked in. Don't change it. Put the thing in there that you're working on that matters. And again, assuming that it's correct and complete and all those things. Right for you, which is one that's often overlooked. And basically, lock that right-hand in and then ratchet the left hand up. Allow the left hand to move up toward the right-hand. And now it doesn't have to necessarily touch it, but it should get close to it before you replace the right-hand with something else, which then drops the left hand again, creating that 12 to 14-inch gap that you then have to close.

[00:21:10.880] - Speaker 1
And improvement in pick-able, and in anything in life, is like that. You lock in an idea, you lock in something that you want, and then you ratchet yourself up closer to that ideal shot, ideal strategy, ideal objective that you have. And then you replace with another one and repeat the process. This idea of constantly replacing the right-hand idea or the goal that we have with a new irrigation idea, with a new shot, with a new whatever came across YouTube or your friend at the courts told you, will not allow you to progress. And that's how you end up on a treadmill or hamster wheel or spinning your wheels because you're never closing the gap on any of the one thing that you're working, that will really help you. And just To round this out, so you understand how we think about it as coaches, how we apply this idea, is that we just launched our most recent pickleball System class. And if you look at the pickleball System structure, the curriculum, it's a very structured curriculum. Everything in there is organized based on highest result. So we prioritize it for you. We say, Okay, this is the highest result, and that's going to get you a lot of work on your game.

[00:22:30.300] - Speaker 1
So if you lock that in in the order that it's presented, you know you're going to get a lot of upside on your game with the work that you're putting in. And you can do the same thing, or if you can, in your game, you want to try and think about your prioritization of what it is you're working on. And then close that gap is the key that I want to leave you with on progress here. All right, it sounds like the puppies are getting riled up by there, so they probably need a little bit of a walk. I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. As always, if you have a minute to rate and review it, really appreciate that. And share it with your friends, because remember, if you enjoy this podcast and if it helps you out, it'll probably help them out as well. I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you on the next episode of pickleball Therapy. Be well.