[00:00:04.500] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I'm your host, Tony Roig. I'm out of the studio this week, and so I'm on location. But I had a few minutes this morning, and I said, You know what? There's a message that I'd like to share with you all that I've been working on that I think might help you out. So why wait another week or two to get that to you? So it's going to be a short episode, but I wanted to share this concept with you while it was fresh mind while I'm still working through it so that you can get the benefit of it. And it's this concept of choosing to be positive. The title of this episode is It's Amazing, Why Not? And that's really the question that we can ask ourselves whenever we're faced with anything, including just a regular day. I'll tell you the story of how it came up, and then I'll talk to you a little bit more about it. Anybody who knows me well knows that I'm a pretty private person, and I also don't engage well in small talk. When you combine those two factors, when I get asked the question, How am I doing?

[00:01:07.340] - Tony Roig
Or How are things going? I don't really want to get into it normally if something's going on in my life. Also, I don't want to be just formative about it, performative, I should say, about it, by just the standard, like everything's great, or I'm fine. I guess it's not... People won't say it's great, but I'm fine, or things like that. I started saying, It's amazing. Everything's amazing, right? So you ask me how things are going, it's always going to be the same answer. Amazing. And at first it was just a thing. I would just say it, right? It didn't really mean anything by it. But then over time, I started to lean into it a little bit more, just saying the words that's amazing and playing with that. So as an example, I have grown children. When my grown children say, How is everything with you? I'll say something like, It's amazing. I just can't help it, or, I'm cursed with just amazing. And so, again, it became a thing. It got his own life. But actually, what ended up happening was, as I say it's amazing, and I start thinking about it, then I go, Well, why isn't it amazing?

[00:02:20.960] - Tony Roig
What's not amazing about it? And I recognize that there are days that are objectively better than other There are situations that are objectively better than other situations. But regardless of the situation that we're facing, we have a choice as to how we interact with that situation, interact with that day, interact with that experience, whether it's pickleball or life. The idea that I'm playing with and the idea that I want to plant in your head is this idea that, why not amazing? Why not come at it from the premise of, You know what? This is awesome. This is amazing. I'll explore this more in-depth in a future episode, but start thinking about the idea that every experience that you have and Every day that you live is a singular experience. Actually, today might be... I guess today is 9/11 when I think about it. I'm recording this on 9/11. No, just a coincidence, but Obviously, it's a big date. But it's the only 9/11, 2025 that I'll experience, that you'll experience. You've already experienced by the time you hear this one. But whenever you're hearing this, whatever date it is, just put that in there and say September, whatever, October, whatever, November, whatever.

[00:03:48.500] - Tony Roig
It's the only one you're going to have. It makes it a singular day, singular experience in your life. The same thing with personal things that happen to you, like good and the bad. Those are singular experiences. Perhaps just acknowledging that these events are singular events, singular experiences that we're going to have, allows us a different framing of them and allows us more control, more agency, more choice in terms of how we choose to interact with those experiences. And so maybe give it a try. Maybe the next time You lose every single game that you play in a session and someone says, How was your pickle? Or you say, It was amazing. Because you can't directly at least control the wins and losses that you have. And that's a whole other subject that we cover in other episodes and in the upcoming book. But you can't directly control wins and losses. You can't control certain aspects of how you play, but not all aspects of how you play. But you have pretty much 100% control over once learn how to do it, is how you react and how you experience those events that happen to you, including winning and losing on a pickleball court.

[00:05:10.630] - Tony Roig
So give it a try on how you frame your reaction to a day, whether it's a day of all wins or a day of all losses. It's still a pickleball and it's still an amazing experience, and it is singular in terms of your life, which is, at the end, probably nothing more than a collection of experiences that you're having from beginning 10. Anyway, so that's what I wanted to share with you, just something for you to chew on. If you're listening to this podcast in September, then we have our end of year or fall clinic, if you will, our big online event coming up at the end of September, where we're going to be covering three myths, three realities, and the three pillars of the pickle. So if you either don't know what those are or want to know more about them, make sure you join us for that. And just being on our email list, you should be getting emails from us on a pretty regular basis because we're pretty insistent on making sure that you know what's going on. Anyway, that's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And as always, consider sharing with your friends, because if you enjoy the podcast, they probably will, too.

[00:06:15.160] - Tony Roig
I hope you all, and I'll see you next time.