Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. This is a special episode. I'm coming to you on site from the a PP tournament here in Punta Go Florida. It's the first stop in the Humana Cup team event. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I haven't gotten to play yet. It rained all day today. We're waiting to play,

we're going on that court right there in a few minutes when the, these teams that are playing right now finish against each other. But I want to take an opportunity to talk to you a little bit about something that I've been pondering and seeing in, in Pickleball players in terms of, it's an obstacle that I'm seeing that's happening a lot, and I'm gonna be going in into some more in depth.

But I thought it was appropriate to raise the subject with you to at least put it out there as, as a, something that you should be on the lookout for if it's something that affects you. And actually, there's, there's two things that I wanted to mention here. One is, if you're a tournament player and you're getting ready for tournaments in 2024,

have a blog close coming out soon at Better Pickleball that I think will help you define why you're playing, enjoy the tournament more, and at the end of the day, actually play your best when you're at the tournament. What I wanna talk about today is I want to talk about results. And it's the obstacle that we place in front of ourselves, because we look at,

at, at the, we, we, we measure the success of strategies or shots, not by process, in other words, not by the big picture of that particular shot or that particular strategy, but by its result. And what I mean by this is, if you had a shot that ended with a winner for your team, you know, you won the rally,

most players would conclude that that was a good shot. No, that was the right shot to hit. Likewise, if we end up, we, if we hit a shot that ends up with a, with us losing the rally, then we conclude that that is a bad shot. That is not a good way of thinking about your Pickleball game, whether it's shots or strategies.

And it really got brought to the forefront with a video that we published on the in Two Pickle channel. You're welcome to go check that out over there. If you haven't subscribed yet to the channel, please consider doing so. But on the, in two Pickle channel did a video where I show a poach gone wrong and nationals mixed doubles match. And,

and I expected the comments to all be that this shot was a bad shot. And I understood that, and it was set up that way. But I said in the video, allow me to make the case for why the shot may not in fact be a bad, a bad shot, a bad strategy there to poach. And I laid out the argument as of this recording,

there has not been a comment other than one that where the, where the players understood that the poach, that that, whether the poach was a good poach or not, not a good poach, is not to be determined by the outcome of the shot, but by the process. In other words, by considerations about whether the poach made Sense in that situation.

And I articulated the reasons and the video for it. And it's, it's, it's, it's perfectly normal. I mean, as players or as human beings, we look at results, right? If we were able to get the food or get our shelter or whatever it is, then it, it's good. If we failed in that, then it's bad for survival.

That's good. But for deciding what's gonna work best for your game, whether it's a shot or a strategy, you're gonna really want to go beyond the, the results of the shots and consider looking at the process. Consider evaluating the process of the shot. Because here's the thing, even the best shot, in other words, the, the, the 100% right shot to hit is not gonna be in 100% of the time.

What that means is you're gonna get feedback that says that that shot may not be the right shot because you missed it. Sometimes it's still the right, it could still be the right shot. Same another area that's really easy to explore as out balls. You know, we hit a lot of out balls because we're so afraid of letting that one ball go that lands in.

We give up all of the, all of the balls that are likely to, in fact land out. So I'll be talking about this more in some subsequent episodes, but I wanted to, to raise this with you in this episode. If you're interested in this kind of thinking, this kind of approach to Pickleball, it's a deeper way of thinking about the game and understanding the game.

Consider joining us inside our pick upcoming Pickleball system class. We have a class opening in March, and you can also join us inside our academy if there's a particular course or an area that's of, that you're struggling with and you would like more help with. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Hope this is helpful to you. If you find yourself evaluating everything based on results,

maybe step back for it a second and ask yourself, was it the right shot or strategy from a process standpoint? Have you enjoyed the podcast? Please share with your friends. As always, if you share, if you enjoyed the podcast, then your friends will probably enjoy it too. Have a great week and I'll see you this Friday and your regular podcast episode.