At the beginning of the year, we have all that enthusiasm and most of us are filled with hope, promise and a lot of excitement for the coming year. When players set resolutions or goals for the year, it's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to tackle too many things at once.

In this episode we're going to talk about how to actually achieve your goals, take those New Year's resolutions that may be rambling around in your brain, and to actually achieve some(if not all) of them when it comes to your pickleball game.

This will prevent a situation where we either don't take any action or we take very inconsistent action and by the end of January or perhaps by the end of February, most of the resolutions are by the wayside.

Start with small, consistent actions. Here's a way for you to do that;

i) 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. On the left side of the paper, try and do an honest assessment of where you are right now as a pickleball player. This should feature the different parts of your game.

- 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 one most important thing that you're going to start closing the gap on.

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Happy 2025! Let's think about our progress journey through pickleball as worth experiencing and enjoying to see the game better. Because here's the fact, there's really nowhere to arrive at and there's no magic place to get to.

Embrace the infinity of your journey and try and avoid pestering yourself with the, 'Are we there yet?' question.

Take a minute to imagine yourself as the player you want to be in the future. It could be a six months from now player, six years from now, however long you want to do it, and however much you want to add to yourself as a player. Picture that player for a moment. What does that player look like?

Placing yourself in the future you and who you want to be or grow helps us avoid being dissatisfied with where we are now because we want something more in the future.

You are in charge of how much you want to grow as a pickleball player and the game will always have something to teach you.

Now to the soft game- it's valuable and useful as a tool when you're playing. Consider adding it into your game or working on it more. It's the central feature of our game and continues to be the most reductive form of our game.

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Ben Johns is no longer going to play with his brother, Collin, and is looking for a partner for 2025. It's a little bit sad in the sense that they're brothers, they play together and I imagine they love pickleball.

There's been a lot of opinions about who would be the best partner for Ben for 2025 and I thought it was a good time to talk about picking a perfect partner. In this episode we'll also talk about your journey, getting ready for the new year and what you want for yourself in 2025.

How do you pick a partner? What do you look for? If you play rec play, you can also use also these ideas conceptually;

i) Shared Goals. Be on the same page so you can put in the work necessary to achieve your objectives.

ii) Compatible play energy. Approach the game from an energy standpoint as you flow through different situations for better partnership.

iii) Complimentary skills. This applies more to competitive situations, although in rec you can just be aware of it. For instance if you have two players that are super hyper aggressive, attacking everything all the time, that's probably not going to be ideal. Same case applies when the two players super passive.

There's other factors you can consider in your decision making that are not strategically driven in terms of chances for success in partnership from a pickleball standpoint, but are certainly super important, such as good partnership.

The key takeaway here is doubles pickleball is a team sport, such as basketball, thus needs the performance of the individual player like being able to hit your dink, your serve, return, volleys etc.

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Think of a perfect world as one that includes adversities because things will occur to us that are not in line with what we would hope or like. That in and of itself is the perfect world.

How do you deal with adversity when you're working on your game or when you're playing?

i) If you're working on your pickleball improvement, let's say you're working on your serve and you have a tendency to pull your paddle across your body (a very common mechanical flaw in players' games), understand that that's part and parcel of the game

ii) Allow yourself to not lose sight of the positives of the journey itself. You're going to have to deal with obstacles as part of your process to get to where you want to go, but that's just how it is.

I'll relate this to a personal story that we'll tie it into pickleball where a lot of times we focus so much on the final painted room, and lose sight of the moments that we're painting, the seeing it develop and trying to do your best.

In this episode I also share with you ways of thinking about your process that make it seem more manageable and use it for your benefit if you haven't done something before.

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Have a great week and we will see you this Friday for our regular episode - Pilling: It is a thing :).

Obstacles will naturally arise and are the reasons why you cannot reasonably say that you will not miss a single shot the next game you play. If obstacles are unavoidable and they generate the percentage, then that percentage is unavoidable by extension.

This week we drive home the conversation we're having last week about 15% volley and setting reasonable expectations as we try to figure out the best way for us to approach the invariable situation where we miss a shot.

If you understand what goes into your shots like shot variability, and removing variables, you can work your percentage error rate down.

You can improve your shots by;

i) Working on them
ii) Drilling
iii) Playing more

But no matter what, you're gonna have a number that is higher than 0% as there's no 0% error rate. Not even the pros have a 0% error rate.

So set the number you want then get it down from whatever your number but recognize that you're always gonna have a number at the end of the day, and how you decide to react to the missed volley relative to that number is going to be relevant to, how you feel and also just dealing in the real world.

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When we're playing a match and we miss a shot, particularly one that we consider 'easy', we can get down on ourselves. Missing shots is usually the most negative feeling that we have besides losing.

How do we process when we miss a shot when we play? This week I'm gonna share with you a technique of dealing with misses because they are going to occur .

And it is a normal part of overall execution and strategic decision making in pickleball for us to miss shots when we play, even the easy ones.

We need to change our mindset from 'I should not have missed that volley' to 'Okay, I missed a volley. That's just simply part of the deal.'

This approach will help you stay in the real world and not create some discord between the words you're trying to tell yourself and the reality you're dealing with. And it allows you to avoid needlessly beating yourself up.

The key is to avoid the negativity of always classifying your shot or expecting that you should not have missed and accepting that the shot is within the parameters of your overall game, which includes, by definition, missing shots when you play pickleball.

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This week we dive deeper into a recent episode by Tony on a very powerful perspective that had me reflect on my journey about learning.

What I discovered about the reality of the struggle during practice is that, first of all, it's unavoidable. The absolute only way to master a skill to proficiency is through repetition where you will inevitably face both success and failure, no shortcuts.

Now practice is about finding joy in the process and being fully present in that moment. There is just something so satisfying about the rhythm of drilling, practicing and the repetition of hitting a pickleball.

What helps me to stay grounded a majority of the time is a really simple tool that I use after every practice, or after playing a session, called 3, 2, 1;

👉 Writing down three things that I did well that day that do not have to be result-based.

👉 Taking on an awareness about myself on the two things I learned about myself to bring back the things I can control. It can be as simple as noticing that I play better when I take a deep breath before serving.

👉 Then one is one thing that I'm going to do with that information in the next 24 hours.

This exercise is a way to shift the focus back onto the process and away from the results, and ultimately, from where I feel the struggle and the frustration.

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