Bottoming Out

Hello all –

I’m sad to admit I’ve been bottoming out on my favorite activity: pickleball.

What started out as leisure and exercise has turned into something I love so much and have started to take so seriously that, before a recent self-imposed intervention, I all but zapped the joy from the game for myself and anyone who had the misfortune of being my playing partner. 

Bottoming out essentially means that my thoughts, feelings, and relationship to a certain behavior are becoming too painful to bear. Thankfully I’ve been able to use The Three A’s: I’ve become aware of my problem, have begun to accept it, and am taking small actions to get better.

Before I share what's helping get me out of this funk, here’s my pickleball story: In Spring 2021, two of my friends told me they started playing while visiting their folks. The happiness in their voices when describing the game piqued my interest. With an imminent six-week trip to visit my folks in Southern California on the horizon, I asked my mom to see if she knew anyone who played. She put me in touch with her friend Mike, and my dad and I met him at an eight-court complex in San Clemente a couple days after I arrived in California. The courts at San Gregorio Park overlook the Pacific Ocean and are flanked by hulking palms and coral trees; while walking up from the parking lot, one hears paddle pops, laughter and line calls beneath a steady soundtrack of 70s rock wafting from a bluetooth speaker – a staple at any pickleball court. From the moment I stepped onto the courts, I felt home. Despite having no clue how to play, the friendly atmosphere pulled me in, as did Mike and his buddies who very patiently taught my dad and I how to dink, how to serve, and the basic rules so we could start playing a game within minutes. 

One of the many gems about pickleball is that it is simple – most people can learn how to hit the ball over the net and play a game in no time. But its simplicity is deceiving as the game is not easy and, like anything, the more I learn, the less I know. Another beautiful part of pickleball is that it’s very social. I’m on a WhatsApp thread with 75 people and more than half the messages are about barbecues at people’s homes. The court is small and all four players are in close proximity, which provides ample socializing. I think of pickleball like a 12-Step Group or church but in sport form: folks come for a primary purpose (in this case, playing), but the social element is a close second – the delight of human connection keeps people coming back. 

This buzz is contagious and helped pickleball explode in popularity during the pandemic. According to U.S. News & World Report, participation grew by 40% between 2019 and 2021 (about 5 million people play in the USA). And an NBC News article encapsulates the social appeal of pickleball with these short anecdotes:

“Seattle resident Ben Winston learned to play pickleball in a decidedly non-fancy location: an elementary school parking lot, with a portable net and chalk to mark the lines. 

He and his wife moved to Seattle in the months leading up to the pandemic. Then lockdowns hit, and with the encouragement of a friend, the two formed a pandemic ‘pod’ with the friends they played with in the parking lot.

Since graduating to actual courts, Winston, who is 31, said he has played with a range of people: a former NBA player, a bus driver and people of all ages and skill levels. That’s part of what he likes about the game.

‘I’m capable of getting my butt kicked by 70-year-old women,’ Winston said. ‘They’ve been playing for a while, and they just have this craftiness and guile to them.’

He’s not the only player who finds himself playing older opponents.

Wendy Siegel embraced becoming a pickleball mom and said matches have brought her closer to her father, who still plays in his 80s.

Still, she has no problem besting a younger player and hanging out with opponents afterward.

‘We’ve totally become friends,’ Siegel said. ‘[I] go to their birthday parties — like their 40-year-old birthday parties.’

‘I’m 53. I feel like a total mom.’”

The above passage exemplifies why I love playing: regardless of age, athletic ability, profession, etc., anyone who wants to play is welcome and the connection built between players is the best part. In essence, pickleball injected a ton of joy and community into my life –  I generally leave the court feeling happier and more connected to myself and the world around me.

That is until I started professionalizing my favorite game.

In March 2022, I was playing with some friends and, as is customary, someone who has more skills or court knowledge often offers tips to their playing partners (i.e. let’s get to the kitchen line after the third shot, try hitting your serve deep, etc.). This is what was done for me when I started in San Clemente and helped me learn the game despite not having taken my first formal lesson until almost six months after starting. Multiple people told me I was adept at offering helpful tips and wondered if I was an instructor. I wasn’t, but I did some Googling, found a one-day training program the following weekend in Newport Beach, and flew out and got certified to teach. 

Shortly after, my friend K and I played mixed doubles in an amateur tournament and a side of me came out that I hadn’t experienced since high school. As a kid I loved playing competitive sports – basketball and baseball mostly –  but hadn’t competed in many years; the only sport I would sometimes do is throw a frisbee in a park with any willing party. Though I’d played for almost a year at that point, I’d never gotten angry on the court or been overtly mean to myself or my partner. That all changed on the day of the tournament, when something was at stake (in this case a cash prize + a jar of pickles). Though we came in third place out of eight teams, I didn’t feel good afterwards because of how I acted toward my partner: surly, mansplainy, baby-ish. I thought I could think myself out of this problem and felt pretty good for a couple months in a row, but this ugly side of me reared its head again a couple weeks ago.

Recently I started teaching private lessons and small groups, and I love it. In fact there's a major correlation between teaching pickleball and life coaching because, as my first teacher Pickleball Pat instilled into me, “the game is 90% mental.” It’s more important to relate to my playing partner and opponents (and myself) than it is to win. It’s vital that I drill and work on my fundamentals whether I feel like it or not. I sometimes use life coaching skills while teaching pickleball (i.e. shifting negative self-talk from: “I’ll never learn to serve effectively” to “Learning to serve is a challenge and I can get incrementally better today,” affirming people for what they’re doing well instead of pointing out faults, asking if people are available for feedback instead of just dishing it). And as I often tell my pickleball students: “Take my advice; I’m not using it.”

This brings me to my bottoming out. I’ve started to take the game so seriously that I’ve begun acting in ways that I regret on the court. This includes having a chip on my shoulder, being rude to my partners or the opposing team, sulking after a bad play by myself or a teammate, barking suggestions or shot selection ideas. I’ve also done this in front of some of my students. Most of my pickleball clients live in Highland Park, and I’ve been playing a lot of recreational open play at the same courts as they do. Despite being a year-old player (but because I am now certified to teach beginners and intermediate players), I think I need to play perfectly all the time. Or that if I’m on a team with one of my students, we have to beat our opponents no matter what. While my knowledge has increased exponentially in a year, I am still a beginner myself. But when I play with or in front of my students, I put whopping pressure on myself (“I cannot make any unforced errors! I have to win every game! They won’t want to work with me as their teacher if I don’t play better!”). This has led to me leaving the courts with a much worse attitude than when I came on and has even splintered some friendships. I was direct with one my new friends/students and shared with her how I felt embarrassed and perfectionistic about my behavior, and asked if I could share with her a spiritual reading that showed up on the day that I left rec play feeling like I’d bottomed out:

June 9

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
-William Hazlitt

Whether I want to improve my skill at tennis or jogging or the art of living, the experts all tell me the same thing: I must get out of my own way, stop thinking about how I’m doing. The allegory of the centipede makes the point nicely: asked how it knew which of its hundred feet to use when, the creature found itself unable to move.

To perform any action self-consciously is to function under a [hindrance]. Being natural, throwing myself into an activity without worrying about the outcome relieves me of distracting and counterproductive pressures. And isn’t that letting go and letting our higher power?

For today: I free myself to fulfill my potential by having my higher power take me off my hands.

This is what I was doing: overthinking about how I’m playing and how I look in front of my students while trying to incorporate everything I’ve learned since becoming an instructor. In a way, I played better and had more fun before I learned how to play with more strategy and refined skills. Thankfully, this inner conflict brought on the pain in just a few months (instead of years like other areas of my life!), and that I’ve learned that “pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth.” Hence my pickleball woes have led me to search further for help via one of my favorite mediums: the podcast.

The first helpful podcast I stumbled upon was an episode of Pickleball Fire with special guest CJ Johnson. CJ developed a technique called “3-2-1” that she teaches to help her students “silence their inner critic.” CJ suggests that after every time someone plays, whether it’s rec play, a tournament, a lesson, or drilling with a friend, that they write down the following: 

• 3 things I did well

• 2 things I learned about myself (wording here is key – she emphasizes that it’s not what I did wrong, but what I learned about me while playing)

• 1 thing I will do within 24 hours to improve my game

CJ emphasizes that this “inventory” must be written down in order to be most effective and that the method could work for life outside of pickleball. She insists upon someone writing this down in the spirit of my favorite (and oft-repeated) Joan Didion quote: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” CJ also suggested a book that, although “tennis” is in the title, all pickleball players should read.

I haven’t yet read Mental and Emotional Training for Tennis by Dr. Peter Scales, but I did listen to him on a couple of episodes of the Compete Like a Champion podcast (Part 1, Part 2). I immediately related to Dr. Scales because, like me, he didn’t grow up playing tennis (or a paddle sport) his whole life. Instead he got the tennis bug in his early 40s and, once he started playing regularly/taking the game more seriously, he found himself miserable every time he played. So much so that his wife, a tennis pro, said she’d refuse to play with him unless he changed his attitude. 

Dr. Scales used his background as a psychologist to work on his attitude and found that fear was the main factor for his negativity. He breaks it down through the lens of “Self-determination theory” as well as his work as a psychologist (and now tennis coach) for adolescents. He says that the reason for our fears are as simple as ABC: Autonomy, Belonging, Competence. “The fears and anxieties on the court surround these ABCs” in that an individual will fear a “loss of autonomy or control,” “feel threats to belonging and relationships,” or fear “I’m going to look [like I’m not competent] if I keep playing like this.” Scales says these emotions are healthy and natural and that he’s not trying to evaporate them; he emphasizes how important it is to feel this because it indicates that one cares about what they’re doing. 

His goal is to help people see these threats as challenges, and to not be paralyzed by their feelings but instead be energized. Scales’ ABCs dovetail with another method that he calls: Competence – Learn – Honor. When working with new students, he teaches these items in reverse order and summarizes them as follows:

Honor: On and off the court, how we reveal our character with our actions will show respect for and bring credit to ourselves, our families, our teammates, our [community], and the game.

Learn: We will be open, curious, humble learners.

Compete: We will give our best effort 100 percent of the time.

Scales’ concludes that, “The game is bigger than you. It was here before you. It’ll be here after you.” Therefore, he says to “love the game more than how you perform” and to “lose your focus on yourself.” 

The other day I was playing at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Under the summer sun, with a light breeze, I was wrapping up my last of about 10 games over the course of two and a half hours. I was playing with three others whom I’d never met before. My partner and I were losing and I found myself taking it all a tad too seriously. Before I was about to serve, I looked at my partner and said, “I’m remembering to smile, taking a deep breath, reminding myself that I’m outside on a beautiful summer day and I’m playing my favorite sport. Plus I’m not injured at the moment. How fun!” The surprised look on his face indicated he might have thought I was nuts, but I didn’t care. I needed to remind myself of these things: that this is fun, or as Scales said at one point in the podcast when comparing his attitude after he began playing tennis to John McEnroe’s, “[I’m] not good enough to get this mad.” But instead of telling me to be quiet, my partner smiled and said, “Wow, you have an amazing attitude.” 

Later that night I texted the friend who I shared the spiritual reading with and told her someone complimented my good attitude. At that moment, I realized that for me, a compliment like that is more powerful than hearing I played well or that I’m a good teacher. It shows me that I’m starting to get out of my bottom and be in a position to bring joy into the game instead of my hang-ups and fear.

Time and time again I come back to the wise words of Damian Goldvarg, the coach who trained me, who always reminded us that “it’s less about what I’m doing, and more about who and how I’m being.” Now that I’m shifting out of my bottom, I need to be gentle on myself when I forget how I want to be. As I tell my students, when they get frustrated for making the same mistakes over and over, that it’s totally okay – we all have “pickleball-ism,” or an Incredibly Short Memory when it comes to applying all we know we should be doing. That’s why I still take lessons and need others to remind me that how I act toward my partner is more important than whether or not I get my dinks over the net.

One thing I love about being a coach is that, if a client asks, I can share my personal experiences related to similar situations they might be going through. I can share myself and my imperfections and show my clients that just because I’m a life coach, it doesn’t mean I have my life perfectly figured out. In fact, the more I learn about myself, the more support I desire. I guess I can parlay this into my pickleball teaching too and remember that just because I’m certified to teach, it doesn’t mean I’ll always play well or even act in an ideal way. What matters to me is that I’m not hiding who I really am, and that I am willing to remember that the game, just like all my other pursuits, are more about the relationships and connections I build along the way and less about getting the results I think I need in order to be okay.

Until next time,

Matt

***Do you work from home and want support to help accomplish certain tasks or projects? If so, I’m hosting a supportive online co-working session on July 7th @ 9:00 a.m. CT. Free to attend. Register here and invite a friend!***

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matthewleebaron.com