From Life Coaching to Pickleball Champion - A Journey of Purpose and Mindset

Join us for a transformative conversation with Sara Weiss, a two-time bestselling author, high-performance success coach, and international motivational speaker. In this episode, Sara shares her remarkable journey from network marketing leader and life coach to becoming a sponsored amateur pickleball champion. She delves into how burnout from her coaching career led her to discover pickleball, a sport that reignited her passion and brought balance to her life. Sara discusses the importance of mindset, embracing failure for growth, and how pickleball offers both physical and psychological liberation. She also shares insightful advice for couples and teammates on the court, emphasizing the power of surrender, avoiding judgment, and staying curious. Whether you're a pickleball enthusiast or looking to be inspired, Sara's story and wisdom will leave you energized and motivated. Tune in to explore the intersections of personal development, sports, and joy.

00:00 Introduction to Sara Weiss: Leadership and Personal Development
00:43 Balancing Professional Achievements and Motherhood
01:53 Sara's Personal Journey and the Adventurous Spirit
03:07 Discovering Pickleball: From Burnout to Passion
05:53 The Joy and Challenges of Pickleball
08:04 The Social and Physical Aspects of Pickleball
18:29 Commitment to Pickleball and Professional Growth
23:24 Mindset in Pickleball
24:25 Growth is Not Linear
25:17 Overcoming Plateaus
26:26 Embracing Failure
29:26 Practical Tips for Improvement
31:06 Winning Mindset and Positive Distraction
36:01 Advice for Couples and Teammates
42:11 Connect with Sara Weiss"

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Music: Purple Planet Music
Thanks to Purple Planet Music for Pickleball & Partnership Intro and Outro music Purple Planet Music is a collection of music written and performed by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Are you feeling burnt out, stuck in survival mode, or like you've lost your spark? You're not alone, and this episode is for you. Sarah Weiss went from high achieving coach on the brink of burnout to finding joy and purpose again through the most unexpected path. Pickleball. If you are craving more balance, more passion, and a reason to play again in life or in love, don't miss this conversation. Here we go.

Charlotte Jukes: 0:42

This the pickleball and partnership podcast, the place to talk. Talk about building better connections with your partner. Learning how to communicate with each other and how to inject fun. Into your relationship all through the game of pickleball. If that sounds like your cup of tea. Pull up a chair grab your paddle and join me. Your host, Charlotte Jukes. For pickleball and partnership.

Charlotte J: 1:16

I am so excited to be joined today by Sara Weiss, who is a dynamic force in leadership and personal development. Recognized as a two time number one bestselling author in leadership education, high performance success coach and international motivational speaker. As a top leader in the network marketing industry, she has built global teams of. Thousands and mentors individuals to achieve six figure incomes, A sponsored amateur pickleball champion and dedicated coach. Sara is also a serial entrepreneur, a wealth coach, and passionate agent of change. Balancing her professional achievements with her role as a devoted mother of two, she inspires and empowers others to unlock their potential and achieve extraordinary success on or off the pickleball court. Wow. And welcome, Sara.

Sara: 2:19

Oh, thank you so much for having me. You know, you list off all those things and honestly, my favorite thing on there is. Being the mother of my two kids, they're my favorite. They're always so consistently giving me smiles more than anything in the world. So of all those things, that would be my favorite.

Charlotte J: 2:36

As a mother of three, I completely resonate with that. Those relationships, they just warm the heart, don't they? Absolutely. So, oh my gosh, I felt exhausted reading that list. Of accomplishments. That's absolutely incredible. You wear so many hats. Bestselling author, high performance coach, entrepreneur, and mom of course. And now a sponsored amateur pickleball champion. I've taken some left turns. I guess Left turns are good. Can you take us back and just share a bit about your personal journey, who you are off the court and how pickleball found its way into your life?

Sara: 3:22

Oh my, where do I begin? There's so many things. I'm someone who's always been very adventurous in life, and I've tried so many different things just to make sure that I'm getting the experience out of life. So, naturally I would try something like pickleball, but, yeah, I've, been, an international speaker, so I've spoken publicly around. Mainly North America. I'm from Canada. I'm living in Minnesota right now. So again, the adventure continues, but I've always loved helping people have aha moments. I've learned a lot in all these many different experiences, so I love to share. I love to yap people's ears off and listen as well. I loved, the fact that's really cool about pickleball is you never know who you're on the court with. So I love asking questions. I love learning from people's different perspectives and then sharing those perspectives and my perspectives with other people. So, that's led me to becoming a life coach and I've coached many people again around the world living on Zoom and what led me to pickleball was. The burnout from living on Zoom. Giving my energy to a lot of people, and I'll tell you, it was it was amazing to live in my purpose and I still coach people remotely, whether it's pickleball or life coaching, but I was helping a lot of people while my kids' lives were happening behind me. I set up my computer and my microphone and everything in my dining room so that I wasn't away from everyone. I still wanted to be, active, even though I was glued to the computer screen, living on Zoom, doing private coaching, group coaching, doing podcasts, and all the stuff that, life coaches, especially over social media and stuff do. And I got to this point where I was, I was making tons of money and I was helping tons of people and I was very like, fulfilling in the fact that, I find that my purpose in life is to share what I know, give my secrets and enrich people's lives. So I felt great in that, but I noticed that I was starting to get burnt out doing it and that kind of, that was a conflicting thing for me.'cause I had always wanted to live in purpose and I had been thriving in my purpose and making good money doing it, having good, positive impact, changing people's lives, getting me aha moments and stuff. But I would get this typical thing where I would be. Not doing anything and feel this anxiety, like, I need to be productive right now. I can't be sitting down on the couch. I can't relax. I've gotta go help more people. I've gotta do more marketing. I've gotta build my courses out. I've gotta blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I gotta do all this stuff. And one day I was sitting down, I'm watching Netflix in the middle of the day'cause I wanted to, and all of a sudden my mind goes, you can't be watching Netflix. And I'm like, I'm 33 at this point. I'm 37 now, so this is four years ago and I'm like getting this production anxiety and I'm like, why am I feeling this way? I shouldn't be feeling this way. If I wanna relax, I should be able to relax. Sara, stop. And I'm like. Why do I feel this way? I had to do this like introspection. If I can't allow myself to just relax, what's the whole point of doing all of this? I'm doing this so that I can have options and choices and be able to relax if I want to. And I did this introspection. I was like, what am I missing? If I'm living in my purpose, what am I missing? And the thing that came to my heart was like an instant download. It was like fun. Where's the fun? I mean, I do have fun conversing and networking and connecting and talking and yapping and blah, blah, blah, but I, I wasn't doing any like physical fun. Of course I would meet with friends once in a while. I. Amongst our busy lives and stuff, but I had this big thing hit me. It was like, you're not having enough fun as an adventurer. There's not much adventuring happening right now, aside from taking my kids to Disney World and it was amazing and we would do, little outings and stuff. And of course I loved that. I lived for it. It wasn't hitting the button that I needed to hit for fun. And I was married to this guy at the time, so this is my ex-husband now, but he was like, why don't we go and I'll teach you tennis and I don't come from sports. I never really played sports other than like middle school volleyball. And I did enjoy volleyball, but I never got into sports. So I was like, okay, whatever. This was during Covid and we were, stuck in the house. I'm stuck on Zoom. And he knew of this little public court back home in Ottawa that we would drive by, and we never really thought too much of it, but we're like, why don't we go to that court and I'll hit you some balls and you can try it and see if you like it and we get to the court and he steps on the court and he's like. Um, I don't think this is a tennis court. I don't know what it is, but this is not a tennis court so he hits me some balls and he keeps, like scratching his head. He is like, something's not right. I don't get it. I don't know what this is or why it's even here, so we're giggling. And he's like, I gotta figure out what this is. So as we're leaving, we saw like where you would hang your racket, and then there's this picture of a racket and a picture of a. Paddle of some sort. We don't know what that is. We're like, okay, we gotta figure out what this means. As we went home, we Googled, found out it was pickleball, and we're like, what kind of sport is called pickleball? Like what? What? We looked it up. We found out at the time, there was this. 14-year-old phenom, Anna Leigh Waters is like top female pro and Simone Jardim and Ben Johns. And we're like, okay, this is like a serious thing. There's like a pro league and stuff like that. So we went and bought some cheap beginner panels in the old beginner white ball and we started hitting and it was cool. And he would beat me up around the court, it made himself feel good, but me not so much. I'm like, can you like just hit me the ball so I can actually experience what this is like. Something about the sound of it and just hitting the ball over the net got me like instantly feeling an addiction to it. Like, every time I hit the ball over the net, it was like this, like dopamine went on. Like, ooh, that was cool. Look what I did. And eventually we're like, well, we gotta try doubles, right? Because we can't just be you and I hitting the ball back and forth. So one morning we started driving around to local parks and can we find pickleball courts? Will we find other people doing this weird thing. And we found this senior citizen group, like old Tommys and Jills just playing and they're like, Hey, come on over. Come try playing with us. And we're like, oh my God. Okay, cool. And they just whooped our butts. They just whooped us around the courts and we loved it. We loved it. We were addicted already. And we decided we would wake up. Crack of dawn to go and meet these people. They played like 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM or even earlier. It was like 6:00 AM or something like that. And we started to play with them, and then eventually we're like, okay, all right. We're starting to hang with these old timers who, used to kick our butts, four weeks ago. And we're like, let's look for a club. Let's see how. Serious, this gets, and we found a club pretty local, and we just drove there and we watched and was like, oh, there's some younger people, there's some 30 year olds. I think we saw like a teenager and we're like, how do we join this? Found out, went there and then all once again had our butts handed to us by people who've been playing for four years and whatnot. And eventually we got invited into groups where we were at the bottom of the. King's Court for at least a month to two months. And they were really nice to have us,'cause obviously playing with us as their partner sucked, but they gave us a lot of patience and grace and eventually, I was like I wanna do this instead of coaching. It was such a weird thing to hit me. I'm having so much fun, I feel so free. I don't feel the pressure of having to, give to others to, to impact them. I don't have to do anything, but just almost be like an animal on the court. Not like a scary animal, but like in the sense that I didn't have to think about everything I was doing. It was instinctive and I was like, for the first time,'cause I, again, I don't come from sports. I got to experience this instinctive, intuitive action where I was just like acting out of whatever happens in the moment, rah. You know? And. It felt so freeing and liberating, and I was like, the business entrepreneur in me was like, well, this is clearly a blue ocean. And if you don't know what a blue ocean is, it means there's so much opportunity and not many people are in it. Red ocean means it's full. There's a bunch of people doing the same thing. So you're in competition. But here I'm like, this is a blue ocean. There's gotta be some business here. I could coach people, I could create products, I could find ways to turn this into a living while still doing what my purpose in life is, which is, helping positively impact people's lives. Whether it's by giving back to a community, whether it's coaching people, teaching them my secrets for on and off the court, and as someone who doesn't come from sports. But I do come from a mindset background. I took what I would teach people from mindset, whether it's from, running businesses, relationships, creating better wealth scenarios. I took that stuff onto the court and it helped me become pretty good at it pretty quickly. And I started to teach people,'cause everyone in the community was watching me get. Get better and better and better from like completely uncoordinated and getting my butt handed to me by everyone getting stuck on the bottom court to like recording all of my games, analyzing all of my games, getting to know who the top players were, watching them and analyzing them, comparing them to how I look and I would notice certain things about how they played and I would adopt it. And then I started hiring all the coaches and it was like I was moving up and moving up and it just, I. I guess I could say the rest is history. It's gotten me to this point where I now play pro events. Me and my boyfriend play in the US Open. We travel for APP and like we just had a tournament this past weekend here in Minnesota, local tournament, got a gold medal in the Open Pro division and it just, I love it so much. I just I'm living my dream right now. It's amazing.

Charlotte J: 13:03

I can feel the energy of the passion you have for the sport is, it's palpable. It's incredible. There is so much to unpack there. Sara, I loved every piece of that. Congratulations on your gold first of all. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's fantastic. Interesting that you were sitting on the couch in the middle of the day and there's this voice, and I think lots of us can relate to that, and I personally can relate to that too. My upbringing was, and it sounds like yours was also in some respect, if you are not doing, you are not achieving and therefore you are being lazy if you to attach that word to it. And you are so lazy, right? So lazy and not moving forward. And how dare you. Gosh, we. Would never allowed to watch television in the middle of the day. Why shouldn't we? But how interesting that, that was the voice that told you not to do that.

Sara: 14:12

Yeah. Yeah. And when, when it was like, what am I missing that is really making this such a terrible experience, such a lazy experience. When I work my tail off, I am making a great living, having great impact. Why can't I relax or do something in the middle of the day that is not being productive and that comes off as lazy? The question, that, is burning inside me. Why, why is this a problem? What am I missing? And, fun being the answer. Uh, it's. Awesome that it led me to looking for something different and still being productive, still doing my thing, but like having this open mind to see what's out there that could maybe I don't wanna say fill this void, but satiate this need for a little bit of adventure and fun. And then, I think it was two months later, I found pickleball and it was like. Ah, this is what I was looking for. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm like, I'm not religious, but I do believe in some sort of higher power God source energy. I don't know what to label it as, but I did. Thank it. Whatever it is. I was like, thank you. This is amazing.

Charlotte J: 15:13

I say that every morning, every day when I step on the court. Thank you to the universe, the divine whatever is orchestrating this and you can't describe it to somebody else who is not a addicted. And you use the word addicted and a hundred percent I am addicted too. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because okay, your Ex-husband, your husband at the time was a tennis player and you didn't come from any sport background at all. What was it then, do you think about pickleball? That one got him to play pickleball and not tennis and be excited by that. And two, for you to absolutely love and find the fun in this sport.

Sara: 16:03

Well, it's beautiful that we're at this this point of the conversation where we can compare tennis and pickleball it, it always comes to that. Always, always. And I love it. Actually, we were just having a conversation literally 15 minutes ago with. My boyfriend and his dad, who is a tennis player, he loves tennis and he's like anti pickleball. Blasphemous. Oh yeah, yeah. But he'll play it because every Sunday we go out with the family, we pick a court, my two kids, JJ's cousin and his dad, and we just, we hit the ball around just for fun. And he does enjoy that, but he will not. Convert from tennis to pickleball. And he was talking about why he likes tennis and why pickleball is trash compared to tennis, which has this rich history and where there's, solid rules and you've gotta be a certain type of person to fit into the community of tennis. It's got this sense of class to it, whereas pickleball just. Anybody, just any random schmuck off the street can grab a pickleball, paddle and play and they're playing their loud music and laughing too loud and having so much fun. It's distracting us and our tennis and it's honestly, that's what it sounded like and we giggled and that pretty much is it, a lot of the tennis people, they find it's just, it's not as fancy. It's not as fancy as their tennis. Right. But like for me and my ex-husband, he wasn't like a tennis player. He liked tennis. He played it fairly often, but not like seriously. And I'll tell you, a lot of tennis players that I meet, they convert, they're hesitant, but they convert. If I could sum it up in two words, it's easier on their body and they have more fun. They have more fun because there's more people, it's much more social, it's much more connected. It's even just as far as the size of the courts. It brings the people closer to each other. You're playing at the net and you're like in each other's faces trying to smash the ball at each other, laughing at the same time while you do it and getting a sweat on your. Like feeling good about the activity you're doing without breaking your body completely. I actually don't even play singles in pickleball because I think that's just too much moving and I'm, you know what, let's, I'll admit it, I'm a little lazy here. I like my little rectangle. I'll cover my ground. But my boyfriend, who is a tennis player, he played collegiate tennis he loves playing singles, but he won't go back to tennis. He loves pickleball Way more.

Charlotte J: 18:28

That's so interesting, isn't it? I come from a tennis background, so I don't feel like I want to go back to tennis now. As listeners will know, and I've talked about it in previous episodes, I was. Cajoled into playing pickleball. It wasn't something I wanted to do because I was hardcore tennis. Welcome to the dark side. Right. But it was one, I'm not old. Like maybe I'll play pickleball when I'm 80 years old. Oh

Sara: 18:57

yeah. That's a classic. But

Charlotte J: 18:58

another, I love also that you say, that you went and you drove around in Ottawa and you right. Found other people playing pickleball and they were old people. Mm-hmm. But they whooped your ass and it isn't, how did they ever Interesting, because I have walked on the court and I think most people have walked on the court so many times and we sum up our opponents and we are like, Hmm. Oh goodness. So. beat you and maybe they have a couple of knee braces on. They have the looking bionic. Yeah. Overweight and it's like, Ugh, this is going to be a walk in the park. And then yes, so I love that pickleball is so accessible and Yes, social totally. Because the court is smaller so take us back to the moment where you decided to go full in and it sounds like you tour with pickleball and you go to lots of different tournaments tell us about that part. I.

Sara: 20:00

I think one of the biggest there were a couple little moments that really made me go, I could do this. I could make this my life. But one of the big ones was when I got Ernied for the first time, I was like, what was that?

Charlotte J: 20:13

So explain for listeners who don't know what an Ernie is.

Sara: 20:18

So, and Ernie is, so like when you're playing at the net, there's the kitchen. You stay outta the kitchen unless it bounces. Then you can go in the kitchen. You can get it off the bounce Well, someone dinked the ball to me and then jumped off the side of the court, and as I. dinked back. They just smacked it from beside the court. I was like, what was that? Is that legal? It's very legal, and it looked really cool. I love when I get my butt handed to me, I'm like, okay. I wanna do that to you next time. So I researched it. I found out how am I gonna do this? And I tried to do it like I committed to learning this move. I committed to it. It was like such a big thing for me. I was fascinated by it. This was like my first big pickleball commitment. I'm committing to doing this, and when I recognized how committed I was to it and how good it felt to commit to it. I was like, there's something to this game that could light me up. I think in a long-term way, if there's constantly something that I can do to challenge and grow myself and be a better player, a better partner, there's so much to pickleball that's more than just the technical and mechanical things, especially as someone who teaches mindset. There's so much psychology behind it. There's the chess of it all the strategy, there's the learning how to regulate your emotions, especially if you're playing tournaments. And especially if you wanna get better and you're challenging yourself and you're, losing to a team that you think you can beat when you're judging the book by its cover. And I loved and was fascinated by all of that. And when I got ernied I was like, there is more to this than just hitting a ball over the net and. I found myself saying if I'm committing to, to learning something as crazy and silly as an Ernie, I think I am silly and crazy enough to commit myself to this sport. And, I continued to coach my life coach clients, and I was actually,, I was, about, I. Six months into designing a whole program, I was certifying other life coaches in my techniques and I was designing a program for people who wanted to pay a membership and to get coached by multiple different types of coaches, real estate coaches, financial coaches, life coaches. And I had this website developer and I was getting such a big headache from it because there was unmet promises and they were constantly asking for more money and all this stuff, and I just stopped. I was like, you know what? I'm giving up on it, and I hate the sound that, that sounds like I'm giving up on it. I took a massive left turn. I said, this is not bringing me joy. And not to say that, if you commit to something in the long term that yeah, it's gonna be tough sometimes you're gonna have a tough road and challenges and stuff, but my heart was so already all in on creating a life around pickleball because I could fulfill my purpose of teaching, giving, impacting while also. Incorporating this amazing fun I was having, I was like, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. And I did the done dance and I, I committed to pickleball. That's when I started to record myself to see what am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? I started creating highlight reels and posting content on it. I was active and engaged in the pickleball forum to a point where a company reached out and they're like, I know you guys, you just started, but you're content's great and we'd like to sponsor you. I'm like. A sponsorship. I could be a sponsored athlete. I'm like 33. And I just started playing this weird game and someone wanted to sponsor me and I'm like, okay, yeah, this is real. This is real.

Charlotte J: 23:45

That's amazing. And from you putting yourself out there and recording yourself. Honestly, Sara, what I get from this is that when you decide to do something, you go all in. It's very well

Sara: 23:59

known about me,

Charlotte J: 24:00

yeah, and there's something in that. But I think, you brought up another great point. I think there is great wisdom also in knowing when not to quit, but when to pivot. And it sounds like, you really pivoted, you really, tapped into that inner wisdom and said, okay. This isn't working. What I'm trying to build with my coaching is not working for me on so many different levels. Mm-hmm. And fun is not a key word, which you wanted Not

Sara: 24:33

at all. No.

Charlotte J: 24:33

In your life. So I think, there's great wisdom in being able to pivot. And you mentioned mindset too. And again, I have spoken in. Many previous episodes, but there was one particular episode of this podcast where I did talk about preparing for a tournament that I was playing in and about mindset and how important that is. I think for any sport. I also think for anything that we do in life. But can you talk a little bit about mindset and pickleball? No, I can't

Sara: 25:11

talk a little bit. I could talk for hours and days. It about mindset. I can't just talk a little, there's so much I can share on mindset.

Charlotte J: 25:18

We could sit here for hours and have this conversation.

Sara: 25:21

It's honestly my favorite part about this. Aside from the people, I would say the people in the social part is like probably my favorite. But the second biggest thing that I love about pickleball is the mindset of it. And there's so many things I could touch on, especially when preparing for tournaments or, growing. You know what? That's what I'll talk about if you wanna grow in this sport or in anything. Growth is not a linear curve. And I think a lot of people want it to be, want it to look like it's just going straight up. I'm getting better and better, and better, better, better. The higher you go and this is what happens in the beginning. It is pretty easy to learn and grow. I know I suck, I know I need to learn certain things and I'm open-minded to the coaching and the people and the feedback and all this stuff. And of course, when you play pickleball in the beginning. Everyone's gonna tell you, you shouldn't do that and you should do this. And it, gets to a point where it's annoying, especially if you're the girl.'cause the guys have all the answers and they're gonna tell you every single thing you do wrong and everything you don't do, right? So there's that. But once you get to this point where you're like 3.5, 4.0, now your ego starts. To kick in. This is where it's like, oh, I got some experience and I'm all right. So now you can't tell me what to do. I know what to do. This is where the challenge of growing starts happening. This is why you see so many people plateau at 3.5 and 4.0 because it. Sucks to suck and to get better you gotta suck a bit. You have got to get to this point where it's like, okay, what got me here from brand new, fresh off the street onto the pickleball court and learning what got me from here to there is not what's gonna get me from 3.5 to 4.0. And what gets me from three five to 4.0 is not gonna be what gets me to four, five. You've gotta change things up. When you start to change what you feel like you worked so hard to earn, to get good at the dinking in the third shot drop and stuff. And now to get better, I gotta add top spin. That's different. So I'm gonna start doing some top spin and I'm gonna hit the net a bunch. Oh no, maybe I'll go back to the way I am comfortable. And this is what happens. People go back to the way they're comfortable and they don't, test themselves. Because they'd rather win. They don't wanna feel like their value is being questioned because they lost a match of pickleball, and that is such an immature way to think, but it is how so many players think. For me, one of my biggest advantages, because I understand mindset, was. I knew I had to fail a ton if I wanted to get good, and that never ends. I'm telling you, Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters, the reason why they get better and better continuously still to this day is because they're not afraid to fail. They don't like losing, but they're out there drilling nonstop and trust me, they're testing the waters with new strategies, new tools. As paddles change and evolve as strategies and techniques change and evolve, as people are hitting the ball harder, they're doing different things and you've got to fail a bunch to get better, and that's why people plateau because they're so afraid to fail. For me, I have had this such a rocky growth. It's like I get good and it's okay, now I'm adding a new tool. Now I'm trying a two-hand backhand and I start to go down a little bit, or at least it feels like I'm going down because now I'm playing rec games knowing I'm gonna suck and knowing I'm gonna lose. And I'll even warn my partner. I'm working on a couple things, so you know, gimme some grace, gimme some patience. So. I've had to have this really solid mindset, knowing I'm not gonna win for a little while as I'm practicing this. Either that or. I go backwards and I do what's comfortable and I get stuck where I'm at there and not grow, which would be better for my ego and my pride. But I don't care about that stuff.'cause what I care about is getting better and challenging myself. And because I've done that, I've gotten to add so many different tools to my tool belt and the things I can do the backhand flicks and the rolls and the punches and the drives and the. Two hand backhand and two hand dinks and one hand dinks and slices and top spins. And all these little things that I've taught myself that caused me to do the rocky growth, where it's like I'm up and then I go back down a little bit and then, oh, I've mastered a skill. I go up and then guess what? New skill time, new strategy time. Now I'm aiming for the shoulder instead of just at the body. Now I'm aiming for the hip. Now I'm watching certain movements on the court and I'm trying to. Put them, put it to their backhand, put them off balance instead of just getting the ball over the net, which is so much easier. Yeah, that's what helps people grow. Being okay with making those mistakes so that you learn, so that you grow and get better. That would be what my biggest thing. I love to give to people and hope that they embody and embrace it's okay to fail. In fact, it's not just okay, if you wanna get good, you gotta fail a ton. The more you fail, the better success you will eventually have.

Charlotte J: 30:00

I think, the ego definitely gets in the way. I think we've all experienced that. Whether we are playing pickleball or. We are trying something new for the first time or whatever that might be, and it has me curious too, because why is it that we are brought up without that mindset? Because we are told the complete opposite. We are told we need to do better, do better, get

Sara: 30:27

good grades, or you're grounded,

Charlotte J: 30:29

Exactly. But at no point. Was I ever taught that? Do it over and over and make the mistakes. Because the more opportunity you have to make the mistakes, the better you're going to get. And

Sara: 30:43

especially if you're okay with it, if you're frustrated about it, that distraction's not gonna help you grow any faster. But if you're okay, just going on repeat, and I tell people when I'm coaching you're gonna make mistakes. I'm teaching you something new. Don't think about it. Don't grunt and groan and whatever. Just repeat. I'm just gonna feed you balls. All you're gonna do is repeat. I challenge you to make 50 failures and 50 mistakes. Do it with a smile and you'll be fine. Trust me, it's like walking when you're a baby. They're not crying'cause they fell, they, they get up and they do it again and again, and all of a sudden we're walking. It's the same thing.

Charlotte J: 31:17

Exactly, and that's a great analogy. Babies, toddlers, they only got to walk because they practiced and they fell down and they got up again. And I think, people may be thinking, oh, that's easier said than done. And it is said than done. Perhaps you have a couple of practical tips. I heard you say. Put a smile on your face. And I'm a firm believer in you have to feel like you are the part, I walk onto the court and I put on that identity of, Hey, I'm a pickleball player and I'm going to have fun, and it doesn't matter what I look like because. I'm going out there with that positive mindset of having fun, of connecting with people, of taking shots and practicing and doing better than I did yesterday and doing it with a smile on my face. But do you have a couple of other tips that you could got? So many, so many, so many you. I teach a lot about positive distraction. Let's think about a winning mindset. What is a winning mindset? And people will instantly jump to I'm gonna win. I'm the best telling yourself I'm the best. And that's not what it is. It's recognizing that you're already winning. So when I talk to people at tournaments that are feeling the stress and the pressure, I ask them, why do you play this game? Why do you play this? They'll, most of the time they say, well, it's a good challenge, or it's, I get to play with my friends and stuff like that. I'm like, whether you win or lose, do you get those things? Whether you win or lose, do you get those things right now? Are you getting that as we speak? Are you off your butt around good people? Yes. Guess what? You just won and every time you step on that court, are you challenging yourself? Yeah. You're winning. Recognizing all these things. And like for me, sometimes if I notice myself getting in my head and getting frustrated about, making a few mistakes in a row, take a deep breath and I'll look around. How many things can I pick out that I'm grateful for right in front of me? And this is a great practice for everyone to ground themselves and get back into a winning mindset. You look around, you go, wow, look at all these people. I'm making new friends, I've got current friends. I've got this partner who maybe I just met as a blind aid, or who I've been developing a team with. I'm so grateful that, I was picked or that I picked them, or that we're building a friendship. I'm so grateful that I'm staring across people who I looked up to before I had the skill to compete with them. I'm so grateful. It's a beautiful day. I'm so grateful that the sun is shining on me and I'm not sitting at home not doing anything. I'm doing something productive that. Feels good. All of a sudden, you'll catch five to 10 things that you're grateful for and get back into that winning mindset. It's like whether I win a medal, a$5 medal or not, I'm such a winner right now. Such a winner. So getting that winning mindset. Is so huge. And when I say the positive distraction thing I'll give you an actual example and you guys can all use this however you want, but I had a client the other day and he, I would say is about a 4.0, and we're working on transition zone. So he had to reset each ball I gave him, and I would increase speed and power and placement at his feet and see what he could do. And then we started talking about split step, how to move in the transition instead of just shuffling your way up. You take a step and you split. You take a step and you split. And he's someone who gets in his head and he overthinks his shot. It's like. Dude, you already know how to shoot. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to think about resetting that ball because your body already instinctively knows it. You've done it thousands of times. Why do you think you need to calculate it? Why do you think you need to overthink it? Stop thinking about the shot. And of course that sounds easier said than done. So here's the trick. You use positive distraction. And I do this with my kids all the time. If they're like whining or crying, I'll be like, you don't want to eat your food. Why don't you eat your food? And I'll give you, an ice cream. And on the weekend, all of a sudden they'll eat their food. It's a positive distraction. Or if they're, they hurt themselves and I'll just say something funny and poke at them and I love you and you got this and whatever. I just, positive distraction. But on the court I said, okay, we're gonna work on your footwork. I. And that's all I want you to focus on. Don't even look at where the ball goes. Okay? You're gonna go to the back of the court, I'm gonna hit you a ball and you're gonna hit a third shot drop. But I don't even want you to think about the third shot drop. Here's what you're focused on. You hit that ball, you step forward and you split. I don't care if the ball hits the net. I don't care if you hit the ball out. I don't care what the ball does,'cause that's not what we're focused on. You are gonna hit that ball. As soon as that ball comes off your paddle, you split step and he took a step back, goes to the baseline. I'm like, what are you focused on right now? He said split step. I hit him the ball. He does his perfect third shot, takes a split, then we started playing slinky. So he would do that, I would hit it back and he'd work his way up to the front, to the kitchen and then work his way back doing the same thing over and over. And the change was so instant. His thirds, his resets at the net, they were like near perfect almost every single time. I just kept saying, what are you focused on? Split step. What are you focused on? Split step. He hyper-focused on the split step and all of a sudden his instincts just did what his body has been trained to do over thousands of hits of the ball and it just did it instinctively, animalistically.'cause he was focused on something different, his footwork. Hmm. It's really connecting to that inner intelligence and whether you're playing pickleball or you're doing anything in life, it's instinctually knowing we know what to do. We know what we want. Yes, we know what lights us up, but we get in our heads and the. Story takes over and it really sounds like what you're saying is drop the story and just connect to that animal instinct. You said right at the beginning, it's that animal type of energy on the court,

Sara: 37:14

yeah. They're not thinking about nothing. They're just being animals.

Charlotte J: 37:17

Love that. If you could give one piece of advice to couples or teammates.'cause I like to always relate this back to playing with your partner, and whether that's you're playing with your partner on the pickleball court, or you are navigating family life or kids at home with your. Partner but if you could just give one piece of advice to any couples or teammates who are stepping onto the pickleball court together for the first time, what would that be?

Sara: 37:51

Yeah. As someone who plays with my boyfriend in the pro division and has had, both sides of the coin of the experience, it being really great and connecting and it not being so much, and the clash and the frustration and the arguing it would be to surrender. I. I don't mean white flag surrender, I mean let things be without needing it to be different. Especially when you're playing with a partner who you've developed with, whether it's an en court or off-court partner. We get these, I. Expectations and we start to take things personal. We read into things too much. We don't treat them like they're a pickleball partner. We treat them, they're like a life partner. And it's like we read into every single thing they do. And guess what? We're both going through different emotions and pressures in the middle of especially at tournaments and it's like just let. Your partner do what they do. Now, if they're offensive and stuff like that, you talk to them, you say, this made me feel this way. But instead of allowing two emotions, just cause chaos within each other, you surrender to the process. My, my big word for you all to explore in your own way what that means to you. So I don't get too involved in trying to tell you what it means to me and what it should mean to you. Surrender. Don't have big expectations'cause. When you express and spew your emotions, you're causing chaos, even if it's just an eye roll. And we all know that. We all know that on the pickleball court. We see it. We see the vibe. We feel the vibe. We see the eye rolls, we see the huffs and puffs. We feel the tension. If you, I. Let go of that and just surrender to the moment, which again, if you recognize you're a winner by seeing the beautiful sun, seeing the fact that you're out with your significant other, you're around friends, and you just surrender to that and just go, wow, this is amazing. No matter what. It becomes a lot easier to let them do their thing. Let them express how they express. Let them get frustrated. Let them feel their feelings. Nothing wrong with feeling feelings. There's nothing wrong with it. We don't need to take a personal, so when you go on with your significant other, let them be who they are without it being a personal thing. Now, if they say something that really hurts you, bring it up. Try to avoid it being, smothered in your emotion and you're taking it personal. Just say, Hey, maybe next time if you have a certain feeling, I don't know just go err. But try not to direct it on me. There's ways to have communication and you're actually gonna, I find it's a really good bonding experience'cause it's a great way to communicate and set boundaries and really. Sometimes it's trauma showing up, like literal childhood trauma showing up on the court. Let me add this.'cause this is very important. Instead of being judgmental, be curious. If you watch Ted Lasso, you'll know what I'm talking about. Be curious instead of judgmental if your male partner is like a super aggressive and you can tell the frustration and the ego and the pride instead of taking it personal and judging it as a bad thing or an aggressive thing. Get curious, ask questions after the game. Hey, what were you feeling there? It seemed very intense. Were you mad at me? Ask questions'cause I speak from experience. Sometimes I feel like he's mad at me. You mad at me. Am I feel like I'm not doing good enough for you and all this stuff. And it's not necessarily that. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. But just the fact that you're showing this curiosity, it lets the guard down. If you start saying judgments, the guard goes up, it becomes an argument. Then you've gotta really heal from some stuff. But if after the game you ask questions, you get. Curious about the behaviors the words, the actions, and you actually ask and you get to, you learn more about your partner. It can actually make you closer, and you, it can be turned into a positive bonding experience where you learn more about each other. You set certain boundaries. You also get a chance to share how you feel about something. And then he can know, hey. Maybe that behavior, that those words I should do something different.'cause I don't wanna hurt my girl. I don't wanna hurt my partner. I don't wanna hurt my man. It's not always the guy who's being aggressive, trust me. It's, it's a two-way street for sure. But yeah get curious. Don't be judgmental and just surrender to the process. Let your partner be who they are. And sometimes it's not gonna click and sometimes you gotta find a different partner and that's okay too. But when you're playing surrender, surrender, get in your winning mindset and then get curious instead of judgmental.

Charlotte J: 42:13

Hmm. I'm hearing three super important things there, Sara. Love that. One surrender. Yes. And like you say, that's not giving up or giving away our power. It's actually very empowering when we do surrender. And then don't take it personally. And actually it's synchronicity because in last week's episode, Carrie Sans, who's a. Licensed marriage therapist came on. And that was one of her big points too, was don't take it personally. Whatever your partner or whoever you're interacting with is saying, it's about them, not about you. And then thirdly, get curious. And I think when we can come in with that childlike curiosity that we all had once, and then I think we lost. along the way, then yeah, we can really take every moment as a learning opportunity and Totally. Yeah. I love that. And oh my gosh, I could talk to you, like you say, for hours. You have so much knowledge and energy and passion for the game, and passion for life. Love that. Sara, where can people find you?

Sara: 43:31

Social media, YouTube. So if you look me up on, on Facebook or Instagram, I'm Sara Weiss. My handle is heck yeah, pickleball. You can find that on YouTube. I upload my games. I have an Ernie tutorial.'cause as I said at the beginning, I became so obsessed. I'm actually known in Ottawa as an Ernie Queen and like I get Ernie all the time. I'm like really good at setting it up. So I created a tutorial video. So if you really wanna learn how to do it. As a beginner, because when I learned it, I was a beginner, so I wasn't super coordinated. Go to heck yeah. Pickleball. That's H-E-C-K-Y-E-A-H, pickleball. And the first video you'll see there is my Ernie tutorial. And yeah, you can just connect with me there. I'm happy to chat with anybody. I love this community so much. If you wanna talk pickleball, trust me, I could go on for days. Well, I'll chat with you.

Charlotte J: 44:17

And we will put those links in the show notes too, so that people can find you. But heck yeah. Pickleball. It's been a a pleasure. Sara, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Charlotte.

Speaker: 44:30

Thanks so much for listening today. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Anything mentioned, including links, notes, and a full episode list, will be over on our website at pickleballandpartnership. buzzsprout. com. Com. If you got something outta this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe to Pickleball and Partnership on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so that you are notified of new and upcoming episodes. And if you're finding value in this podcast, a free way to support us is to leave a five. It truly means the world to us. This will help more people access these real conversations. And if you haven't connected with myself or Neil personally, we would love to meet you and say hi over on our Facebook page. Thanks again for listening. Please tune in next week for another exciting episode of Pickleball and partnership. Remember, we're all learning, growing, and showing up in our own ways. And that's what matters most.