How to Feel Skited (Scared and Excited) and Do It Anyway

Let me ask you something you might not want to answer.

When was the last time you did something on the pickleball court that genuinely scared you?

Not frustrated you. Not annoyed you.

Scared you.

If you’re having to think about it—that’s the answer.

I Want to Introduce You to a Word

Skited.

Scared and excited at the same time.

I first heard it recently, and I immediately thought of every player I’ve coached who stood at the edge of their own growth and felt exactly that.

  • Skited before a tournament.
  • Skited before playing up with better players.
  • Skited before trying the shot they’d drilled a hundred times but never trusted in a real match.

Here’s what most players do with that feeling:

They wait for it to pass.

They think: Once I feel ready, once I feel confident, once I feel sure—then I’ll take the step.

But here’s the hard truth:

That feeling never fully passes. And waiting for it is keeping you stuck.

The Avoidance Pattern Nobody Talks About

In pickleball, we talk constantly about floor and ceiling—raising your physical baseline and expanding your best game.

But there’s a different kind of floor that quietly lowers itself when you’re not looking.

Your courage floor.

It drops every time you avoid the scary thing on the court. Every time you choose the safe shot over the brave one. Every time you skip the tournament, decline the invitation to play up, or stay at the comfortable level just a little longer.

Avoidance doesn’t announce itself. It feels practical. It feels responsible.

  • I’ll enter the tournament once my backhand is more consistent.
  • I’ll play with better players once I’m sure I can keep up.
  • I’ll try the risky shot once I’m more confident.

But here’s what’s actually happening beneath all of that:

Every time you avoid the uncomfortable thing, your brain experiences relief—and that relief teaches your brain that avoidance was the right decision.

The next time the opportunity comes around, the fear feels a little bigger. The comfortable level feels a little more justified. Your world gets a little smaller.

And your ceiling stays exactly where it is.

Courage Is a Skill

I want to tell you something that changed how I think about the mental game—and how I coach it.

Courage is not a personality trait. It’s a skill.

And like every skill in pickleball, it can be trained.

The players who try the audacious shot at 9-9. The ones who play up without apology. The ones who enter the tournament before they feel ready.

They aren’t fearless.

They’ve just built more evidence, through repetition, that discomfort is survivable. That the scary thing on the court didn’t end them. That they could handle more than they thought.

That evidence is available to you, too.

But you have to take the MindShift rep to get it.

The Confidence Trap

Most players have the sequence backwards.

They think, “I need to feel confident before I take the brave step.”

So they wait. For the right rating. The right level. The right moment when they finally feel ready.

But readiness is one of the biggest illusions keeping players stuck.

Confidence doesn’t come first. Action does.

Your brain builds confidence the same way it builds any other skill: through repetition and accumulated evidence.

  • The first time you entered a tournament, your hands probably shook.
  • The second time, they shook a little less.
  • The tenth time, you had evidence: I’ve done this before. I survived it. I can do it again.

That isn’t confidence that arrived from nowhere.

That’s confidence that was built—brave MindShift rep by MindShift rep.

The Fear of Judgment on the Court

There’s another layer to this that I want to name directly.

A lot of players aren’t just afraid of losing.

They’re afraid of being seen losing.

You won’t try the Erne because you might look foolish. You won’t enter the tournament because you’re worried that you might lose badly in front of people you know. You won’t play up because you don’t want to be the weakest player on the court.

You’re organizing your game around avoiding embarrassment.

And here’s the thing: almost everything meaningful in pickleball requires being seen imperfectly.

  • Growth requires it.
  • Improvement requires it.
  • Becoming the player you’re capable of being requires it.

Ask yourself honestly: when someone you know enters a tournament and loses in the first round, how long do you actually think about it?

Ten seconds. Maybe. Then you move on to your own game, your own fears, your own internal narrative.

Because everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.

The judgment you’re afraid of exists far more in your head than in the real world.

The cost of organizing your game around avoiding it? That’s real.

Track MindShift Reps, Not Results

This is where most players abandon their courage before it has a chance to compound.

They try the brave thing once. It doesn’t go perfectly. They use the imperfect outcome as evidence that bravery wasn’t worth it.

But here’s the truth:

You can fail at the outcome and succeed at the MindShift rep.

  • The shot goes out—MindShift rep counts.
  • The tournament bracket humbles you—MindShift rep counts.
  • The better player exposes every gap in your game—MindShift rep counts.

Every time you do the scary thing on the court, regardless of the outcome, you send your nervous system the same message:

I can tolerate discomfort and still survive.

That message compounds. Point by point. Match by match. Week by week. And that compounding is how floors rise. That’s how ceilings move. That’s how the mental game gets built—not through one giant brave moment, but through small, repeated MindShift reps that slowly change your relationship with being afraid.

One Brave Year

Here’s a question I want you to sit with.

One year from today, what do you want to have built?

Not just your rating. Not just your shot selection.

Your courage floor. Because when you raise it through consistent MindShift reps—when you rise to a higher level of training—the gap between your floor and your ceiling closes, and your potential rises with it.

Because one year is going to pass anyway. The seasons will change. The tournaments will come and go. You’ll blink, and another year of pickleball will be behind you.

The only question is whether that year built evidence—or excuses.

You don’t need 52 giant brave moments. You need 52 weeks of small MindShift reps.

  • One brave drill this week.
  • One brave match next week.
  • One brave tournament entry next month.

Track the reps. Let them compound.

And a year from now, the player who did it while feeling skited—week after week, point after point—will look back and realize:

The ceiling moved.

Not because fear disappeared.

Because they played through it anyway.

That’s Mental Edge: The X Factor™.

And the X Factor—the courage, the MindShift reps, the willingness to feel skited and play anyway—

It’s always been YOU.

Coach B is the creator of Mental Edge: The X Factor™, a proprietary peak performance system that helps everyday and elite competitors—including world No. 2 pickleball player Anna Bright—Re-Train Your Brain™ and build the mental infrastructure needed to Master Your Mind. Master Your Game.™

If you’d like a deeper look at how to build mental infrastructure that holds up under pressure, your first step is to access your complimentary mental fitness assessment (the same one Anna Bright took). You will then have a complimentary Discovery Session with Coach B unpack your results.

Pickleball Escapades By Women. For Women.™ Retreat in the Pacific NW August 27-30, 2026.    3.5-4.5 Level      3.0-3.49 Level