Played my first mixed tournament! Some thoughts

Hey all, I participated in a local tournament for the Dutch padel league for the first time last weekend, and figured I'd share some insights into my experiences. We were lucky to play 3 matches in our poule as opposed to an elimination bracket, and honestly I had a lot of fun and learned a lot from all three matches! Would definitely do this again. We lost all 3 matches, but they were competitive, fun, and we were playing well for the most part. 1st match was 3-6, 4-6, second match was 6-7(7), 6-1, 10-12, and the last match was 2-6, 4-6. I enrolled in playing mixed doubles with my cousin. We only played together once before, but we got into it pretty fast. Every match we've played, the man was playing left, including me. My initial assumption was that this is done because of the more dominant overheads, making finishing points easier. However, I noticed that in all 3 of my matches, I think I might have had a low total of \~8 overheads that I could really put away, roughly the same for finishing volleys. The reason for this, to me at least, seemed that the opponents were very rarely landing lobs in front of my baselines, so aggressive overheads were pretty rare to find during all of these matches. This surprised me honestly, because when I'm playing with only guys, I tend to have *vastly* more overheads and finishing volleys. The same also happened on the other side of the net. There was only 1 guy who was religiously attempting to hard-hit his overheads from the baseline, but as a result he was also spraying them out half the time. So it was quite a change of pace! And honestly, I enjoyed that a lot. I really had to switch from the "hard hitting" on every ball, to a more mindful, tactical approach, building up points, not making mistakes, and finishing without overuse of force. And that feels just as good, if not better, than finishing a 3-ball point with a hard overhead lol. One thing I did not like so much was the "Golden Point" rule... Having to win 2 or 3 points in a row to win the game is just so much more competitive than accidentally losing your game because of a net cord or an unlucky cage-wall-ball. I think these points where the most difficult for me in general: Since I had quickly adjusted my slightly aggressive game style to being much more solid and using less power, I got into a nice little flow during the match, up until the point where we had Set/Match/Golden points. I would still play solid during these points, but I noticed that I lost most of these points because of eventually digging out a "soft floater" that my brain then wants to absolutely annihilate as if I'm back playing with dudes only. The result: Improper timing = losing the point due to overhitting that singular volley or overheard on critical moments. This was especially frustrating as it seemed to only really happen on these critical moments, the instinctive over-hitting. We had 3 match points in the second match (in a row!), and we had set points in the first match that went the same way. I also noticed that we had no issue getting ahead in games or sets. But the harder part is to keep the advantage. I've lost a bunch of serve games where I start 30-0 or 40-0 only to lose the game over a Golden Point for example. I guess that's just the mental aspect of the game... As a tennis player I'm not surprised at all by it, but it does make me wonder if the tactic really should just *always* remain on the "make no mistakes" tactic, or if there comes a moment in one's Padel career where the soft floater balls could, and should be killed? For example, in between games I watched a match of very high level/quality, and at this level it seems that hitting hard ánd controlled seemed to be pretty standard. So maybe this is how you should start to learn it? First teach yourself to be consistent, not making mistakes, guarding your margins? And then later, add in the speed to kill on easier balls? What do you think?