If you’re a top competitor in your esports title, congratulations on how far you’ve already come.
You know you don’t only play the game itself (for the sake of it and simply having fun). Perhaps even more significantly, you play the opponents — the top players — and… yourself.
Within yourself, you face many battles. Not only the ones on the screen (PS5, Xbox, whatever).
That’s where we’ll point you over the next couple of minutes: toward reflecting on three big mental challenges, ordered by when they tend to appear — pre-competition, during competition, and the final moments of competition plus the aftermath.
And we bet you want to become more able and skillful at winning over the barriers those challenges present.
Sport Psychology (and our specialized team) can offer the precise, precious elements to get you on that track.
We mean two things:
- Finding and resolving what blocks or makes optimal performance difficult.
- Working toward creating, maintaining, and upgrading what promotes optimal performance, regardless of circumstances.
We’re here to introduce you to the worlds of Mental Skills Training and Self-Discovery. These matters are complex, and a single article can’t do them full justice. You would need more detail, and a more personalized unraveling of your psychology as an e-athlete.
Still, the topics we share here can take you at least one step further in navigating the difficult aspects of competitive endeavors more efficiently.
So let’s dive into the challenges — and the nine mechanisms you can increasingly tap into when they arise in your tournament matches.
The Challenges
1. Self-Doubt
Translates into: Regarding yourself as inferior or inadequate.
Examples:
Thoughts — “I may fail miserably today.” “I’m not sharp / hot / fast enough (insert your ideal-state wording), and that’s bad.” “My opponent(s) are showing super high level lately, and that may crush me.”
Feelings & sensations — insecurity, trembling, significant discomfort in the belly, overthinking.
Reminder: these thoughts and sensations can be subtle and hard to become fully aware of.
3 Ways to help:
- Attuned preparationThis is not just the obvious advice about studying the game and putting in hours repeating meta game-mechanics (though those certainly help you maximize your in-game abilities).
We’re talking about two strands:
- Studying the opponent’s style and weak points so you can be responsive, strategically on-point, and adjust your playstyle to take advantage.
- Studying yourself — your in-game weak points as well as your mental side. Which unhelpful perspectives do you develop? Which maladaptive reactions creep in? How do you conduct and compose yourself? How do you deal with setbacks and struggles?
These are questions worth exploring so you can master your mental game even before the big moments start.
Optimal preparation equips you with better resources and a solid mental framework to operate from — and, as a consequence, supports optimal performances.
- Amping (or relaxing!) yourself“Yeah, okay, I admit it. I’m doubting myself and feeling insecure about my plays. Should I try to relax or pump myself up to face the next game?”
There’s plenty to talk about here. No way to condense or simplify it into a clear-cut answer.
Some athletes prefer to get relaxed before a competitive moment; others prefer to get fired up. Both can work well. This is another area where developing strong self-awareness and routines is critical.
Key aspects to keep in mind:
- Feel it — Whatever discomfort or challenging thought or feeling is going on inside you, know that it doesn’t have to control you. Feel it as something that arises, and work toward becoming bigger than the feeling, rather than letting the feeling become bigger than you.
- Accept it — It’s a natural part of the big stages. If you felt nothing or were super relaxed, that would actually be something to worry about. Some feelings may simply be there to get you ready and focused — they can be transformed into a useful degree of excitement for action.
- Don’t make a big deal of it — If you start worrying about having those “unwanted” or uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, you can start yourself down a distressing path that will not serve your best performance. Fighting them hard can pull you into a negative spiral.
Wrapping these three together creates a foundation for training mindfulness in sports performance. We integrate this fully in our Mental Coaching services.
- Objective functional focusIf you’re more pragmatic, we can also work on the mental side without heavy mental talk. We can go straight to implementable tactics and behaviors.
In the case of self-doubt, alongside attuned preparation, you can recompose yourself by focusing solely on the most important elements of the game — the in-game cues.
esports has this fascinating aspect: players are almost always in action (unlike sports like football, where a player may not be taking strenuous actions when the ball is elsewhere). You have to stay aware and control dozens of button-input combinations.
So what objective in-game things can you anchor yourself to? Positioning? A pass? A shot? A build-up or defensive strategy?
If you miss a pass or a shot, or see that a decision was off, what can you focus on and do right away?
2. Nervousness + Distractions
Translates into: Crippling feelings of anxiety plus internal or external derailing cues that take a toll on fluent, fruitful performance.
Examples:
Thoughts — “This is far from my top level.” “I hate listening to them.”
Feelings & sensations — shaking, pressured, threatened, distant, irritated, overwhelmed, worried, hesitant.
Reminder: Nervousness and distractions are highly subjective; each person experiences them differently.
3 Ways to help:
- Objective functional focus (yes, yet again)It’s key to train yourself to switch on the chip for focusing on what matters most for the game. A little win to W-I-N to WIN.
This Psychologist has a strong WIN Strategy that works well here. It can be as simple as creating your best adjustable “If-Then Implementations”: If X happens, then I will do ____.
The secret is staying connected to the game at every moment. Keep addressing what the game, the opponent, and your team are requiring from you. It’s about constant tweaks and decisions aimed at performing your best possible.
- + Awareness ++ Space | Pause + Breathing (pause if needed)This is self-inquiry work.
Gaining awareness of what triggers you for the worse is a considerable win. From there you can develop skills to manage the situations — dealing with pressure, responding confidently in clutch moments, maintaining the kind of composure where revolt, fear, or disappointment don’t even affect you.
By knowing yourself (how you operate and react) in critical competitive moments, you can enlarge your degrees of influence and control. That’s what we mean by more space — wider mental space that lets your in-game skills skyrocket, and a special kind of space where you can respond more adequately between stimulus (a setback: conceding a goal/death/overtake) and response (the clogged-up sigh, the tilt, the berating or cursing).
This is something that can be explored thoroughly in 1-on-1 professional sessions and can unlock potential while helping you master the mental game.
- Body language influencesThis is a bigger topic than it might seem, and it’s powerful work for any athlete facing difficult circumstances.
Your unwanted external events can influence your body language and internal state for the worse — but that is not a settled fate.
Your physical state can also influence how you experience and approach the moment. Deliberately shifting your body language toward something more confident, powerful, liberated, or peaceful (whatever optimizes your performance) can broaden your sense of control and space.
And yes — you can integrate this technique with the ones above.
3. Choking Triggers (go to clutch)
Translates into: Things that switch an athlete’s internal state into a bitter, piercing, paralyzing one that affects the ability to perform well enough to achieve victory — or to maintain the lead or domination. Events that can turn or cut the athlete off.
Examples:
Thoughts — blank states, or “This is too much for me to bear.” “I can’t outperform him/her.” “I can’t tap into my creativity / speed / accuracy…”
Feelings & sensations — mental crippling, stiffness, threatened, passivity, powerless, overwhelmed, worried, hesitant.
Note: We considered calling this “Choking Events,” but that feels too deterministic. A choking state can be momentary and more malleable than you might think.
3 Ways to help:
- Train how to deal with intrusive thoughts and sensationsCognitive-behavioral techniques provide evidence-informed tools for working with challenging thoughts and sensations (especially in the most decisive moments).
You can train yourself (with the aid of a psychologist or coach) not to be as affected by “bad” or threatening triggers, and even to use them to propel growth and outperformance.
You can become better equipped with mental tools that make you stronger than the crippling thoughts that threaten to derail you. You can manage yourself more healthily and optimize your gaming decisions — all while navigating the game more productively and with a clearer head.
- Pumped appraisalsAppraisal? More precisely, re-appraisal — arranging new empowering perspectives on those triggers.
We’ve already touched on this technique. It’s another cognitive mechanism that helps you confront challenges more intelligently, strategically, and efficiently.
You can look at a challenge as something that will crush or freeze you, or you can look at it as something that pushes you to rise to the occasion — a test that lets you overcome limits and crush the moment.
Quick examples:
- From tilt → to great game-sense and an energetic, optimistic state.
- From “I can’t connect. I’m blank. Getting destroyed” → to “Let’s connect better. I like discovering what’s going on, and I like challenges like this that make me step up a notch.”
- From “This is too much for me. It’s impossible now” → to “Let’s go! W-I-N to win the next play? Let’s make it happen.”
We suggest you insist on these kinds of mental moves while cultivating a dose of compassion, curiosity, and fierceness.
Important reminder: these are not times to analyze or spend time doing this too consciously. The focus should redirect fully to useful actions and to pumping yourself into the right performance state. This is time to perform, not to practice or criticize. If nothing else, just keep trying to recover and return to the present moment.
A very big key here is developing a solid growth mindset.
- “GG’s”At the end of the day, whatever happens, we hope you can turn toward yourself and utter an honest and complete “Good Game” — in whatever sense of it.
We touched above on self-talk, another huge area in Sport Psychology. These final moments are times to be positive with it. What can you say to yourself about how you handled the plays so you can improve and stay motivated to keep working?
Ask yourself:
- “What lessons can I retrieve from this?”
- “What can go better next time?”
- “What should I / we work to correct or perfect in training?”
This is the time to find ways to self-soothe and get reassurance for the next competitive and training moments.
Maybe the competition was exhausting, so you should get some recovering rest so you don’t get drained.
Wrap-up
The main purpose of our work with e-athletes is developing a new relationship with themselves and the game.
Operating from optimal fundamentals and a top-level mindset is the groundwork for everything else specific to your game title to flourish.
We openly orient you to appreciate each and every moment of your gaming experience. Why? Because every experience has something that can help you mature as a player and as a person (“What’s contained in this experience that I could take to my advantage?”).
The wide array of playing experiences is what makes esports magical. So why not search for the gifts in disguise they can offer?
You already wish and demand that your attention is sharp. It’s just a small extra step to make it sharp for the mental aspects of performance as well.
