chances are your mindset is what's holding you back from becoming a greater player for example imagine that you're the last alive on your team trying to pull off a clutch play to save the game your teammates go silent watching and hoping that you can pull through while the enemy slowly closes in on you or imagine a different situation you're one ranked game away from losing your rank you're about to be demoted and you're trying desperately to pull yourself out of a losing streak now in both of these situations your mindset makes the huge difference between you playing to your full potential or you completely choking under pressure and even as you rack up more experience achieve higher levels of performance and get closer to that pro scene your battle with stress anxiety and your own mindset won't fully go away imagine as an example going from playing online at home to suddenly playing in front of thousands of spectators or imagine going from being the top of your leaderboard and always the top of your team in ranked games to joining a semi-pro team where you're suddenly bottom fragging and struggling to prove yourself and according to dr k from healthy gamer many gamers are unprepared for this kind of stressful situation of being elite among their local gaming communities to then being average or below average among their peers once they turn pro and without the right mindset this stress can cause you to crack under the pressure once you've finally made it to the top causing you to then mess up your only shots at the pro scene so whether you are battling to maintain your spots on a semi pro team trying to hold yourself together during an online tournament or just fighting to get that clutch victory in a ranked game then the pressure will be highly distracting and the harsh reality is that if you don't learn how to handle that kind of pressure you'll lose more ranked games struggle in those tournaments and fail under the weight of your own team as you try to make it towards that pro scene so then how do you manage your stress and mindset to keep you focused despite your nerves [Music] imagine you're underperforming in a stressful game if a teammate then starts to flame you saying what are you doing why aren't you playing better well chances are it's going to affect your mindset and make you a little more stressed but what if another teammate says no worries man just focus on the next round you got this well that will affect your psyche as well but in a vastly different direction now of course it is hard to control how others speak to us in the game but what is easier to control is how we speak to ourselves and so sports psychology says that one of the best ways to encourage ourselves and boost our mindsets is by developing a self-talk strategy now that idea of talking to yourself seems a little weird but in reality you already have a voice in your head that's expressing your thoughts and opinions you already have these sort of internal conversations whether you're really aware of them or not in fact estimates suggest that we talk to ourselves at a rate of 400 words per minute yet most of us don't really think about how we talk to ourselves now to really highlight this let's look at some really fascinating information discovered outside of esports and pull it back so that can help you in your potential pro career and so in 2012 a group of researchers administered a self-talk plan to a group of swimmers and measured their performance results over the course of 10 weeks they then compared those results with swimmers of a similar age and skill level who did not use a self-talk plan now both groups of swimmers showed performance improvements the swimmers who didn't work on their self-talk improved their results by 0.05 percent over the course of 10 weeks but group who use their self-talk plan improved by 1.43 now that doesn't sound like a giant difference on the surface 1.43 versus 0.05 percent but in reality that's actually a 30 times higher number but swimming isn't the only area where we've seen these kind of benefits in a similar study done at the university of desolate a group of tennis players were put together into a group and researched in a similar way now the group of players that use a self-talk plan ended up performing 13 times better than the other group after just one week they also reported having self-confidence scores three times higher than the other groups and we can even go back as far as 1977 to find a pennsylvania state university article that suggested that competitors who qualified for the winter olympics used self-talk more often than those who didn't qualify and the same study showed that athletes who use self-talk more often were able to lower their anxiety levels twice as quickly as those who didn't now it's crazy to me given all of this scientific evidence that so little is taught to aspiring gamers when it comes to this crucial skill given the huge boost in performance that good self-talk plans offer it's a no-brainer for you to start developing one for yourself and to start doing so today now the first step to put this into action for yourself is to overcome the barrier that prevents most from improving their self-talk now that issue is that your self-talk is so automatic that you probably don't even recognize what is being said in your own mind so how can you know whether your conversations are positive and helpful or not if you don't even recognize what's being said but to overcome this you simply need to begin by building that awareness so next time that you play an intense match or practice a round pay close attention to that voice inside your head then write down notes of some of the things that you're saying to yourself particularly in situations when you lost got killed or made a costly mistake then ask yourself whether most of those statements that you said in your minds were helpful harmful rational realistic or true and as you work on your awareness you'll begin to notice patterns of negative self-talk i'm in high pressure games we naturally become a little emotionally invested in that experience unfortunately highly emotional states can cause us to think quite irrationally which is why it's easy to sometimes say things to ourselves like oh man i'm useless or why do i bother playing if i'm so bad and these negative statements are quite harmful to your performance but the problem is that it's hard to stop the emotion once it's already starting to flow instead you need to prepare your mind so that your emotions don't trigger negative self-talk but rather more productive self-talk here's an example of some affirmations you can use the next time that your confidence dips and you need a little self-talk boost the first statement could be something like if i don't do well this game i can still keep improving or the next game can be better or if i've won before i can win again or even i'm smart enough to figure out how to be better now these statements work because they follow a specific criteria of being realistic true rational and helpful but while this is a good start just saying positive things to yourself doesn't always work when you're ready to take the next level the next step towards your self-talk strategy you'll need to start using a more advanced tactic and to do this begin by dividing a sheet of paper into three columns labeling the first column your unhelpful thoughts in this column you'll of course list out all the unhealthy things that you say to yourself while you're in the heat of battle the three unhelpful thoughts that i can use as examples might be you know there's no way i'll win another round today or all i do is let my team down and i'm so bad today now we'll skip the middle column here for now but the next step is in the third column writing down the healthy thoughts or truth that you want to use to keep yourself positive and confident for example i counter the first unhealthy thought with i can win today if i keep my focus and trust myself the second one could be i'm important and a valued member of this team and the third will be i'm a great teammate and a dangerous enemy to play against now the third step is quite crucial here it's when you visit that middle column and list out all the evidence against the unhelpful thought and for the helpful one most players who try to have better self-talk will make the mistake of trying to jump to the positive thoughts while still feeling the emotions from their negative self-talk and i'm sure that you know what it's like to feel deeply discouraged by a bad performance only for a friend or a coach to say something positive like ah come on man you gotta stay positive you're such an amazing player sadly without the evidence for this and when we're wrapped up in that emotion it's going to be quite difficult for you to change your emotional state and raise your confidence repeating positive statements to yourself repeatedly while feeling low is also kind of like saying i'm warm i'm warm i'm warm while standing with shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of the antarctic it just doesn't work like that but then finally once you've listed out all the evidence against your unhelpful thoughts you can basically reprogram your minds you can make sure to take the time to really sit down for a few minutes and memorize what you did in these three columns it will help you to really sink that into your subconscious so that next time you're in a game and you're thinking about a negative thing or something bad happens then it becomes an automatic response to think of something positive and productive to say next committing to this process of moving from unhelpful thoughts to healthy thoughts while using evidence will reinforce your neural pathways to ensure that it's easy to apply when the pressure is on so self-talk might be one of the most important skills for you to work on especially if you want to master your mindset and improve your performance now perhaps you've needed to master your thoughts for years now and you've kind of known about it but haven't known how to do it or maybe you've never even recognized how much it influenced your mindset and performance but either way this exercise that you learned in this video is an essential first step for growing and maintaining unshakable confidence and a burning motivation to dominate opponents game after game and if the idea of being a tier one player and fulfilling your lifelong dream of being a champion excites you then you owe it to yourself to find a pen and paper as soon as this video ends and create your self-talk strategy right away writing down and organizing your thoughts into the three columns could honestly make all of the difference between you becoming a champion or choking when it matters most [Music] i hope you absolutely love this video and if you want more like this from the channel then you're gonna have to turn on the notifications and drop a like on the video i'm not saying that for my sake i'm saying that because the youtube algorithm will never show your videos again if you don't do those and if you're curious about improving your skills a lot faster or even becoming a professional gamer then i recommend checking out our course and boot camp the content in each of those are not the kind of things that you're gonna find on youtube so if you're very serious about making it in esports and you're very passionate about that idea of becoming a pro gamer then it's definitely worth your time together they'll teach you everything that you need to accelerate your skills faster and even build a pro career in esports and both will teach you a lot of information that most other players in the industry never really learn so when you start trying out for teams and teaching them your new approach to improving they'll probably think you're a genius but anyways i hope you guys love this video i hope it helps you a ton on your esports journey and i'll see you all in the next video [Music]