Crit-icisms

Hey team, I want to share some of the feedback and criticism I received the other day.

You are awful. You are the worst League of Legends player ever. Why do you even play this game?
What’s with the healing? You’re the reason we had that 2% wipe. Uninstall right now.
You don’t deserve that job. You’re not really that talented. Someone else out there is way better.
Just give up and tap out. Why bother? No point anyway.
You choked. Blew your chance. Screwed up. Horrible. Terrible. Get the hell out. Got destroyed.
Fail at life.

Source?

Me.

You really are your own worst critic. Ask any member of my guild. No matter what game I play, I am thee worst when it comes to self-beating up and self-rage. Healthy? Probably not by a long shot. I’m willing to bet that most of you tune out when you’re reprimanded or given harsh feedback because nothing anyone else says to you compares to what you’re saying to yourself at that moment of failure. Anyone else giving you similar words is bound to reinforce what you’re thinking anyway.

And let me guess, at the moment of failure, you’re replaying that moment over and over in your head. You’re analyzing what happened. What you did. What went wrong. Where you screwed up. You’re reliving every conversation, every discussion, every moment leading up to the critical moment where shiitake mushrooms hit the fan. You wish you did Y instead of X. A Flash Heal instead of a Greater Heal would have been the key raid saver.

Choked at a crucial life changing moment? Screwed yourself out of a potential opportunity? You made the wrong dialog choices, and unlike Mass Effect 3, it actually does matter. Sometimes there are no second chances. You goofed and you know it.

So what do you do?

Learn from it. Remove the hostility, the negativity, and the extremism. If it helps, mentally recite what you should have done, and file that fact away in the back of your mind so that when it does happen again, you can do it the right way. But you can’t do that if the primal version of yourself is busy screaming at you all the time.

People who succeed think about failure differently. It was that the strategies used didn’t work. It’s not that they should never have tried in the first place. It’s not that those people are always right. It’s not that you’re a loser. You win when you’re good at losing. The hardest part about losing is that you might reach a point where you believe you don’t deserve that victory and that you give up.

The best player at mind games is you. You’re the only person that can psych yourself up or down. Winning or losing at anything starts with your own mentality.

So the next time you start talking to yourself about how bad you are, do yourself a favour.

Tell yourself to shut up.