Sunday, April 5, 2015

Mindset

I figured I would try to start with a topic that may apply to as many smashers as possible, mind-sets.

Weather you are conscious of it or not, your mindset is always affecting how you play. There are so many factors when figuring out what your mindset is and how to improve it, I am not going to list them all, rather I am going to explain how to identify the largest contributors to your mindset, good and bad, and how to improve upon them using my own personal experience.

Super Smash Brothers Melee has taught me to be very analytically of myself. When I first started to play I would try to beat my friends with the same tactics over and over again even though they weren't working, I wasn't thinking about how to approach them differently I would just run in and sometimes it would work but most of the time I would lose stocks because of this. I believe this comes down to an issue within your mindset. I wasn't trying to look for other options because I was underestimating my opponent. Because I was cocky i automatically assumed that any trades or interactions would be in my favor. This is Melee though, anything can happen. After my first few tournaments where I did horribly and one tournament where I got very salty I started to recognize that my mindset was all wrong and it was hindering my improvement as a player.

I began to analyze the mental aspect of my game, I came to the conclusion that was previously mentioned and I knew something had to be done about it. I started to research ways to clear my mind and focus. Meditation is what helped me the most, personally I thought meditation was a joke. Why would not thinking about things help you? To be completely honest i'm still not sure how it works but it does for me. All I do to meditate is simply make your room quite and dark, sit with your legs crossed and breath normally, after a few seconds of this start to count your breaths, inhale is one, exhale is 2, inhale for 3 and finally exhale for 4. Then start over this helps you stay focused and in the present. So now I was able to clear my mind and focus effectively, after this I started to analyze my gameplay and mindset more efficiently and I began to improve at a faster rate.

So now that I can truly understand my mindset it is time to look at all of the factors that affect it. Think about the last time you were salty during a match, think about thing events leading up to the match, what caused you to get salty and did you win or lose? Now that you have the reason you were salty fresh in your mind ask yourself some questions: How did it happen to you? Could you have avoided it? Did you get punished for a bad habit? How did you recover? These are only a few but you get the idea, analyze how you got there, what happened in that instance and how you came out of it.

Well I hope this may have helped some people, I'l have more posts and a post on tournament mindset in the future.

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