Guide: Improving your Mentality
Important Nobody is perfect. No matter how hard you try and how level headed of a human being you are, sometimes competition can get to your head. You can and will get upset sometimes. The important thing is that you bounce back quickly from your anger and you don't allow it to infect others.
Point 1: Emotions can impact your gameplay When you see red, it makes you more aggressive. You're less likely to expect ambushes and sneaky play, you're less likely to pay attention to visual cues to dodge skillshots or notice warded and unwarded locations, and you're less likely to play logically. When you're sad it makes you lazy. Your reaction speeds are lower, you're less likely to move out of the way, you'll miss CS, etc. These emotions start a slippery slope that leads to bad performance, which leads to even worse emotions. Being positive can have an inverse effect to these emotions, but it has to be sincere. You can't fool your own brain and your own body. The key is not to trick yourself with insincere ideas, but rather to change your mentality altogether and genuinely think positively.
**Point 2: Emotions are Contagious ** A positive attitude can reflect on your teammates, improving their mentality and performance. Likewise, a negative attitude can spread and infect others, lowering their performance. Having a positive attitude will not only improve your mechanics and decision making as stated above, but it will also improve teamwork due to it's contagious nature. Likewise, having a negative attitude can create a dysfunctional team.
Disclaimer: This doesn't mean you should fake joy for the sake of teamwork. Emotion is a very obvious trait in humans. It's easy for us to detect when someone is lying, and put simply it's just annoying. Any time you say something it should be sincere. Sometimes silence is the best positive reinforcement you can offer.
Point 3: Emotions/State of Mind impact our memory This point is twofold. Psychologically, if you practice in X state of mind then you need to compete in X state of mind to get the full value out of your practice. So unless you want to be angry all the time, you need to learn to regulate your emotions and stay positive as often as possible if you want to play well!
Second, it's easy for humans to remember negative experiences and forget our more positive ones. Oftentimes I'll hear people talk about how "toxic" the League of Legends community is as a general statement. This could not be farther from the truth! These blanket statements are a reflection of that person's inability to shrug off their negative experiences and remember their positive games. For those of you who do not believe me, try the following exercise: Play 10 or more games in whatever game type you most enjoy. Record everything from that game that you can remember immediately - both positive and negative. Ex: "Lux told me 'good job' when I hooked Leblanc. It made me feel good and I think I played better." Remember that you need to make these notes as quickly as possible. Believe it or not it's very easy to forget little things like this over the course of a 30 minute game. Complete this exercise and you may be surprised at the results!
Summary: Using this information to improve as a player and member of the LoL community So on the assumption that emotions can impact your gameplay and you have the power to spread them to your teammates, it's clear that a positive attitude can do nothing but help you win more games. It also has the side effect of making you actually enjoy your hobby, which is just healthy in practice. The key to improving your mentality is making yourself realize how great of an impact it has on your gameplay and memory. Recognizing that it's easier to remember poor experiences is the first step to improving your overall attitude. The second step is taking the effort to remember the positive experiences so that you can crowd the negative experiences out with that memory.
Final Disclaimer As stated, nobody is perfect - including me. I certainly don't follow my own advice all the time, but I try my hardest to do so. A big effort I usually take is to reflect on my recent attitude and ensure that I made the correct decision. Doing this has helped to improve my reaction to similar experiences.
Anyways, I have no cheesy parting words. So uhh... taco? -Nasreth
okay I guess that was pretty cheesy
