Competition
This post was originally written for another site that is now defunct, so I'm reposting here to reference. The examples are video game and Guild Wars 2 specific, but if you want other non-GW2 examples, please let me know!
Today I am going to talk about competition. What it is, how it makes people react, and how to overcome the most natural mistakes and behaviors that make competition a dreaded thing for most people.
Competition
1. Compete for something; engage in a contest; measure oneself against others
(this next definition is just fun)
2. Interaction between organisms, populations, or species, in which birth, growth and death depend on gaining a share of a limited environmental resource
Competition to me is a wonderful thing, but to many people it is a bad word, or the antithesis of what they want to do while they are “having fun.” It will probably come as no surprise to people that I am an inherently competitive person. Most of the time I like to just compete with myself to get better at everything. Do something faster, better, more consistently.
When competing against others it can almost become a debilitating phenomenon, though. Being by yourself and doing something is great. You can practice; become an expert. The second you do that same thing in front of a crowd, or against someone else, everything changes. Your mind thinks differently, you worry about things that do not matter, you think about results rather than just the competition itself.
How do you get beyond these thoughts?
What is the trick to competing in the moment and not worrying about the future?
How do you perform at your best when the pressure is on?
Good questions. I have some answers, but they are incomplete, and always will be. There will be different answers for everyone.
Pressure
Pressure is what people refer to when they talk about competition. That athlete “cracked under the pressure” or “could not handle the pressure.”
What is pressure? Pressure is wanting to win, or to perform “at your best.” With that desire to win, the mental processes that normally occur, change. Thought processes change from “I will do [X] and do it great, because I’ve done it before!” to “ohmygod ohmygod I need to win this” or any other 1000 thoughts that have nothing to do with actually completing [X] task.
Short and sweet: competition causes a change in thinking and mental cognition, which generates more mistakes, a loss of self confidence over time, and a hatred of competition because of not knowing how to deal with “pressure situations.”
Good mistakes
To start, let us go back to the mistakes discussion from the Learning post I wrote. I talked about making good mistakes, and not being scared to make mistakes, and that still holds true. The difference now is being happy to make mistakes during competition.
When there is something on the line.
When the pressure is on to win.
Learning to make mistakes in practice is very different than learning to make mistakes in competition. The process is exactly the same, but now everyone is going to see you make that mistake, and the mistake just might be a costly one.
Make the good mistakes during competition. Do what you know you need to do. Sometimes you will just screw it up. Sometimes it will have been the wrong thing to do. Above all though, do not be afraid to make that mistake.
Then learn from that mistake. The more mistakes you learn from, the faster you become an expert at competing (and whatever else the mistake is associated to).
Debilitating mistakes
These are the exact opposite of good mistakes. Sure, both good and bad mistakes can make it so that you lose a game, but in the long run, you do not have control over who wins and loses a particular competition (more on this later).
What makes a mistake debilitating? The psychology of self-confidence and being able to execute.
Let me give you an example. Easier to understand than me throwing a bunch of gobbledegook at you:
“Gameronomist The Mighty” (remember him?) is in (Structured PvP combat) SPvP in Guild Wars 2 (GW2). It does not matter what profession he is playing. He has found 4 friends, and they have joined a SPvP tournament. Big stakes, as they all really want to win. Gameronomist The Mighty goes into The Forest of Niflhel with his team. While running around, he goes to flank the center control point and sees 4 members of the other team killing one of the NPC mobs.
This is our mistake scenario. No mistake has been made yet, but what happens next will decide if it was a good mistake or a debilitating mistake. The difference between this being a good mistake or a debilitating mistake is how Gameronomist the Mighty approaches the rest of the game.
Let’s break it down.
Debilitating mistake:
Gameronomist the Mighty sees the opportunity in stealing the NPC kill from the enemy team and perhaps killing some of the other team at the same time. He runs in thinking, “OMG this is going to be great. My team is going to get a buff, extra points, and I am going to just demolish these guys! This right here will win the game for us!”
And the other team turns around, kills him, then finishes off the NPC.
Because of his failure to kill the NPC, Gameronomist the Mighty starts to talk to himself saying: “oh man, that was a dumb move. They got a kill on me AND the NPC. I should have just left them to get the NPC without getting an extra kill on me. That was so stupid.”
So, because of this negative self-talk, Gameronomist the Mighty will now not be so mighty. He is second guessing himself, and his confidence has been eroded by his own thoughts.
Then the situation happens again. Gameronomist is going to flank the center position and sees 4 members of the other team killing one of the NPCs. He could easily walk in and cause a rumble and either get a kill on one of the players or the NPC.
But, because of the negative self talk and the previous mistake he made, he goes into the fight half hearted and does not play the full potential of his ability. He has second guessed himself, thinking he is going to lose, and he is sure that this is a dumb idea; because that is what happened last time, right?
Thereby creating a debilitating mistake. Spiraling down into worse and worse play and worse and worse mental attitude. Gamernomist the Mighty is no longer thinking about the game, he is thinking about his performance and the outcome. Which is a debilitating mistake.
Good Mistake
After failing in the first NPC fight, Gameronomist the Mighty thinks about the fight and what went wrong. “I spent that whole time trying to kill all of the players AND the NPC. I’m just one player, there is no way I have the DPS for that! Next time I think I will just try and annoy them and focus on the NPC kill.”
There is also the second aspect that you may have overlooked the first time. In the original mistake, Gameronomist the Mighty began thinking, “of how big of a win this will be, how amazing it will be when he gets this NPC kill.” How in the world would Gameronomist the Mighty be able to get the win and the kill if he is not even thinking about the game itself? Focusing on the details of the game, not on what the outcome could be, is what is important.
Then, the exact situation happens again. This time, Gameronomist the Mighty looks at the health of the NPC and sees that he is still at 90% health while the other team fights him. Instead of barreling in guns blazing, he sits back and waits until the NPC is at 25% health. Then, he rushes in, blows all of his cooldowns to surprise the group of players and distract them into attacking him, and focuses all his damage on the NPC mob. Then, because Gameronomist the Mighty learned from his mistake and focused on the objective that would help his team the most, he was able to turn the tide of the game.
By learning from his first mistake, Gameronomist the Mighty was able to get an advantage for his team. This is a good mistake. Even in this case, if he had failed to kill the NPC, just causing the disruption and having the chance to steal the NPC is a good mistake.
So, really, it is not always about the mistake that is made, but the attitude of the player following the mistake. Set a winning strategy and keep trying it to the fullest potential of your abilities. Focus on the small moves that you can control, not the things out of your control.
If you go in, and you are scared of making mistakes, or you are scared of losing? Debilitating mistakes will just snowball on you.
I now hear the readers saying, “You did not say anything about how to actually win when competing!” I did, but it was hidden. I'll go into more detail on it in another post.
Thanks for reading.
How do you compete? What makes competition easier or better for you? Why do you enjoy it?