Hi, this is my first time doing this sort of thing. I figured I'd give it a shot, because talking about mindsets for competing has been something I've very much enjoyed recently and, quite frankly, I'm looking to pursue things that make me feel better these days. I don't claim to be an expert though, as I don't think I'm close to being in that top echelon of players. I'm just a pretty good player that has managed to survive close to 7 years of competing and perhaps that's enough for me to feel like I have something to say. The goal of this blog is to just document my journey through figuring out all this mentality stuff and I hope that others who are also in the thick of competing can have some good takeaways as well.
In this post, I'm going to discuss a concept that many players often encounter while trying to take competing seriously -
The Results Trap.Melee players often fall under this trap of putting a lot of emotional stake into their tournament results. We can make the mistake that results are an indication of our own progress. If we get good results, we are doing good and if we get bad results, we are doing bad. It's not a bad thing that this happens, it happens to almost everyone, myself included. And if you look at the way things are structured in Melee, it makes a ton of sense why we intuitively put so much value into results. We have things like regional power rankings and the annual Top 100 SSBMRank that are easy for players to set their sights on as goals. And it is much easier for us as people to assign ourselves these kinds of tangible goals, because we are able to confirm when we complete them. If someone wants to get good at Melee, these kinds of things are what they can point to and say "If I'm ranked, that means I'm good at Melee". It is a very comfortable way to think. But while it provides comfort, it can also produce a self-destructive mindset.
In 2022, I made it a personal goal to make it onto the SoCal Power Rankings. Not to gas up my own region too much, but I believe it is objectively the hardest region to get ranked in. Any given ranking is usually comprised of a double digit amount of current or previously ranked Top 100 players. And the rankings don't even paint the full picture of the countless strong Arcadian players that will give you a run for your money. Regardless, I was determined to put up the results to get me on the rankings. But therein lies the problem. My mindset was driven by results. I wanted results. When the focus is on results, it can really warp your whole perspective on tournaments. A common symptom is that you might view your opponents under the lens of being "good wins" and "bad losses" and that can be very strenous on you and have added pressure while competing. Sometimes when I would go to a tournament and not get any "good wins" it would feel like I was stagnating or wasting time. And when I would experience "bad losses" it would give me the feeling that I was falling behind and wasting even more time. I remember breaking down a bit mentally after having a really bad Verdugo where I went 1-2 due to some unfortunate bracket happenings and thinking that I had just "thrown away my entire season". I had gotten so caught up in the multitude of results that I was missing the forest for the trees. Results can NEVER tell you the full story of your own progress.
Well, if we can't use results to measure progress, what should we be doing instead? Results appear as the most concrete things we can observe after a tournament. It is extremely easy to view results as the only takeaways from a tournament and ascribe value to ourselves in whatever way, dependent on those results. However, if we really care about our capability to improve and, more importantly, care about ourselves, we have to detach from results and engage with what happened on a deeper level. It might sound obvious when you put it into words, but you really just need to take in everything before you go about deciding if you succeeded or failed that day. You can extract situations from the game in isolation and think about if you played out what you had practiced or thought about. You can think back to what you were thinking in the match and recall if you were focused at all times or if you remember a lapse in judgement that caused you to maybe lose an interaction. There are so many things that you can isolate from a match. And because there's so many things, odds are that you probably succeeded in a lot of those things and to discard them in your takeaways, purely because of the result, would just be a disservice to yourself. And again, this is all a lot easier said than done, so if this kind of thing doesn't really work for you right away, that is completely normal. Losing and falling short is always gonna suck if you care, and it's always okay to let yourself feel your emotions. It takes a while, but learning to approach these things with an honest effort will be rewarding in the long run. I think at the end of the day, you gotta just remember to have fun and be kind to yourself, because that's all you need to continuously prosper.
- cliché