Stab! Come back dude!
Dr Peepee
"So what I do to remember what happened to me is I train the skill. I couldn't do it at first either. In friendlies, I would get hit and then try to remember how I got hit as I'm exiting the combo/starting to get comboed. If I couldn't remember, I'd just die. If I needed to, I'd request the right to pause after I got hit and then let them combo me anyway after I unpaused." The majority of people I play get upset after being hit. Myself included sometimes unfortunately. Sometimes I think honestly the key to getting really good at this game is asking questions/non-judgemental thinking/everything on mentality we've talked about basically lol, but for some of us it's so difficult to get over that wall of anger after being hit. Why do you think this is? Could there be any tips for someone to calm themselves down and start asking productive questions after being hit? Maybe taking a deep breath after being hit and *then* start thinking? You've taken it a step farther by pausing the game before too lol, and in your friendlies vs Mahone I've never seen anyone back off and think to themselves why they dropped punishes (If you recall that). Most people in friendlies are always like "ARRRGH GOTTA STAY ON SETUP" etc. Emotional control is really difficult for some people, you're really good at it it seems
Lmao I only streamed that because he wanted recording but I'm a noob and didn't realize you could just record without all of this. At least some good came from it =p And yeah I do that without needing to stop when I'm normal unless it's a really complex thing usually.
Also, that video and my posts here may make me seem like I was always in control, but that is FAR from the truth. I used to internally rage when getting hit any time, and Twitch has seen me rage outwardly before as I learned to accept loss in tougher periods of my life(this rage extended long past our sessions at times sadly). So when I say people can train the skill, I am definitely speaking from experience. Also, I used to think the only way you could get good was through my "new way" of thinking where it was all acceptance and love, but I did not come up as a player that way, and neither did the other top players. So I am always somewhat torn when giving advice here. One person I taught to think more calmly just gave up trying to be good as he became satisfied with his performance....
To me, being good is about being hungry/cultivating drive much moreso than about calm I believe. I think calm is healthiest of course, but hunger seems to be the only consistent factor. If you want it badly enough, it'll even overpower your rage at getting hit and drive you to learn more. You can be calm and be hungry through love as well, but it seems this can take extra work for people as they will need to rewrite a lot of mental programs for it to work. I'll just cut myself off here lol.
More to the point of your question of how to actually be calm, it is a way of training, a way of thinking, and a way of holding your body physically. Physically, if you build up tension in keeping your shoulders up, having tight breath etc you're less likely to notice things. Observe yourself in player cams when playing well vs not for example. Thinking is more difficult. I believe people resist getting hit because they can't handle their confidence being undermined/tunnel vision on a hit and don't really account for what the opponent is doing in neutral based on their often limited understanding, as well as not handling failure well and fearing that. Essentially, fear and lack of knowledge. So the way you'd counter this would be with gaining knowledge(of yourself and the game) and addressing those fears in yourself. Stepping back and realizing growth is much more than the next match on setup or the next tournament and is a deeply personal process of growing yourself, that each tool is an extension of yourself and overcoming matchups or fears or strong opponents is about overcoming yourself, that falling back in love with the game and feeling energized to play gives you so much more clarity than nervousness if you'd just take the to cultivate it as you did naturally when you started....
You can also focus on your goals and really visualize achieving them and allow them to energize you.
You can also independently see a therapist or do cognitive-behavioral work on yourself to break your mental habits.
You can also push your body to its limits to gain perspective on pushing hard and also see there's so much growth to be had. It can humble you to be overwhelmed by a physical challenge as well.
There are many ways to resolve an issue. I can't say what way is best for everyone, only that your best bet is to keep trying and to stay creative until you find it. I have more specifics for everything I've said of course, and I know those mental blocks as I've described are more or less right, but that doesn't mean they all get resolved the same.
Edit: I should probably add what I specifically did myself so people could try it at least. Not sure why I didn't include that.
So I personally began consciously tackling this after I had resolved some other mental blocks. One of my mental blocks was a confidence issue stemming from my upbringing, and another was my anger toward other top players. The anger issue was quickly resolved through reading the Inner Game of Tennis and realizing that I had another option and that competition could be more fulfilling through the perspective of cooperation. The confidence partly was resolved from spending a very great deal of time reading about how early life experiences and parental/peer involvement can impact your personality and thinking. I became much more interested in choosing to view obstacles as challenges instead of threats as a result.
To address confidence further, I would do sentence completion exercises. "If I want to be happy, I will-" "I feel hurt by my mother when-" and so on. I would also challenge my typical thinking through the mental exercise of imagining situations I responded "poorly" in and thinking about why I did and then substituting new ways of acting. I also recognized at some point this should be tackled from a holistic perspective, or laziness in one area will bleed into them all. So I began refocusing on my health, on my family relationships, on my friendships, on understanding opponents as people, etc instead of just what I had previously described alone. I would also read about role models I found personally inspiring and see how they handled things and add that to my list of ways to handle myself, as well as give me high standards in areas I thought they succeeded at to strive for. They could also be guiding internal voices to me.
I probably could have organized this all better but that's a lot of what I did. If people are interested in more specifics I imagine I could provide them.
