Reddit mentions of The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

Ah yeah, you’re in a tough part of the melee journey. Serious enough to be invested in results, not good enough to get a ton of positive feedback. Good enough to identify weaknesses, but you don’t quite yet have a framework to solve these problems. Good enough to have others put expectations on you / talk about your play style but not quite good enough to refute haters or have your point of view heard. You’ve been playing long enough that you can see how far you’ve come but you also start to realize just how far you really are from the top.

It’s easy to get discouraged from here, especially with what seems like a decently large skillgap between you and the next guy up and what seems to be a fairly toxic community wherever you are. At your skill level it seems like you can grind out tech skill and still see a million errors in your play. You can improve a bunch and not really see progress in how far you place in bracket. Even if you do really want to put in the effort to improve it doesn’t seem clear where exactly you should focus these efforts.

My advice is to start to really appreciate the journey every step of the way. Yes, this is a tough part of it, but learning to overcome this spot you’re at both skill wise and what you have to admit has become a bit of a mental barrier will provide tremendous benefit to you. Learn to focus your effort to be more productive, to see benefit in your training in ways other than counting how many times you SD in a match. Hard work pays off. Not always in the most obvious ways, but trust me when I say that if it feels like you aren’t benefiting from practice you need to either re-evaluate how you practice or re-evaluate how you measure progress. Enjoy the process of practice, finding things to work on, improving those things and repeating the process. Enjoy the journey of self improvement that this provides you.

I can tell you that you have nothing to worry about in terms of “learning the game backwards,” I’ve personally always been a proponent of focusing on tech skill first before neutral game but at the end of the day there is no roadmap to getting good and there is no easy way to reach the next step. The only universal truth is that you get out of it what you put into it.

And don’t worry about people calling you lame. “Playstyle” is something people obsess a lot that isn’t a very useful thing to think about when gauging your improvement. When I was quite a bit worse than I am I was called campy, reliant on lasers, I used to be called the backwards facing Falco cause I “only use Bair / Utilt.” People like to assume that your playstyle in a certain way because that’s how you intend for it to be but in reality these are all just steps on your way to having a more robust style. There are a LOT of things to learn about this game and if you’re getting pretty good at a certain style that they like to call lame then feel free to take pride that you’ve got understanding in one part of the game but remain humble in that you know there are many other parts of the game to learn. Not because they’re “less lame” but because you need to expand your knowledge base to improve. Next time you get called lame just say "that's ok I'm just trying to get better." Honestly style is overrated at low levels cause realistically nothing is cool at low levels, just get good then you can shut em up later.

Lastly I can’t overstate how helpful these two books are relating to this type of stuff. If you’re dedicated to sticking to it and seeing how far you can go / what you can get out of melee then I highly suggest you read both of them!

Good luck dude.

Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

Online pdf:

http://www.tinapse.ro/home/coltul-indrumatorului-coach/resurse-materiale-instrumente/W.%20Timothy%20Gallwey%20-%20The%20Inner%20Game%20Of%20Tennis.pdf

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-Performance-ebook/dp/B003T0G9E4

Art of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin

Online pdf:

http://www.nordiccentre.org/downloads/The_art_of_learning_waitzkin__josh.pdf

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Learning-Journey-Performance/dp/0743277465

You can follow along with our Muay Thai Mental Training reading group in our Open Facebook Page: MTMT Reading Group - Reading For a Better Muay Thai or you can participate in our live discussions of chapters as a patron. You can see what our discussions are like here: Chapters 1 & 2 an excerpt.

Or just buy the book, highly recommended, and read it on your own: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance-ebook/dp/B003T0G9E4 it might change your life.

This is also the best pool book out there.

You likely failed because you were nervous.

This is called "performance anxiety", and it's a common topic discussed within the realm of Sports Psychology ("test anxiety" and "stage-fright" can be interpreted as variants of performance anxiety).

There are several books on the topic, my favorite of which is an oldie-but-goodie called "The Inner Game of Tennis".

Basically, it's likely that a good portion of your mental energy was wasted on thinking about what the interviewer was thinking about you, rather than just thinking about the problem itself.

I agree completely. I just found a couple of postures where I was shrugging my shoulders. Worked it out in a couple of sessions, but it was definitely bad form for ~20 years that was limiting options and leaving openings.

I highly recommend the book The inner game of tennis Really opened my eyes to how willfully ignorant we can be about ourselves when it's so easy to spot inefficiencies in others.

Read this - I'm not kidding. I read this while in Fresh Meat, and after I finished it (in two days), I walked in the warehouse as a different skater. Never looked back.

https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance-ebook/dp/B003T0G9E4

yes and no

you do have the talent to be a top notch infantry player.

situational awareness: angle coverage and position which derives from thought, thinking about what youve done and how it has worked, and what you intend on doing next.

twitch: aim/mouse sensitivity

honestly most of aim is your mouse sensitivity so once you get your equipment right, you are able to be you, plenty of you tubes devoted to that subject, if you havent read any go find them.

IF you are having trouble letting your inner twitch killer out, and just cant seem to learn

try this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance-ebook/dp/B003T0G9E4?ie=UTF8&btkr=1&ref_=dp-kindle-redirect