 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Noor. Today, my guest is Ryan Hawks, mental skills trainer at Game Sync Training. Our topic is Game Sync Training, the mental game. All right, welcome, Ryan. Thank you for having me, great to be here. All right. So what is Game Sync Training? Good question, yeah. So Game Sync Training is basically like an eSports-based mental skills training platform where we just help people to work on the mental side of the game. An easy way that I like to say what I do is it is like personal trainer, but for your mind. Okay, so what is your background that allows you to do that? Yeah, so I did my master's degree in sports psychology. So I like to say sport and performance psychology because it really goes beyond sports. And I recently got that completed from John F. Kennedy University, kind of recently now. But yeah, so I did that, all kinds of courses in performance and sports psychology around all kinds of different topics like choking under pressure or performance anxiety, even just goal setting and breathing. You know, choking under pressure, that's a really big deal for athletes. How do you work with an athlete to help them deal with choking and that pressure that they have when they're doing well and the game's really close? Yeah, that's like, it's probably like one of, if not the most common thing that I work with, with eSports athletes. Usually they're choking under pressure. And the thing about it though, it's not a straightforward answer. So we really have to, before we work on that choking, we have to back up a little bit. The first thing we do is work on awareness building. It's usually where I start with almost anyone becoming more aware of your surroundings and then aware of yourself and how are your surroundings and your thoughts and feelings and behaviors affecting your performance. And then from there, we could start to get to the roots of some of what can cause that choking. You know, what was it? I was thinking about choking actually a couple of days ago when I was watching the LPGA US Open. OK. And the commentator kept saying about the leader who is actually from Hawaii. She kept saying, now she has to focus on the present. She has to forget the past and forget the future. Is that one of the skills that you work with on, you know, in terms of the issue of choking and performance anxiety? Yes, that's exactly it. That's really a lot of it. And a lot of the early sports psychology research was done in golf. Golf, one of the easier ones to study is an individual sport. And yeah, it is about being present. Those that the opposite of choking, we call it being clutch, right? Those that are considered clutch are people that are able to stay in the current moment, usually, and just perform. They're not thinking about the past, how even if they were doing well, how well they were doing in the past, even five minutes ago, how bad they did, how much it sucks to date, miss that whole. And they're not thinking about the future either. They're not thinking about winning or losing. They're just thinking about performing. Yeah, so would you say that a better player is going to be someone who is able to deal with that pressure? Yeah, you have to. You have to be able to deal with that pressure and not let it overcome you because another thing that comes down to it is attentional capacity. And our attention has limited capacity. And when we're doing peak performance, when it comes down to it, then all of that has to go towards whatever the performance is, whether it's golf or gaming, getting that headshot or whatever that may be. So if you're able to stay in the moment, if you're able to stay focused and put all of that attention towards it, we're going to be a lot better off. So for game sync training, when who are you working with? Like is it teams, is it individuals? Or like what age ranges are you working with? Yeah, I mean, it's simply put where worldwide, worldwide service that works with everybody. There isn't like a huge demographic right now that's really honed in on. I've worked with people as young as like seven, oldest, probably at this point, maybe they're 40s, I don't know. But all kinds of ranges, all ranges, all levels of professionalism, you know, whether they're just an amateur or whether they're trying to be pro. And sometimes they're just gamers who are also I work with streamers and they may not even want to go pro. They just want to be streaming so they want to get good. So individuals as well as teams too. So we've recently honed in a little bit more on teams than in the past. But yeah, we also work with teams. When you're talking about gaming, what percentage of the play would be mental versus skills based in terms of physical? Yeah, that's like a million dollar question, even beyond gaming. A lot of experts saying traditional sports, that it's up to 90 percent. Now, these are 90 percent, 90 percent mental. Yeah. Oh, OK. Mental. Yeah. Now, in eSports, hasn't been as closely studied because we're not quite there yet. But I would have to think that if it's about 90 percent in a traditional sport, like soccer or baseball and football, it's probably as much or more in gaming where there is even less emphasis on those physical skills and a lot more on the mental. Sure. So someone is having a really bad day. It's might translate into their performance, right? Yes, 100 percent. Yeah. And that's why when you're thinking about it and I'm talking to them about building their awareness, right? And like what what what happened before, during and after the performance? Like what was your day like? What did you eat before you even played? You know, it affects you. Do you find that athletes will rely on like some lucky thing? Like I'm wearing my lucky shirt or, you know, they'd have to have something that a certain way in order to have that mental ability. Yeah, that's that's funny. You know, I've seen a little bit less in gaming than traditional sports. You know, we've seen it a lot. Baseball, they're super superstitious a lot. I haven't seen it as much in gaming. I can't think of any good examples of that, but I'm sure I'm sure it's out there. Yeah, like OK, so let's talk about team dynamics. If you have you worked with teams? Yeah, I've worked with a couple of teams. So when you work with a team, do you have to observe how they work together first before you get involved? Tell us how that works. Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of the initial stuff with teams is observations. You can kind of do simultaneous. What I like to do is post the teamwork in some one on one at the same time. You spend some time observing the team. You spend some time with the teammates one on one. But yeah, a lot of it is observation and it's especially fun to observe because then you get to see some of the discrepancies that some of the individuals bring in regarding their observation, their observations of themselves or their own awareness. So it is really important to do that observation. So is insight an important aspect of peak performance mentally? Yeah, insight. You have to have insight on them yourself, your strengths and weaknesses. You have to be open to learning more about it. And then you have to have insight on what your role is on the team. Sometimes someone wants this role or they may think that they have the role of being maybe the leader or something, but they're not. They need to know what their role on the team is. So I would think an extremely important element of teamwork in gaming is communication. Tell us about the communication piece and how that relates to mental training. Yeah, communication and that's they go hand in hand, especially on teams. And a lot of individuals ask me that are trying to find a team like I'm really good and some of them are. I've worked with some people who, if I look at their staffs, they're like five percent in the world, but the team work's not there. You know, they and they and they stream, they must stream. And then they're like, why am I not getting picked up? Like, well, it doesn't seem like you have that collaboration. It doesn't seem like you have the communication, especially with others to help you get on the team. So that's kind of a big thing. How are you able to work with athletes to improve that communication and their ability to collaborate? Yeah, I do. Yeah, and it's a lot of times we'll have to set some goals down with that. We do some really specific types of goal settings and set what we call process goals that really work on small pieces of the performance. And communication is performing. It's all part of it. So we may I may have to tell them to hold back from speaking five times during your next practice or opposite. They don't communicate enough. I need you to do call outs at least five times so that you can start to communicate. And then the big thing in communication is it's getting gamers called getting tilted, right? When they just get mad at their opponents or even their teammates. And then the communication goes downhill, which causes a performance decrease and really a spiral of a decrease. How important is listening as communication in a team? Yeah, I mean, it's just just key. I mean, it's all it's all key because they're a unit. They're a unit, so you have to listen in order to stay as a unit and operate like the machine and in many sense, each of those teammates is a cog, so they have to listen. You have to listen to each other. They have to be humble, especially the higher levels that you go because they're all really good and they think that they're the best one on the team. But they all have their roles and they all have to fall into those roles. And sometimes it means pulling back and sometimes it means pushing forward. So in business, the word or the discussion is always about the culture. So would there be a team culture or even a game culture that you would be addressing when you're looking at these issues? Yeah, what I try to do with teams, and this is usually like the first work that we're doing is trying to build a culture of excellence. And one of the ways to do that is obviously you want to get the buy in in order like to me, what does that mean, culture of excellence? I have my ideas, but each team has their own unique idea of what that means. And each member has their idea. So the way that we go about doing that is doing what we call a team creed. So that can take us hours to do of a lot of times when I work with a team, we'll do a one hour session, you know, at least once a week. So sometimes it takes us three weeks or so to complete this creed work. Each of them individually first, they write down what is the best team mean to me? Like what is an excellent team? They sync back to the best teams they've played on. They sync back to the their favorite team that they observe. What are some of the traits that that team has individually? And then depending on the team size, we may kind of split them in half and then or pairs and start working if they're a smaller team, which is usually how eSports goes, you know, five, six people, then we can bring together. And now they start deciding and we say, OK, you have five, you have five, you have five, let's come together and choose five together. Then what is this team? What makes this team unique? And they start agreeing on it and then you get to buy it. And then they all start working towards really living that culture. So in in when people do traditional sports, you know, there's there's a lot of opportunity to learn about being on a team, like if you play little league baseball or if you know, whatever. But in gaming, there's a lot of opportunity to be an individual. And so how is it in gaming versus like traditional sports in terms of teaching people those skills that they would learn in traditional sports? Yeah. And that that's right now where eSports is really suffering. And that's really a big part of why I chose to focus in on eSports, whereas traditional sports people are playing them since they were kids on teams in team environments with coaches that are helping them to kind of elaborate more, that are helping them to have healthy communication skills and healthy coping skills. Gamers, a lot of them have been playing since they were kids. A lot of them have been playing with people since they were kids, but they're playing online with people of all ages. They're playing in faceless places where toxicity is much more common and easier to do. So that's what holds a lot of people back when they're trying to get onto teams as they don't have the communication skills. They don't have the social skills that are needed for collaboration because of their individual individualistic a little bit too much sometimes. And with COVID, when people were more isolated, did that, do you think that impacted the mental game? Yeah. Yeah. I think it did. It's interesting. I kind of think about that sometimes as we've moved more towards a digital world. In some ways, some gamers were already equipped to not be as affected, maybe, because many of them already have been playing online with their friends and things like that, but it's definitely worse now. I think the effects are maybe more than initially I thought or others thought. Heather, there's less social skills. There's less in-person communication is just different because once you put a face to a name, now you become real. And that's kind of maybe even emphasizing the problem with COVID is gamers, when they're on teams, they don't have a face to that name. And so it lets them be a little bit more toxic sometimes. Sure. So in working with teams, are they physically together or are you online with them? Mm-hmm. Yeah. On my end, I've only worked, I'm trying to sync with games, sync with those teams. I've only done online work with the teams so far. But it's funny, I've worked with some, they may be physically together. I've worked with a few where they might just all be in the same room and just like we're on Zoom now, then I see all of them. Or they're on their own devices, like I've done it where they're in the same room on different devices. And I've done it where they're all at home and stuff like that, too. So that is one good thing about gamers is they're flexible. They're flexible, they're used to technology. So the barriers that maybe in the past some traditional sports would face in terms of coming together and the ability to do so, gamers are like, this is nothing for me. So when we're talking about the mental game and mental training, are there times when someone has personality issue or some kind of maybe even a psychological diagnosis that would impact their performance? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's where it becomes kind of knowing what my lane is, too. I definitely refer out. I have referrals ready to go that it makes it a little bit trickier the fact that I do work internationally because sometimes I have to go and do some research. I mean, I've worked with gamers in like Greece and stuff. And I don't know if I've done international ones yet, but I've definitely done referrals for people in other states. And then, you know, I have to go and ask them what city are you in and maybe find a therapist if they need that. But definitely it comes up. Yeah, and there's things that affect them that that I can see and like, OK, this this is a little bit beyond my scope. But let me get you someone who may be able to help out in a different way. What are some of those issues or diagnoses that might impact their performance? Yeah, most things. I mean, there's depression is one of the ones that I've seen a few times where gamers may lack motivation in terms of getting better. You know, there's someone I remember working with. I started out and, you know, he was really motivated, really go get her. And then he kind of had this period where it just showed those signs, you know, the apathy and losing motivation and, you know, tough for him to get out of bed. And at that point, yeah. And he noticed like I suck right now. I'm not playing well. And so at that point, like, well, you know, based on what you're telling me in this regard, it may help you to do this. I mean, another person relationship problems. I referred into a couple's therapist because, you know, at some point we I think one of our sessions, you know, we weren't even we didn't even speak about gaming. And I'm like, OK, well, it sounds like there's other stuff going on that you may want to kind of be referred out for. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I could I could see where you would have sessions where where a person would be so focused on something besides gaming that they wouldn't that wouldn't even be a big issue. They would be talking about their problems in their lives. Yeah. Yeah. And you definitely have to reel them back in and let them know. I mean, many times they want to call me their psychologist or their therapist and like, no, you know, and it's just to do them justice. You know, we don't want to I don't want them to be given bad information. It's not my expertise. But the thing is, is that affects it. You know, I can talk about maybe lack of motivation from a performance standpoint and try to help you in that regards. But beyond performance, it'd be better for you to speak to someone else. So when you come in, is it usually the actual gamer who makes the decision that they need to learn the mental game? Or is it maybe a coach or a parent? How is it that you end up working with a player? Yeah, good question, too. The majority are self-referrals. I have gotten a few coaches to come in and find us and say, hey, you know, I've got a few people that I think could benefit from this. Parents as well are kind of looking for that for their their kids. Yeah. And it's a lot of mostly self-referrals. And the funny thing is sometimes they're not even 100 percent sure on what they're signing up for at first. Mental skills training isn't quite as known in eSports and quite as accepted. So I really kind of have that initial conversation and people really get surprised. OK, you know, they may be looking for a traditional coach that can help them improve their aiming or centering and or you know, comboing and then I'll let them know, oh, geez, you know, actually, I do. I do kind of choke under pressure a lot. That is something you could help me with. Let's kind of move forward here. That's what's fun about it. So how what is the process of working with an athlete? Like how long how many weeks or how many hours you spend? Yeah, that's a good one, too. It all it all depends on what they want to do. Traditionally, what I what I'd like to do is start off with the like a five session commitment from them. And the sessions happen usually once a week for one hour. Once a week, one hour sessions, typically consecutively, that's going to be the most effective and usually it's virtual. Yeah, I mean, I've done some in person, but since less happens now, even for the people that are local to me, I've usually done virtual. So that's how that kind of goes traditionally. And we work on one one mental skill can take between one to three sessions, depending on how deep we go into it. So in five in a five week period, we may do two to three where we dive in and it really starts with a good assessment. You know, that first session is information gathering. What's their history in gaming? What what kind of support systems do they have outside of gaming and interest and identity? What are some of their strengths that they have now? What are some of their things that they want to work on? And then we can kind of create a plan from there of how the next four or so sessions would look. And then from there, like, let's do a real reevaluation and see how much longer we want to go. And so what kind of skills do you work with them on? Yeah, so it's all kind of stuff. But after we go awareness, it may be the performance anxiety thing. So in order, it always depends on what the route is. So for example, it's performance anxiety. It could be like a breathing thing and over activation is a lot of times what happens. So what I'll kind of start with is the breathing exercise. And like, OK, when you start to notice that you're getting a little too apt up, sweating, heart beating, things like that, then let's do some breathing to get you back to where you need to be. We may even follow up there with like some thought stopping or reframing because maybe they're just interpreting these physiological symptoms as negative. Something that I like to tell people, anxiety and excitement, you really break it down. They have the same physiological symptoms. So why don't we try reinterpreting what you're calling anxiety as excitement because you're excited to perform? That's something that can help a lot. So we're usually like defining the concept, giving some examples, individualizing it to them and then kind of creating that plan on how we can proceed. All right. So do you think that any particular game makes a difference? I mean, does your work with them? You know, does it dictate what game that they're playing or is it or is that irrelevant? Yeah, that's irrelevant. That's what that's what always is cool. I tell them like it doesn't matter what game you're playing, you know, you can work with me. And that always is something that surprises people. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It applies. Not only does it apply to gaming, I mean, it applies to life. Those same anxiety assisting strategies work in things like job interviews, taking tests, going on a podcast. All it all works in everyday life. So, you know, this is really a holistic approach. And, you know, in many ways, we're just using gaming as a vehicle to help people become better people in their lives, to help them be the best versions of themselves. Sure. OK, so let's take a look at your website. And why don't you tell us about it and how people can find you and what you offer? Yeah, definitely. So on there, we've got looks like what we have up there is is the home page. A lot of times you want to start at the top individual gamers or teams and then you kind of click on which one represents you and we've got our services there. So there's all all kinds of great stuff. I mean, we have this really fleshed out. So scrolling down, you can get some information on what we're doing, what our process is. Some of the testing and tools that we're using, you know, this is all evidence based stuff that we're using in performance, psychology, research based and then some of the things we do. We even do I mentioned the sessions where we have gameplay view where I can observe you playing and things like that. Controlling the pace, that's some of the ideas that we have. We even do some assessments like midway point, maybe if we're a month or two in, like, where did you rate yourself on certain skills when we started and where did you rate yourself now? We even have gamer workshops, too. They are kind of larger workshops where more people can come, a little more generalized, but a little bit easier for some people that aren't ready to take the individual dive. And yeah, I mean, that's mostly that. If you were to scroll down further, you'd see some of the packages there and you can always book a free consultation. That's where we get most of our referrals in there. There's a free consultation. You can usually it's going to be with me where you get about 15 minutes to go through a little bit of what I do and how it can be specifically worked towards you. All right, fantastic. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for telling us about mental training for esports and gaming. I hope a lot of people contact you. Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate you all having me here. This was great. All right, and thank you to our viewers for joining us today. In two weeks, my guests will be Tony Brown and Justin Manley to discuss Black Point BR, creating a new frontier in gaming and the military community. And so we'll see you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo. Thank you so much, Mahalo.