Hello, I’m Chester King, and I’m from London, the United Kingdom. I’m the CEO of the British Esports Association. I’m also a vice president of the Global Esports Federation. And I’m a member of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee Esports and Gaming Liaison Group.

So we’re going to talk about resilience. And I think resilience means a lot of things to different people, and it can be part of your everyday life. It can be part of your personal relationship with your friends and your family. It can be in work, it can be in sports, and it can be in gaming and esports. From my personal experience, I’ve built up resilience for a number of different aspects of my life dealing with stressful situations, and it’s all around learning from your mistakes. My uncle was an Olympian. He was the British record holder. And it was interesting seeing him and how he dealt with his resilience to competition and the stress of competition. And it’s interesting the work that I do for the British esports Association, trying to teach children to be more resilient, and to basically control their nerves and become mentally tougher when they’re experiencing competition. And it’s something that I’ve seen with my children as well. So I think trying to be resilient is a positive thing. It’s not always easy.

It is interesting, what techniques are there? How do you build your own resilience? The practices that I put in place is around repetition so that you don’t have to think about things when you’re playing. So I play a lot of tennis. I’m a member at the All England, which is, you know, where Wimbledon is held. Obviously, I don’t compete in Wimbledon, but I do play there as a member. It’s interesting seeing other members of the club and how they continue to practice and practice and practice. So when they’re playing a match, they’re not thinking about what they need to do, because they’ve practiced at so many times, which allows them to be better.

So, you know, when, for example, one gives speeches, you know, I read an incredible thing about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would practice his public speaking 50 times by reading it aloud in a mirror the day before, looking at himself, repeating the words and becoming resilient to the stresses of doing public speaking.

So I think everyone has their own techniques. I think practicing it is obviously one thing, but I think you’ve got to try things. And I think if for some people, you know, there is a problem with actually thinking you’re going to fail, but there’s no problem in failure because that’s how you learn things. And you hear all these quotes around, you know, “If you don’t make a mistake, you don’t make anything in life.” But, you know, I think to convince someone, don’t worry about failure as a negative. You know, some people focus on being number one, number one, number one. The problem is if you’re not number one, you’re how does that affect your mental health? So resilience is a key factor.

It’s interesting to see that in most sports, professional athletes now have not only physical coaches, but also mental health coaches. And a key focus of that is to improve the resilience. During a number of sports, you have to deal with criticism, and you have to deal with distraction, which does affect your performance. Yeah, in a number of sports when you’re playing, especially team sports, you know, the opposition is trying to affect you. And I think, you know, the more you can build up resilience to that, the more you can focus to achieve. There’s a huge amount of values of when you play sport that you can transferable over to real life and other situations. So resilience is incredibly important. It’s so good to have, you know, the ability to work with other people and listen to other people don’t feel that you’re on your own about it.

Thank you, Chester. You make some excellent points on resilience within competitive environments. I like how you allude to people being able to build resilience and build it from a young age. As soon as you said this, I compared to it mental toughness and grit in the face of tough situations. Practice just as you said can reduce stress because repetition can make you naturally adapt to a variety of situations. Competitive gamers similarly have to gain resilience and avoid distraction in playing in front of large audiences, whether it would be in a small LAN tournament, in a esports arena, or even on an online streaming service.   

A lot of the amateur and professional gamers that I know and have played against utilize some of those same techniques. In the gaming community, where it was originally from poker, we like it to call it becoming tilt proof where tilting is what happens to players who become frustrated and not think through their plays. I can’t agree with you more on the role of good coaches. I think no matter the sport or genre, the responsibility of good coaches really hasn’t changed as much as the players have. Being able to create an environment where a player doesn’t feel demoralized when his teammate criticizes a decision he made or play he failed to create is the sort of environment that can be pushed in the real world too.