The words on everyone’s lips at the moment is Coronavirus. And why wouldn’t it be? The entire world is practically on standstill and we have now been asked to stay at home, to save ourselves, save others and save the NHS from the strain that has been put on them already.
As I have been discussing video games for a while now, you’re probably thinking, ‘what makes you eligible to talk about this?’ Well, my past strongly involved video games too.
It was a large part of my life and even though there came a point where I decided to stop, I still learned a lot from that era of my life.
This is where I want to share how video games helped me.
As in a previous post I went through how gaming can benefit your life, here is my experience of using video games to benefit my own life.
When I would play games, I wanted to be the best. Simply put, if you put a game in front of me, I had to beat it and win over anyone else playing.
When I stopped, I used that persistence to get myself to the gym and beat my personal best each week. I also would walk into an interview and want to be the best and win that job.
I found that drive I had gained from ‘winning’ to be so useful in my day-to-day life once I actively triggered it in real life.
With that drive that I had gained came a want to get better each time and want to grow in anything I set my mind to. When it came to starting my business, I was always on the lookout for what could make it grow or what could help me achieve my goals.
Like I’ve mentioned before, when you play a video game, you learn to fail, brush yourself off and learn from your mistakes when you start again.
This is a huge skill to gain, as nothing can be made perfect the first time you do it. When I stepped out into the real world, it wasn’t as big of a step to convince myself that things might not always go my way but that’s ok!
Again, failure is normal in the gaming world, so it wasn’t a far stretch for me to dust myself off when my website would go down. I’d simply step and get down to how I can fix it and succeed.
Like I said earlier, when I would play games, all I wanted to do was win. So now when I give myself a task or a new obstacle comes my way, all I want to do is level up and win at that too.
Leading onto that need to win and be the best at what I do, I’m still always learning, and adapting to change to be the best version of myself.
Games have helped me to understand myself and become the person that I’ve always wanted to be. And that doesn’t mean masking my flaws and failures, but rather feeling able to see the good, bad, adapt and change the way I relate to the world to my advantage.
As I don’t play video games competitively or at all anymore, I want to next take you through my decision to stop playing.
As I have mentioned in a few other posts, I wanted to start a discussion about video games because it is a hobby that I know too well.
Arcades were a huge part of my life for years, and I had to make a decision at one point to either embrace the hold it had on me and sacrifice other areas of my life or, take a step back and enhance the skills I’d already developed in the arcades to better myself within the real world.
Last week I wanted to start a discussion on video games, and not just how they can negatively affect your real life, but the positive impact that gaming can have.
This week I want to start to answer the question of how you can use the positives of gaming to help you in other aspects of your life.
For the past few weeks, I have been going through the ins and outs of playing video games.
Now so far I have mentioned the negative impact that playing incessant video games can have on your day to day life, but this time I want to share the positive attributes of playing. And yes there are some…
Video games have become an extremely popular, and all-consuming hobby for some people. And I hear from many that they can feel like they can’t control the draw to play.
Many of us have had that experience with a game where you just cannot put it down.
Whether you want to be the next person to win Fortnite or you can’t get enough of Candy Crush, it’s a feeling all too familiar.
As a former gamer, I know too well that video games can have some kind of implication in your real life. This can either be in a good, or bad way, and I want to go through how and when you should start to consider changing your gaming habits.
Trust is a key part of not only having confidence but also general success and being happy. If you don’t have trust in yourself and in others, it can be pretty difficult to find success.
If you want to start gaining more trust, then I would like to offer my three steps to doing so.
As part of my series on confidence, the last part of this is trusting yourself.
In the past few weeks I have been covering confidence. Last time I discussed building self-esteem and how it is the foundation for building up your overall confidence.