Flow state is a measurable neurological state where your brain enters complete absorption, allowing automatic skill execution without conscious thought. It requires three conditions: a clear specific goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge that slightly exceeds your current skill level. Pressure activates the prefrontal cortex, shifting your brain from automatic to conscious control, which causes choking. To engineer flow state on command, use four mental tools: cyclic sigh breathing (two short inhales, one long exhale), effect labeling (naming emotions to reduce their impact), implementation intentions (scripting 'if this happens, then I will do this'), and pressure rehearsal (gradually exposing yourself to stress in training). The complete pre-game routine includes physical warm-up, mental warm-up with visualization, an on-ramp game to calibrate your prediction loop, and reflective practice after sessions.
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Call Of Duty PRO Flow State EXPLAINED – Command Flow On DEMANDAdded:
INTO IT. CRIMP, MAMBA, ESTRA, LIGHT IT UP. OH, HERCULES AWAY. HERCULES WITH THE ACE. HERCULES WITH ALL FOUR FROM THAT SHOTY triple really at midst.
>> You've got good games. You've had bad games. Sometimes, yeah, it does come down to skill, but a lot of the times you're not actually even reaching the potential you have. This is my how-to series. You've already learned the spawn system. You've already learned the neuroscience behind aiming. And in this video, we are going to engineer your flow state so you can call it on command like Ultra Instinct Goku.
>> She up as Stra gets another one. Dash in behind. Hits the shots. One versus one.
Oh my [screaming] god.
>> Now, your best card doesn't show up by accident. The top CDL pros don't show up by accident. Your flow state shows up because your brain is in a specific state. Every single elite athlete on the planet, they train themselves in a way to get flow state on demand. This is the problem for you guys watching. Most of you guys who play ranked, most of you guys who play any sort of esports, Valerant, CS, COD, mainly in this case, you guys either don't know it exists or for the ones that do, you don't know how to purposefully get into it. I am going to show you the real science behind engineering flow state. It ain't motivation. It's going to be real truthful research over the past 40 years. And this is what we're going to cover in today's video. The three things that every flow state needs and why you guys are missing all three. Why pressure makes your skill disappear and the science behind pressure. The four mental tools that you guys can use and pro players can use to stay locked in. Uh and a full pregame routine that lets you get into flow state just like that. So guys, the drills and the routines are at the end if you don't want any of the science because I know you guys watch Tik Tok. You don't have the attention for it. Skip to the end. There'll be chapters. By the end of this video, you are going to know exactly why whenever pressure is on, you suck. Why it feels like your skill and your talent disappears. And why you tilt after one bad death. And we're going to fix all of that. Most of you watching have this exact same experience. You'll play one game and you feel like a god. Everything is hitting. All your timings are hitting. All your shots are hitting. It doesn't matter the rank that you're in.
You just feel like the best of your ability. But then you have the same setup, the same sensitivity. It's the same lobby. You go into the next map and you you're a literal bot. You can't do anything. Maybe I need to change my sense for the 100th time. It's not that.
There's a name for what you're experiencing. Now, in sports science, and I've studied a lot of sports science, especially as a boxing coach, they've been studying this since the 1970s. It's what we call flow state. Um, in sports, we use a different word. It's called the white zone, but it's basically the same thing. So, you can use both words interchangeably. Now, the man who founded the research, Dr. Mihali, I'm not even going to say his second name. So difficult to say, but he defined flow state as the state of complete absorption in the activity where your actions and your awareness come together. So what you're doing, what you're thinking are basically one.
In practice, this is what it means for you guys who play ranked. Your brain stops thinking, you just keep going.
Now, for you nerds out there, here's what's actually happening at the brain level. You have what's called the preffrontal cortex and that's the part of your brain that's responsible for how you monitor yourself, how you deliberate, how you even worry, right?
The worrying aspect. It has two settings, an active and a quiet. When it's active, guess what happens? You start overthinking. You're worry about the scoreboard. You're worry about the gunfights you're going to take. You're worrying about if your slide cancel is going to hit. You're worried about all these other things. And guess what?
Active is slow mode. Let me give you guys an example on myself back in Black Ops 4. This was December 2018. This was the Las Vegas Open for the CWL and this was the pool play qualifiers. I knew at that event if I didn't make the Pro League, I am going to retire. I'm going to retire and go back to school, right?
And and and well, not go back, but go fully into school and just commit, right? That pressure was on me. My first game in the pool play qualifiers was against Parasite. It was against Parasite and the Pittsburgh Knight. I had this in the back of my head like, "Okay, I need to perform." And guess what that did? My brain, my preffrontal cortex was active. I was overthinking everything. Guess what happened? We got run. It was not even close. It was so fast. We sat down, got smoked, we out.
it was done. That's what happens to you guys is when your brain gets active, everything becomes a lot more difficult and most importantly slower. When it quiets down, the part of your brain that handles your movement, your predictions, your decision making, they can run without interference. That is what we call fast mode. That's flow. When you're in flow and you're in fast mode, that's when your best Call of Duty comes out.
This isn't just theory. There's a lot of researchers out there who have published uh studies in 2014 that scanned people's brain during flow state and they found this exact pattern. Reduced activity in your prefrontal cortex and the amigdala while you're doing something task relevant stayed online. What that means is flow state involves more nuanced attentional control. Flow looks different in the brain. Basically that's what it means. So why does any of this matter? I have coached obviously pro players in the past who do this routine deliberately. Think about some of your favorite pro players. They feel sharper when they do it. The pros who don't really think about it, they have built this over years of scrimming, of high performance, of mainstage. So, they know how to get into it. Whether it's whether it's intentional or not, most of you guys watching do not have that same level of volume or even the same level of pressure that pro players have. This is really important because flow state isn't a skill you lose overnight. But it's it's something that you can lose in a single moment. Think about it. When you're Goku and Ultra Instinct, you can lose that in a single moment if you are not careful enough. When your preffrontal cortex flips back to active, when there's a little bit of pressure, when you start asking stuff like, "Am I good enough? What if I miss? Am I doing the right play?" You start hesitating.
You start overinking. Is this the right play? Should I challenge? When you start thinking consciously, your brain moves from automatic to conscious. And when you're conscious, that is the textbook definition of choking. Now, here's the value. Why get into flow state? Why does any of this matter for you watching?
This will make your best COD show up when it matters. It'll make your best COD, your potential, what you have right now, more consistent and shows up a lot more. Right, let's go one layer deeper.
Now, when a player is in flow, what looks like playing without thinking is actually what we call a continuous prediction loop, going fast and fast and fast, and it runs quicker and tighter than normal. Right now, your brain isn't just reacting to what it sees on the screen. Your brain, especially at higher level, is predicting what's going to happen ahead of time. And then you're acting on them predictions. You get feedback, updates, the prediction, acts again. And it's this nice, beautiful little loop that we have going on in neuroscience. And I'm going to bore you guys for a second. This is what we call forward modeling. Some scientists published that work in the 2000s. Um, and the research since then has only gotten better and better and better. But basically what it says is that your brain is literally simulating what is about to happen and your hands are acting on that simulation. So you're thinking ahead right now. That's why pros when you watch them at the highest level and you watch some of the best players in the world, they look so calm in clutch moments because their loop is running earlier than yours. When you can't replicate your best games consistently, a lot of the times you're saying your prediction loop only works in specific conditions. You don't know what them conditions are. That's why your best game is not consistent enough.
That's why your best game is one out of 10. What we're trying to do is make it five or six out of 10. Okay. Now, what are the three things that get you into flow? Now, the guy that founded this field, I don't even know how to pronounce his name. I'm going to try.
Sizzix Zent Malik TZ. He named three things that produce flow. You need to make sure you have these three things or you can't get into flow. Well, the first thing that you need to get into flow is a clear goal.
Now, before your next game, ask yourself, what is your goal? Most of you are going to say something like, "Well, I'm trying to play well. I'm trying to climb the ranks. I'm trying to get kills, have fun, blah blah blah blah blah. I'm going to get less." And that's the biggest problem you guys have is your prefrontal cortex has limited bandwidth. The more goals you give it, the more things it has to monitor. the more things it has to monitor, it's going to be slow. Slow kills Flo. Slow kills Flo. Now Flo needs one goal, not five, not three. Don't listen to Zuma.
>> Zuma is three and 22. When we went to his screen, he was tweaking. He wasn't able to hit his shots.
>> When they're these guys are yapping, you got to do this, got to do this, got to do this, got to do, and it's about 10 different things. It goes against neuroscience. Now team things different but for you one thing for you guys watching one goal it needs to be specific to what is going on next not something generic has to be very specific one specific to lock in could be anything pros don't realize it especially in COD but pros in other things in other sports they look locked in because they run on micro goals one round one rotation one fight it's not about winning the match it's about breaking it down to do one thing at a time this is the biggest problem pros have in the CDL and I'm going to call it out directly they they'll lose a map in a tournament or official and they'll start to talk about the previous map rather than getting prepared for the next map. When you start to talk about a lot of the the previous things that happened in the previous map, you don't you get yourself out of flow state and not prepared for the next map at hand. So, here's the action for you guys is before your next match, write one specific goal, specific goal. P2, I'm going to do this. P1, I'm going to do this. P3, I'm going to do this. I'm gonna play more position D.
Then a generic and try it for one entire session. Okay. Number two on how you can get into flow state. COD gives you everything you need to get into flow.
You need to be able to read it properly.
Your flow needs to be continuous and you need to have what's called instant immediate feedback. So your brain will use feedback to to basically give you fast mode in real time. Without it, remember the predictions we talked about, it breaks down, right? So in COD, you're getting feedback. The kills you make, the waves, the hill tick, the score, the mini map, the spawns, the gaps, awareness, you know, all these different things. That is an enormous amount of feedback running every second, right? Pro players don't do anything magical with that. They're just reading more than you. So your brain takes the feedback, you process it, and you adjust what you're predicting as you're doing it. Then that's how that loop keeps on going. A lot of you guys who play, you don't do it consistent enough or continuous enough in order to get into flow state. Bear with me. This one is going to be a bit confusing and honestly the most difficult to do and probably the easiest to get wrong. And this is what we call the challenge skill balance. Both the lobbies that you dominate in and the lobbies that you get absolutely run in are both killing your improvement and your ability to enter flow state. The research has already mapped this directly. This is what we call the flow channel. This is the narrow band in which your challenge slightly exceeds where you are to force you to grow without breaking your competence. Yes, you need to be uncomfortable and challenged in order to grow. If the challenge or the fact that you're uncomfortable is too high, you ain't ever going to grow. That's not how it works. I can't just go in with some experience in boxing, spar Anthony Joshua. I'm getting sparked out. So are you guys. And guess what? I could do this 100 times and I'm not learning anything. You could do this for the next six months. You might improve a tiny bit. Why? Because the challenge is too great. Some people are too eager to improve, but they take a challenge that forces them to not produce the muscle memory or the automaticity to improve.
So from my experiences with New York, we would schedule our scrim opponents around this. We tried not to get too easy scrims. That's why you might see some CDL teams avoiding playing the lower teams because they can't get into flow and it actually does a lot more damage. Now you might say, well, yeah, but if I play against the best players in the world, I'm going to learn something. But learning is different from applying. Both are different skills. You can learn every theory in the world. It's different to applying and developing the muscle memory in the moment. The most optimal way to do that is slightly better than you. So you can apply it. Now here's the part that describes why you suck under pressure, why I sucked under pressure, and why even pros choke under the light. Now your pressure just it doesn't just affect confidence, right? It changes what we call your physiology. And it specifically changes or denies flow state at the brain level. When you have pressure, when you have something that's high stakes, whatever it may be, it activates a threat response. What you called your amigdala fires, your your stress hormones, your cortisol starts to rise. And this is where the problem starts. And there's a bunch of research that have shown over the last 20 years of why this happens. And it shows you that with pressure, automatic skill becomes conscious. and it degrades. We don't want it to be conscious. Very little has to be conscious. The moment pressure starts to hit and you don't know how to deal with the pressure, your brain starts removing these automatic skills into now conscious skills. Think about it using the keyboard as an example. If you're typing away with no pressure, you're just typing away, you're typing paragraphs, you're typing the BS, right? You're not thinking about any letter. You're thinking about the the word. If I put a gun to your head, I promise you, you're thinking about every single letter and it goes from being fast to slow. This is what we call choking. When you see players choke in the pro league, this is why. It's a cognitive process where the conscious control takes over from something that's automatic to now manual. That's why you see players who are incredible in practice don't do anything really matters because they're overthinking, right? There are two different types of choking. There's explicit monitoring.
So, this is skill-based choking. So, basically, when you start overthinking and you start consciously monitoring things that are automatic, you're focusing too hard on your aim. you're focusing too hard on your movement. You start to feel the pressure. Then you start to deliberately track, for example, crosshair placement. You're tracking your centering, your peak's advantage, your movement. You start to feel your hand on a controller. Like when you're when you're in flow, I'm not feeling this. I'm not feeling this. This is just nothing here. This is just an extension of my being. When you feel the pressure, you feel the weight of this.
This weighs nothing. But you start to feel the weight of this. Guess what happens then? Your aim becomes slow.
Your aim becomes poor. Your brain is now using slow conscious processing to do something it should be doing automatically. That's what happens. You force a play. You force a shot. You start windmilling. You stop taking fights. You should. Why? Because this is explicit monitoring choking. Now, type two is the distractionbased choking. And this is when you're so worried about the result. You're so worried about things you can't control, it hijacks your attention. Me, Black Ops 4, so worried about getting into the Pro League, right? I'm not focused on the game. I was focused on what could go wrong. I'm playing Parasite, focused on if I don't win and I get don't get into the Pro League, that's it. I'm choked.
I'm done. Now, your attention is split between the task and the worry. Your flow state can't work with that. See, the most common type of choking for you guys in R. So both types of pressure collapse they ruin flow in the same way by activating your prefrontal cortex. I want you guys to be like all right prefrontal cortex disengage. Okay, now you know pressure is a big thing.
Pressure affects your flow state. Now you know why flow state is so important.
Here are four things that you guys can do to fight pressure. Number one, this is my my favorite one. Cyclic sin. This is one of the most important breathing tools that are backed by research, right? And it's so stupid. It's so funny. Here's what you do is you do two short inhales through your nose and you do one long exhale through your mouth.
That is a single physiological sigh. My favorite re researcher in the world, Andrew Huberman. He published a randomized control trial in 2023. They tested this. They did it for 5 minutes a day for 28 days. They did it against box breathing, hyperventilation, meditation, all these other things. And guess what?
This this sigh, as simple as it is, had the largest the largest reduction in baseline arousal. It improved your mood the most, and it slowed you down the most. So, what what does that mean? Do it between rounds. Do it before a game.
Do it when you feel like things about to hit the fan. Here's what I recommend, and this is what I did with Skies. Use your cyclic sigh as a five minute warm-up before you play ranked. I I recommend this to all the guys that I coach. Try it. Try it right now. Right.
Two short inhales [snorts] and then one exhale. Notice how you feel. Imagine doing five minutes of just sat there going, "You look like a bit of an idiot." But I'm telling you, you look even worse if you're going four and 35 on stage. Number two, effect labeling.
It's so simple. It's another one. It's so stupidly simple, but you understand the science behind it. Is when you feel an emotion under pressure, name it. When you name it, it reduces the impact on your brain. There is so many studies that showed you that when you name something and you label it in words, your brain starts to reduce the activity and it reduces your prefrontal cortex from being activated. The naming of the emotion will shift your brain from emotional reactivity to cognitive control. This is called effect labeling.
It's the new standard in psychology. And the reason why it works is your language activates the prefrontal cortex. And an active prefrontal cortex regulates the amigdala to then help you reduce the activity in your prefrontal cortex. For you guys in COD is when you feel yourself tilting. Name it. God, I'm tilted. I'm rushed. I'm scared. That's it. You name it, you bring yourself back. It doesn't eliminate it. Reduces it enough to break the cycle. Number three is the implementation intention.
So pressure will get worse when your brain has way too many options. So you want to narrow it down before you even play anything. This is what we call the implementation intention. And this is a technique that was developed in 1999.
It's been validated over 200 studies.
It's one of the most robust findings in psychology. So trust it. Trust it.
Format is simple. If this situation happens, then I will do this. Does that sound familiar? For my for my people who watch my content, my COD guys, does that sound familiar? It's scripting. If this happens, I'm going to do this. Scripting is one of the most important aspects of getting into flow state because it's automatic. When you're under pressure, your prefrontal cortex is overloaded.
What that means is your decision-m is terrible. I put a gun to your head, you will not be able to type your name. I promise you. When things are scripted, you've already decided what to do. You don't you do not need the front of your brain to decide. You just execute.
That's why pros, they'll have pre-round routines. You'll call out specific plans. You work on specific systems. You don't improvise under pressure. No, you don't do that. You execute precommitted decisions. Okay. The last one is something we did on New York. This is pressure rehearsal. So, if you only practice in calm conditions, you're hoping pressure won't change you. It's going to change you. Um, we did something called stress inoculation training. So it shows you that it reduces your performance anxiety and enhances your performance under stress.
So you gradually expose yourself to stress in training and it improves your performance under stress competition.
You know, there's so many things that you could do to artificially introduce stress. Bro, we used to play with crowd sound to get ready for champs. We had to play to to do pressups if we didn't win a game, right? So there's so many things you could do to artificially introduce pressure to get you used to playing with pressure. You're teaching your brain to say, "Yo, even though there's pressure, I'm still going to execute." And that is the the literal definition of building clutch performance. All right, on this next one, this was a misconception that took me a very, very long time to understand. You might see people who look like they're locked in for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes straight. They don't actually maintain perfect focus the entire time. They get distracted. They get emotional. But the difference between the players who look locked in for a long period of time versus you watching is the fact that they can recover faster. Your anxiety and pressure, it doesn't destroy focus by making you less focused. What it does, it hijacks your attention to whatever is threatening you the most in the moment. So what this means for you guys in COD is when you tilt, your ability to focus on what you've decided to focus on collapses. Your attention gets pulled away. But here's the critical part. The research shows you that elite performance. The best of the best, your Kobes, your Jordans, Ronaldo, for example, they experience the same thing, but they just notice it faster than you do and bring their attention back faster than you do. This is what you call your refocus speed. And that's what it m that's how they look like they're locked in for the entire time.
Think of your focus like a muscle that gets tired. Okay, now you're asking, "Coach, stop waffling. Give me the tools to work on my focus speed." Three things. Tool number one is your single Q rep. You will do this for 30 seconds at a time. You're going to choose one thing, one Q, and focus on that only.
So, mini map check every 3 seconds.
Crosshair placement every time you go around a corner. Are you instantly trading a teammate when he fire when he dies? Are you focusing on your your spawn awareness? Most ranked players, it's it's not about lacking skill. It's it's the fact that you guys lack clarity. you're trying to focus on everything and everything and you end up focusing on nothing. So what we're trying to do with this focus training and this is sports uh psychology research. This is what we call focused attention training. Um Olympians do this. So people in who do shooting, they do this, golfers, snipers, by focusing on one specific thing, you build the muscle of sustained focus. This is only just for the actual practice. It's not when you're actually competing. Number two is your spotlight switching. Now, if you're an elite player in anything that you do, you don't lock your attention in one mode for 247s. You switch it. You switch it over and over. This is called the theory of attentional style, published in 1976, way before I was born. And this says there are two dimensions to attention. It's the width, how wide your attention is, and the direction. Is it inwards? Is it outwards? Right? So, what this means for you guys in COD is you have how wide, information, snapshot, mini map, lanes, objective, teammates, positioning, flow, all these other things. Then you have what's called narrow, right? What's the immediate job? What do you have to do right now? Are you fighting right now?
Are you slide cancelling right now? Are you peing right now? You taking a fight right now? What position are you playing right now? Now, the error that most of you guys make is you you make the switch at the wrong time. Sometimes you might tunnel vision during like a setup, as an example. Sometimes you might be too broad when you're taking a fight. This is what we call spotlight switching. And this is what the best players do really, really well. Focus from narrow to broad or broad to narrow. Right? Train it like a habit and you'll start to be very, very good. Um, at least from a focus perspective. Now, number three is the refocus script. This is the most important focus tool. It's the 5-second script you are going to run every time you notice you have drifted. Notice, label, return. You say, "Hey, my focus is drifting. I'm on autopilot. Bro, I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat at Mike's Chicken today. God damn. I'm I'm thinking about what I'm eating at Cheesecake Factory while I'm holding the setup." Right? Then you're labeling it.
Right? Pressure, anger, rushed, scared, distracted, Cheesecake Factory. Then return. Choose your one Q for the next 10 seconds. Remember the one thing we talked about you're going to focus on?
You're bringing that back. Three steps, 5 seconds, and it's the cornerstone of focus training that you guys have to do.
Okay. For the moment, all you guys have been waiting for a lot of scientific waffle or for you for you you guys who just skipped the video. How to engineer flow state before you quue. Let's put it all together. This is what every single pro alete in every elite sport does.
Step number one is surprise surprise, you got to warm up, right? 10 minutes minimum. Your hands need to feel the game before your brain can trust it. If you just hop on in, you've had no warm-up, you're gonna spend the first rotation, maybe the first map catching up. And for you guys who aren't pro, you're going to tilt definitely. So, you can have specific drills on what you're working on. The principle has to be consistent. You got to make sure you warm up your motor system, meaning warm up your hands and your aim before you stress it. If you haven't, check out my neuroscience of aiming video. It's on my website. Do that. Do the warm-up. This is foundational sports science. Every elite athlete in every single sport, in every single thing, will warm up before a performance. Quick one. Just stay with me for 60 seconds. I'm going to tell you something about your own aim that is going to change the way that you shoot forever. Your aim is bad. I'm not trying to insult you. It is the truth. It's not your settings. It's not your controllers. It's not your internet.
It's not your dead zone. You've changed your sensitivity about 50 times in the past 5 years. It's never going to fix it because the problem is not in your hands, it's in your eyes. When you say you need to train your aim, what are you actually training? Because most players, for you guys that are watching, you've never really thought about it. You loading, bot lobby, you just shoot.
Aiming is not one skill. It is four completely different skills. Flicking, tracking, micro correction, target switching. Each one uses a different part of your brain. Each one needs a specific drill. Each one needs to be trained properly. What you are doing is the equivalent of going to the gym and you're just lifting random things. My pro players, my CDL champions have trained the same way as athletes that train their sport. One skill, one drill, one sequence at a time. That's why their aim is consistent and yours isn't.
They're not more talented than you.
They're more structured than you. So, I give you that structure. four skills in the right order, the right amount. This is the whole point of my aim and moving master class for you to download.
Inside, you'll get an aiming and movement video, a neuroscience of aiming guide, 30-day training calendar, champions daily practice planner, optimal CDL settings cheat sheet, and a before and after self assessment. You download it once, lifetime access. Do this 20 minutes a day for 30 days. I will guarantee your aim will improve.
not just your aim, but how you aim and how you look at aiming. Check out dreal.co.uk and click this big gold button right here to get yourself on the course page or check out the link in the description if you want it. Right, back to the video. Number two, your mental warm-up.
5 minutes of cycling cyclic saying. That is it. Two short inhales, one long exhale. Do this for five minutes. This is how we prime your nervous system. You are then going to do up to one minute of visualization. You're going to picture one outcome, for example, winning your first round, wherever it may be for you.
You do not want to visualize a 60 kill game. Don't visualize you climbing the rank. Visualize something specific you are going to do inside of the map. Stage three is the on-ramp. So, your first game is the bridge between you and flow state. Do a public match, do a warm-up in a custom game to find your rhythm, whatever it may be. The the ramping game has three purposes. It needs to make sure your aim is dialed in. It needs to let your prediction loop sort of like calibrate, I guess. Like you need to work on your prediction loop. Um, and it lets you to engineer your environment correctly to make sure there's like no distractions, your seat's comfortable, no surprises. You know, when you're playing a map and let's say you go into a a super duper important rank game and you've never played a game one before, you're warming up, your screen's not right, I'm shaking around, you know, there's the cable here is on me. you know, my sound is a bit off. And you may not recognize it while you're actually warming up in a free-for-all, but then you're like, man, I feel a bit weird.
Right? That's why pros, they warm up against other teams in the CDL before you guys play ranked, warm up in a pub, right? You can warm up in a private game. You can warm up in a pub. You know, you're already doing it in step one when you're warming up in a custom game. So, when you're doing after you've done step one, you can go into a pub. Do that. Just warm up in a pub. Shoot something in a pub. All right. During the session, step number four is once you are queuing in games that actually matter, you are going to use your single physiological sigh. You're going to use your trigger words, you're going to use your labeling, you're going to use your refocus script, you're going to implement your intentions, and you are not going to replay mistakes in your head. You're going to park it, and you're going to watch it for VOD later.
Stage five is after you are done in whatever it is you're playing, 2K, GBs, ranked, anything important. And this is the part that 99% of you guys will skip.
And it's the difference between a player that's good for one day versus a player who's good in every single session is after your session, write one sentence that felt good. I felt good when I was playing a power position. I felt good letting my SMGs push first. This is what we call reflective practice. This is used by every single elite coach in every single sport. So you need to write this physically. It rewires your brain to recognize the conditions of getting into flow state faster. You finish your ranks, you hit the showers, you start watching the flank. No, don't do that.
Just 30 seconds, right? One line. That's all it takes. Then you can go do that.
This is what the best in the world on Call of Duty see that you don't. You're hard stuck. You're wasting time playing and you're not improving again. Yeah, your aim is a problem, but that is only such a small part of it. Stop paying for advice from content creator coaches and maybe you'll finally improve. You've watched all the tips and tricks videos you can. You've tried the YouTube coaches. You're still stuck. Let a world champion coach explain to you why. In 60 seconds, I'm going to teach you exactly how my pro players would make quick and efficient and quick decisions. And a big part of playing with the best isn't your aim and movement. It is your decision- making. This one decision-making move is going to separate you from someone who's hard stuck platinum for three seasons.
Now, let me explain to you guys watching the one framework that pro players use in order to make decisions. This framework is what me and my pro players would use in order to make quick, efficient decisions and introduce a concept called scripting that you guys do not have. So, I'm going to introduce you to what we call the decision-making tree. This is how pro players make decisions. It starts off with awareness.
Your awareness is your input. You can get a variety of different information from different what we call channels. We need to make sure we have the right pieces of information and the most complete picture in order to make a decision. Once we have our input, we will then evaluate this. Your evaluation is considered your macro. This is what is considered a good, a bad or proactive decision and what is your job in the moment in order to give your team or yourself the best chance of winning.
Once you know what your job is, we then do what's called decision. Your decision is your micro. This is how do you take the fight? your first bullet advantage, your health management, different types of slide cancels, your percentages in the fights, what angles you want to use, anything that can allow you to actually win and see in front of you the one-on-one fight. Once you've decided what you want to do, you communicate this and there's a method for communication and then you act. This means doing something without hesitation. When you look at this, you will see that there are five steps and it can get quite complicated. But the difference between you and the pro players is this is automated and this is scripted. This is one of the most underexplained skills in Call of Duty because two players could have the same awareness. They could see the same picture, read the same information, but one player will produce a decisive decision and the other player will just do absolutely nothing. That gap is what I'm going to teach you. This is trainable. Each step can be drilled and each step can be automated. Right? That was one concept in 60 seconds. Imagine me and you did this and we broke it down in four weeks. I have spent over 10 years at the highest level of Call of Duty. I've coached players like Hydra, Crimix, Sib, Caster, Neptune, Skies. I'm a CDL world champion. I've won 15 titles and challenges and I've also competed at the highest level myself. I've played at the Advanced Warfare Pro League, Infinite Warfare Champs, and World War II Champs with the top five KD and Slayer rating for that event. This July, I am running my first ever boot camp where you can learn this and more. The exact frameworks that I've installed and helped build and do with CDL Champions.
You are getting the material that my players have done themselves taught across four weeks. Your decision tree, teamups, map control, champions framework, first bullet advantage, health management, all the nerdy stuff to guarantee improvement in your game.
This is the same framework that got one player from platinum to top 250 in 16 hours. One from gold to iridescent in eight and two players in the CDL. This will be only for July. 10 spots. Once it's gone, it's gone. Stop wasting time with content creator coaches. Stop wasting time not improving. Train the way the best in the world do it. All right. So, what breaks your flow state?
Flow can disappear in the middle of a game. Yeah, absolutely. And most of you guys watching probably don't realize until you've tilted. Here are five things that kill your flow state. You catch them early. You use the tools that we've talked about. Your goal is not to avoid them. The goal, like I said, if you've been watching the entire video, is to catch it fast, reset fast. Number one, outcome thinking. The moment you start thinking ahead to the outcome, to the result, to the scoreboard, you'll win the match rank, whatever it may be, you're out of flow. Why? Your prefrontal cortex has shifted from the next play to what we call an abstract outcome. That in itself is how you break flow state.
So, how do you fix that? Because it happens quite a bit. It happens a lot to me. Physiological sigh. Return your attention to the next play or the next round. Always don't look backwards.
Don't look super far forwards. Number two is comparison. You look at your scoreboard and oh my god, so many ranked players do this. They look at their scoreboard, see who's up the top, and be like, bro, how's he got so many kills?
That one single thought is the reason why you don't have that many kills in your outflow state. Comparison is a textbook [clears throat] flow killer because it engages what we call self-referential processing.
Meaning you're doing the exact same thing that your prefrontal cortex wants you to do. You're out of flow state.
Congratulations. Number three is the self monitoring. If you remember back to earlier in the video, this is the choking. Oh my god, chat. I've been smoked. User 45 has just said, "Oh my god, you're terrible. Oh my god, I'm 421." The minute you start playing for an audience, you stop playing for yourself. Think about it. This is what we call explicit monitoring. Choking. We did it earlier. I know you guys have skipped it cuz you guys are on TikTok too much. Your brain is shifting from automatic to conscious control. Your mechanics break down. Your flow is gone.
This is the number one cause of pro players being terrible online. Number four, this is funny. Anger at a teammate. This is the fastest flow killer in any team sport. Anger physically blocks the the part of the brain that produces your flow state. It activates the amygdala and it crashes your prefrontal regulation. Meaning you're now in threat mode. Yeah, you're angry at a teammate. Your body's thinking, right, I want to beat him up.
And when you're in threat mode, you can't get into flow state. You can't you can't get into flow state. And in threat mode, both are mutually exclusive. The moment you start to blame a teammate, you've already lost. Use effect effect labeling. I'm tilting on my teammates.
Use your physiological sigh. Then refocus. Return. All right. Ironically, number five. Ironically, number five.
You will hear a lot of COD players tell you sleep doesn't matter. Don't listen to them. Every single sport, in every single industry, in everything, everything in science related will tell you sleep is one of the most important things to get into flow state. You're sleepd deprived. When you're sleepd deprived and you don't have a good sleep routine, not only do you learn very very poorly, not only do your performance suffers, but guess what? Sleep deprivation impairs everything to do with your brain. You can't access flow.
You can't play to the best of your ability. You can't even follow a game plan if you've not had a good night's sleep because sleep is the most important thing for your brain. The most important. Don't let any COD pro or anyone like that tell you otherwise. You need sleep to engineer flow. You need sleep to learn. You need sleep to do anything, right? Treat it like it's the most important thing in the world if you're serious about competing. All right, there we have it. Flow isn't vibes. Flow isn't look. Flow isn't a personal personality trait. You ain't born with flow, you know, none of that.
It's a measurable state that your brain enters when you have three clear conditions. Clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge that slightly exceeds your skill. It will vanish when pressure activates your prefrontal cortex and it shifts you from automatic to conscious control. It will return when you regulate your nervous system.
When you label your emotions and you have scripting in your decision making, there's no point having skill when it disappears when it matters. Train the state, train the access, train the recovery. That's how you stop being inconsistent, start being reliable.
That's how you play like a CDL pro in every game, not just the good days.
Appreciate you guys watching. Hopefully you've enjoyed it. And I'm tired.
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