Books That Shaped My Work: Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Julie Smith

Over the last two decades I've become someone who really enjoys reading, which wasn't always the case. I read almost exclusively non-fiction, mostly health, mental performance, nutrition and sleep, but also history, politics, and books on the universe. Whenever I'm with a team, the staff and players see me reading constantly, and that sparks conversations. Inevitably I get asked whether I can recommend something. So I thought I'd start sharing some of them here. Not traditional book reviews, but a way of sharing books that have actually shifted how I work as a performance coach, and what I took from them that I keep coming back to.

The first one I want to talk about is Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr Julie Smith. Smith is a UK-based clinical psychologist who built a large online following sharing accessible mental health content. The book is essentially her translating clinical psychology and mindfulness into something a general reader can use. Although I've read a lot of books on psychology and mental training, I was genuinely surprised by how easy it was to relate to how Smith words things. The book gave me new angles on concepts I'd already encountered, and a few things I hadn't thought about in that way before. She has a way of making big concepts land in a way that makes sense. Here's what stayed with me, and how it's shown up in my work.

The first idea that pulled me in is one she returns to throughout the book: thoughts are not facts, and feelings aren't either. They're a mix of opinions, predictions, stories, memories and interpretations: ways your brain offers up to make sense of what's happening, not verdicts on reality. The trap she names is emotional reasoning, treating what you feel as evidence for what's true. I feel like Player A isn't try-harding or committing as much as I am, so he must be the reason we keep losing, and replacing him will fix everything.

This kind of thinking gets us all into trouble constantly, and it's enormously relevant to my work. It doesn't always happen, but it happens often enough. Players get caught up in their emotions, lose objectivity, and end up making real decisions based on that. Premature calls for roster changes, resistance to new structures, tactical decisions, judgements about individual performance, all of it can quietly be steered by feelings rather than evidence.

The same dynamic shows up internally when a player starts to spiral. Confidence drops, they slide into a slump, and the negative thoughts in their head start getting treated as facts about who they are. What gets lost in that process is that they actually have a choice not to identify with those thoughts.

What Smith does well is strip out the idea that we have to control which thoughts arrive. We don't, and that fight isn't winnable. What we can do is build awareness of which thoughts we feed. This is what psychologists call metacognition, and she makes it manageable for anyone: noticing the thoughts entering your mind and observing how they make you feel. Mindfulness is the formal practice that helps you build that awareness, and it's something I keep trying to get better at myself. I'm a sporadic meditator at best, but even sitting with my thoughts irregularly gives me a bird's-eye view of what's actually screaming at me, and which thoughts I've been quietly feeding without realising. It's the same skill with players: helping them pause long enough to catch the thought before they act on it.

Another idea that stuck with me is her image of emotions as waves. It's such a simple way of describing what happens when strong emotions hit. If you can let go of the fear of the emotion itself and let it wash over you like a wave, it stops being something permanent. It becomes something that comes and goes, something I can handle with the right tools. It gives me back control over how I respond, and lets me focus on the process rather than the fear. If you fight a feeling, it knocks you off your feet. If you let it wash over you, it does what emotions naturally do: rise, peak, and pass. This image has changed how I handle my own emotions and how I help players, coaches and friends.

One of my closest friends once told me about a fear he himself called ridiculous, because he objectively knew it wasn't based on anything real. Whenever he had to drive over a steep hill, he'd start to panic, convinced the brakes would fail or the car would lose control, doomsday scenarios on a loop. As we talked it through, it became clear his fear wasn't really about the car. It was about the anxiety itself. So I walked him through the wave concept. Don't fight the feeling, prepare for it. Let it rise, breathe through it, trust it will pass. The next time he drove over a hill, something interesting happened. He didn't really need to use any of it. Just having walked through the wave concept, and mentally prepared himself to handle the emotions when they came, was enough. The preparation itself took most of the panic away.

The section that had the biggest impact on me is the one on criticism, partly because handling criticism is genuinely hard for most people and I'd put myself firmly in that group. Even now, having learned to value feedback, I still find criticism aimed at something I care about uncomfortable in a way that doesn't fully go away. Smith explains why, and reading it was a small light-bulb moment. We're built to care how others perceive us. For most of human history, being part of a group wasn't just nice to have, it was the difference between surviving and not. If you got shunned or pushed out of the pack, you lost access to food, shelter and protection, and your odds of making it on your own were very low. The brain evolved to treat any signal of possible rejection as a serious threat, and that wiring is still running today. So when someone criticises us, even when the situation is completely harmless, the brain still fires off that same threat response.

There's also another layer to it. A big part of how we see ourselves is shaped by how we think other people see us. So criticism doesn't only feel uncomfortable in the moment, it can actually shake how we see ourselves.

But Smith doesn't stop at why criticism hurts. She makes a point that helps you tell useful feedback apart from the rest: criticism is almost always coloured by the worldview of the person giving it. We all see the world through our own lens, and we tend to expect others to live by our values and rules. So when someone criticises you, a lot of what you're hearing is really about them, not about you.

Smith offers four guiding principles for handling criticism:

1. Learn to accept useful criticism, even when it's uncomfortable, and put it to use without letting it shake your sense of self-worth.
2. Stay open to negative feedback that could help you grow, instead of shutting it out the moment it stings.
3. Let go of criticism that's really about someone else's values, not yours.
4. Get clear on whose opinions actually matter to you, and why. That clarity makes it easier to know when to listen and learn, and when to just let it go.

At the core of it all is self-compassion. Without it, criticism can quickly become a tool you use to break yourself down, focusing only on the negatives as a way of punishing yourself. Self-compassion is what lets you receive criticism without losing sight of the good in you, and keeps you looking for the part of it that can help you grow.

For anyone working in esports, the section on criticism is genuinely useful. A typical esports team is five players or less plus immediate staff, and most people don't realise just how intimate the setting actually is. You're spending long days together in practice, travelling together to events, eating together, competing together, often for weeks at a time. That kind of environment can't function without a culture where communication is prioritised and feedback flows consistently. Being able to give and receive criticism isn't a nice-to-have, it's what holds teams together.

I can't think of a team I've worked with where we haven't actively worked on improving communication, both inside and outside of the game. A key part of that work has always been helping players and coaches get better at giving and receiving criticism. And it doesn't only come from inside the team. It also comes from casters, community, and social media, all at once. The weight of all that criticism can be incredibly hard to handle, especially in stretches when results aren't there or a player is struggling individually. Any help in this area is more than welcome. That's what I think Smith is offering. Her framework has improved the way I talk to players about criticism, helping them tell it apart more clearly and handle it better.

The fourth idea that's stayed with me is her framing of fear and avoidance. Every time we say no to something because of fear, we let that fear take control of pieces of our lives and signal to ourselves that we're too weak to face it. This often happens unconsciously, more often than we realise. Every time it happens, we close another door. Every avoidance shrinks our life a little, until eventually we've boxed ourselves into a tiny space where everything we do is shaped by the need to avoid fear.

Esports players aren't usually facing huge, terrifying fears. But they are often clinging to what's comfortable and resisting the discomfort of trying something new, both individually and as a team. Smith's circle illustration has become one of my go-to tools for this. It gives players a visual way to see why we need to spend time in the stretch zone if we want to grow.

Getting a full team to consistently work outside of their comfort zone over a long period of time is hard. A book like this one helps, but the work of improving a team as a whole group is rarely straightforward, and it almost always requires the coaches to step outside of their comfort zones too.

There's a lot more in this book than I've been able to cover here. Other sections that stood out to me are the ones on building confidence through courage, self-acceptance, being your own coach rather than your own worst critic, and how the brain defaults to familiar habits under stress.

Honestly, I was surprised by how much I liked this book and how much of the content resonated with the work I try to do with the teams and players I coach. I have a stack of notes on it that I keep coming back to. Smith did a great job of giving useful, practical advice on topics that can sound intimidating when you hear the professional wording.

More book reviews on the way as I work through my reading list.​
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