When you're trying to improve as a player in a competitive game, each game focus on 1 specific thing to get better at. View it as a personal win if you accomplish that one thing that you really want to focus on. After you do this many times and it becomes second nature, you can move onto the next thing.

Now the key is to find a good list of things, but that's part of the journey of improving! Just a few examples:

• Taking an Easy Merc camp as soon as you can when the map event isn't up.
• Every 30 seconds, look at the minimap to see if there are any lanes where experience should be soaked.
• Every 30 seconds, look at the minimap and ask yourself "is my position on the map safe right now, or could enemies gank me?"
• Focus on landing one of your skill shots (specifically just 1) as much as possible
• Using your Healing Fountain as soon as it will give you a full heal (eventually you'll realize when you should save it, but I've found that newer players don't use it as often as they could)
• Focus on being at high Health and Mana before every map event
• If you're a damage dealer, try to follow up the tanks engage and damage whoever he uses his CC on
• If you're a tank, try to make sure that your damage dealers are within range to damage whoever you engage on

There's a good list of things here on this reddit or on various Heroes websites. What I personally do is look at anyone successful (streamers or youtubers are great places to start) and when you watch them try to see some small details that they're doing different or better than you. But the key is to focus on 1 thing at a time and really lock that down, otherwise you'll become overwhelmed with 100 different things and do none of them well.

I've found it really helps to actually keep a list next to me on things I want to improve on. Again, specificity helps! If your goal is too broad (do a bunch of damage in a team fight), you can't quantify and therefore it's more difficult to improve at it. I would break down those broad goals into smaller ones, like "always maintain full stacks of Hatred on Valla" or "use my Abilities on cooldown as Jaina".

If you really want to get serious about improving, watch your replays after a couple games and keep an open mind. When you see something that goes wrong, don't blame your teammates, but instead ask yourself "was there anything I could have done differently to improve the outcome here, assuming my teammates make the same choices?"

Another common trap that stagnates a player's ability to improve is to claim that your allies are the source of your losses. This can be true to a degree, but you'll notice that some of the best players win in spite of allied mistakes. Truth is, both teams are making mistakes due to this being such a complicated game. Since you can't literally control your teammates actions, focus on what you can control, which are yours.

Never get frustrated! This is a game! While you should play to win, you need to find small moments of victory within every game. Congratulate yourself (and your teammates) on great plays, even the smallest. Positive thinking is contagious, and snowballs into further positive thinking. When people get frustrated or toxic, it's okay, they're people with complex emotions. Don't let it bother you, and keep moving forward with your goals in mind!

TLDR: If you wanna get better at anything, be deliberate. Keep your big goal in mind to motivate you, but set a series of small tangible goals that you can accomplish right now that will keep you on the right path. HAVE FUN IMPROVING, not just "being the best".

It's something we'd like to improve.

No, I never did. I got this from a lot of sports, playing baseball and basketball from a young age competitively my entire life. I learned a ton from very good coaches over the years, and became fascinated with sports psychology.