In my professional career I fell for the same tempting psychological pitfall many times:
Dreaming about a perfect future tournament, instead of improving the current one.
Here is how it happened, and what you can learn from it.
The Trigger
Bad tournaments happen to everyone. What we do while we are there, playing below our expectations, has a huge impact on our chess results. For a long time, I believed I was great at coming back from bad results.
But then occasionally, it felt like I checked out mentally halfway through the tournament. And now I understand why.
I wasn’t recovering from the bad tournament. I was escaping it. Faced with tough results, I started planning for future tournaments. I created to-do lists, made notes in my diary on how to avoid such a bad tournament next time. This work felt super exciting. Instead of living in the frustrating present, I lived in a future where I do everything well and such hardship won’t happen anymore.
It felt like serious work. But it was just a more comfortable way of quitting the games still in front of me. The moment I started planning the next tournament, I stopped fighting for the one I was in.
Why Does This Happen?
The reality is messy, difficult and often not fully in our control. But if you are anything like me, driven, goal-oriented, “an achiever”, you don’t like that fact and tend to work towards gaining more control over the future.
The problem is there is nothing there to control yet. The future tournament doesn’t exist. So we pour our energy into managing a thing that isn’t real, and call it preparation. In that moment of hardship, our brains pick a perfect illusion over the messy present.
It is the same principle as sitting on the couch, lazily sipping a beer and snacking, thinking “tomorrow I’ll start exercising” or “from next week I’ll be in the best shape of my life.”
We get a quick dopamine hit from the perfect illusion, but nothing changes.
The Only Change We Can Make
If I could go back, here is what I’d tell younger Noël:
Change can only happen in the present. So go to sleep early, focus on the right process and give your best in your next game. It is all you can really influence.
He wouldn’t have liked hearing that. But the boring advice is the true one: if we want to actually improve, we have to accept the messy present and work with it. That is the only place change is possible. Not in the castles we build in our head.
Keep improving,
GM Noël
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