Lecturing Birds on Flying

Personal news and musings on coaching and performance

My Substack writing has slowed to a crawl for various reasons, and I felt bad about not writing. Then my friend Nate Solon wrote about taking a break, and I felt bad about not writing about not writing ...

I'd slowly drifted out of the chess world and have been more involved in helping out poker players. As the saying goes, "when I tried to get out, they pulled me back in" and I will be helping the English national team again, three years after the 2022 Olympiad, for the European Team Championship in Batumi! I have a great relationship with the players and enjoy the team environment, so I am really looking forward to this.

Thinking is writing, and I use this blog to help me think about complex topics and clarify my own thinking. What does chess performance mean? How to help out a team?

Lecturing birds on flying

This sentence from Nassim Taleb comes from the over-reliance on a limited mathematical model. It embodies the hubris of thinkers and academics who delude themselves in the management of real-world risk. Performance coaching has the same risk. The chess world is full of (chess) coaches that love to take credit for the success of their students "Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan". After all, the coach is never the one having to find critical moves under pressure.

Can anyone teach Zlatan to chest the ball?

If you're not able to coach big players, you're not able to coach anyone. It's important to know you're not gonna teach how to play football. You're not gonna teach Cristiano how to take a FK, Zlatan to hold the ball with his chest or Drogba to attack the near post & score in the air.

Jose Mourinho

In fact, can anyone teach Zlatan? Can another player make him improve his signature move? Can the best biomechanics expert in the world do so?

For Zlatan, it is clear that no one in the world likely has a similar skill, making it likely impossible to improve him from the outside. You don’t see the calculation and evaluation process of the top players, but can the chess coach do? They can work on specific positions, but can they ever improve a highly skilled idiosyncratic non-verbal process?

Now what about “performance coaching”?

Caring is important

Caring is the most important quality in a tennis coach and it’s why many parents who have never played high-level tennis can still coach their children to the top: because they really, really care.

Conor Niland, The Racket

While Conor’s quote doesn’t really apply to chess, it is a reality of the chess professional that it is a very solitary life, and they often very much welcome any support they can have. Caring is step one. To me, anything worth doing is worth doing well and if that means bringing players coffee, then I’m absolutely on board for doing it.

The map and the territory

Nate had this insight a while ago. So many coaches advertise "flexibility in creating a training plan tailored to the student" and yet as we move up in “prestige” on the coaching ladder people look for elite coaches often for the opposite: to get their proven "set programme" as a step for success. This is almost anti-signalling: "my programme is so good that I don't care about tailoring it to your problems, it will all be fixed".
I am convinced that mental coaches require extreme flexibility and the ability to meet people where they are, utilising several toolboxes as needed. And I find it useful to have non-negotiable guiding principles. It was critical for me recently to sit down and make them explicit.

A Framework for Performance: the 3 P’s

Presence

Presence is a non-negotiable. I write about meditation all the time so I will spare you today. Presence is to show up to the world and to yourself wholeheartedly. Is Presence mindfulness? Yes and no. If mindfulness is "me looking at myself doing something" that is not Presence. If you do a tennis serve, you need to do serve, not watch yourself doing the serve. The more you think about serving, the worse your serve will be. If your mindfulness is being fully engaged in something, then that's the way to go. Magnus has said recently that he's never worked with a sports psych. And it totally makes sense! You shouldn't deconstruct a process that doesn't need deconstructing. Only if it is broken, then you deconstruct to put it back together.

Pursuit of Excellence

The “hard yards” is the daily training that is at the very heart of the process. As a child, everything is play. The most challenging work is done playfully, positions are kept in mind at all times… In adulthood, things are more deliberate. How you fuel your motivation, whether through habit formation, peer support, or external constraints like homework, is less important. The question is: can you put in the hours and make it feel like there’s nothing else you’d rather do on earth?

Persistence

Persistence is going along with the ups and downs of life. The skill to manage your emotions during a game. The ability to handle losses and tournament setbacks. This bucket is the whole set of "techniques". If you do Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that’s a Persistence Practice. For some (bad) coaches, mental tools are the entirety of the whole mental coaching. I guess if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The forbidden P: Performance

Performance is something that is not up to you. It really is not; it is a byproduct of doing everything to the best of your abilities. You do everything right and maybe you win or maybe you come up short. Maybe someone was better. But you gave it your all - this is a life well lived. What is truly in your control is Presence, Persistence, and Pursuit of Excellence.

These guiding principles are not checkboxes. At the end of the day, my support can take many forms. One always needs to meet people where they are. Sometimes just listening is a huge part of support (that would be Presence!)

I’m sorry for a post that is more a stream of consciousness than usual. I'm trying to set up innovative methods (by the chess world standards) for England and we'll see after the tournament if that has worked, if people are interested I will write about it. In any case, I promise that you won’t have to wait for months for the next post.

Be well.