You are not your rating

Stop treating yourself only as improvement project

“It is mine, I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious.”

JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Smeagol/Gollum is consumed by the One ring. Yet, it is painfully obvious for the viewer: the ring is the problem! Throw it away! We seem to solve other people’s problems very quickly. “That person should break up, get a haircut, and change jobs”. Simple and drastic solutions present themselves. We do not fully grasp why they are so attached to dead-end jobs and relationships. While people may stay silent on fixing your life problems, they may disagree on how much chess matters. Tell a friend you had an excellent position that you messed up in time trouble, and they nod politely and ask you about a TV series. You just had a great tournament? Fantastic. Please bring the trash outside and empty the dishwasher. The fluctuations of our rating are taking gigantic proportions in our head, and yet the world seems unfazed by our triumphs and disasters.

The ability to temporarily get out of a laser focus on rating and improvement is one of the best things you can do for your well-being. Paradoxically, it is also one of the best things you can do for your chess, replacing the painful with the playful.

The problem with self-improvement

By constantly trying to improve, we emphasise that we are deficient. It’s okay to try to improve and do all the hard work to improve, but it’s a problem only to be doing this. The slope is way too slippery: we go from “I need to work on my chess” to “I need to set a training plan” to “I need to study how efficient training plans are made”. After all, we want to optimise improvement, right? This is like listening to a podcast on optimal vO2 max training, instead of lacing your shoes and doing any kind of running. Steve March, founder of Aletheia Coaching, calls this drive to improvement the “technological attunement”. We see ourselves as technologies to be repaired and improved. Seeing yourself as something incomplete, that constantly requires improvement, is a recipe for long-term burnout.

What is missing right now?

When asking what is missing right now (in this room at this very moment), I am often stunned by people describing:

• a hole in their chest

• a contraction as if a belt were holding their ribcage.

• As if part of their brain was missing

• The feeling of not being ready yet

• A diffuse anxiety and feeling of incompleteness

This is also related to not feeling like we are a real player, but when we have finished this opening course, we are a real player.

This is the “deficiency epidemic.” We have been conditioned to feel separate from the world and incomplete. The narrator part of our psyche has been conditioned for this story. Phones are an ingredient in this story, as they are designed to pull us out of the here and now and create a divide between us and the world. Every time you stare at that black mirror, all that is shown is designed to make you feel more isolated.

Feeling the wholeness right now is not magical, but it will stop the sensation that something is missing. Because right now, prior going to thought to check, nothing is missing.

The sense of a separate self can never be satisfied with any rating gain or chess title. Once that rating is achieved, something else will be missing very soon. And over and over again. We are not technologies but human beings. The purpose of life is to be alive. How do we practically achieve this? It’s pretty simple. We love this wonderful game, and we can tap into its beauty.

Contemplate Beauty

Consider the fantastic Qg6 in Dubov-Karjakin 2020. After fxg6 Rxe6, there is no tactical forced sequence that checkmates black, but a clear positional advantage that Dubov elegantly converted.

I realised in this position that I have this Qg6. I immediately felt that if it doesn’t lose by force, I will definitely play it. You don’t have too many chances to play such moves against strong players. (Daniil Dubov analysing his game for Chess24)

Everyone will have a different opinion of what is beautiful. Maybe you love Tal-like sacrifices and wild king’s Indian. You may love swindles, stubborn defenses, or composed studies and mate puzzles. Whatever it is, seeking the beautiful brings us beyond the strive for improvement. It is a window into something more significant than the self, a deep nourishment. Letting go for a moment of something that we feel we “must do” and looking at something beautiful does wonders. There is even a growing trend for healthcare providers all over the world that prescribe museum visits to patients with significant impact on their mental health and wellbeing.

An integrated chess training approach

Inspired by Reinhard Stelter and Steve March’s approach, I would like to suggest a three-level training approach:

1. First Level is the brass tacks of chess work: puzzles and study solving, game analysis, and overall hard work.

2. Second Level sets the space chess has in your life with great intent. You periodically review what it means to be a player and set your intentions and priorities. You work on your relationship with chess as if it were a dear friend.

3. Third Level explicitly allocates time to aesthetics through studies, a collection of fun games, or a review of a recent spectacular game.

There is a famous Zen parable about carrying a heavy backpack and making it so heavy that people have no choice but to put it down. I won’t go as far here, you can still do squats to strengthen your legs (First level), and you can lighten the backpack by throwing things out of it (Second Level) and finally, learning that you can drop the backpack altogether from time to time (Third Level).

Being able to let go of self improvement from time to time will help your overall relationship with chess. As you train and play more, this will indirectly bring further gains. That’s the ‘paradox of improvement’:

Stop trying to be perfect and let yourself be as you are. Paradoxically, this deep self-acceptance and letting be is the most powerful self-improvement because it puts and end to your divisive, conflictual relationship with yourself. Stephan Bodian

You are not your chess rating. You are not your weightlifting or marathon PR. You just are.