Life coaching through Chess

I think Chess is a little model of life. Of course, originally it was analog of feudal war where the main goal was to reach a king. But its still the model of our world with a lot of possibilities, plans, reactions. But the realization of these plans often depends on the person, its ability to deal with changes and to bring the ideas to its conclusion. Chess and psychology go along together in a very good way.

What I want to underline here is that our play, the style of our game reverberates the main traits of our character, our peculiarities, flaws of character. You can understand the person better with the help of chess this person is playing.

Everything I speak here you can see in classical chess and in its variants. I think even better it can be seen in Chess960, where there are less explored paths and much more creativity possible, where person should think himself from the first moves. And especially good you can see it by playing with long time controls or long tournaments.

Moreover you can see not only character, but typical flaws of thinking. Have you noticed that people often overlook habitual, clearly defined for them things? Every person has typical mistakes. For example, some people don’t see short tactics, others always overlook some positional variations. Others often mistaken in evaulating positions.

In chess you can often see typical emotional reactions of the player, or even emotional schemes – how he/she reacts to his own emotions and deal with them. How quickly the person overcomes emotions, either from loosing or from winning. You can see patience or impatience, the persons ability to endure things and overcome difficulties.

It appears, that many typical reactions in the stressful life situations you can see in chess. We can consider chess here as a premodelled stressful situation, because of the changing position on the board, tournament situation, time restriction, and of course, because of the partner.

It is possible to say if the person is tired, or if the player think about some other things by his play. When the head is not empty from life, and if the person is not concentrating good enough on the game. And even his attitude to the opponent. Or partner in the process of creation? Or brutal enemy?

Even more, in chess you can see persons’ relation to life overall, is it a good place with a lot of resources or hostile environment where you should protect your borders.

The most interesting part here is working on your character and some of it traits through chess. If you do everything in the last moment and you are always in zeitnot – that’s two sides of one coin. We work on the zeitnot problem and in life that’s last-minute habit will evaporate or become much softer. The same goes to many other things.

Another big aspect of what I want to speak about is the correspondence of the style of play to the character. If the person is relatively slow phlegmatic , but plays in very fast , sharps, keen style, because he was learned to play like this from his/her childhood. I doubt that this person will be successful and even if he/she will, chances are low that this person will be satisfied and happy with this.

The chess is a very good way to work with ourself. Its like a training field for life. And everything that we learn, all new traits ans positiv experience here can be transferred to life. And on the contrary, many ideas of life can be transferred to the board.