Reply to NJ 4

Read here, here,here and here.

" as well as making some 'enemies' or shud i say some ppl who r not so fond bout u..anywayz..about joining the dots, can u be more specific..like joining the dots btwn my life, thinking and my chess?? Or is more towards emotions and controlling them??"

Dear NJ

Today I am going to talk about emotions. This is very important. Even if you dont understand anything else except this you will be able to move much further. So please pay attention and try to follow this. Read this first. This is a very important dot to join.

But again, before I move on, let me back track a little. Back in the days when I used to lead team negotiations, I always asked for a postmortem after. I was particularly interested in why some of the team members could not follow a strategy. During the postmortems I realised some of them were reading different signals from the rest. For instance, they couldnt detect shifts in emotions during the meetings; when key members on the other team would turn hostile on certain points etc. At that time I managed the situation by dropping those team members from future negotiations.

When I became a Counsellor, I began to see that many of the inmates just could not join the dots. They were "disconnected" from their emotions. They were unable to learn and I saw that the reason was in some emotional trauma sustained in the past. Certain thoughts, conclusions were intertwined with very strong emotions and could not be accessed to resolve. And the problem was compounded over time before those conclusions became the basis of new conclusions and in finality the thinking became very very convoluted.

A few years later I did my inner child work. Read here. In retrospect this work was more for me. To clear my own mind.

After joining the chess community, I began to notice this. I saw another of our strongest National Junior being verbally insulted by one of our chess icons. Being called stupid in public and with his parent supporting the abuse. I saw trainers teaching players and could not see that the students were not following their lessons or worse, they cannot see the traumas they were inflicting on their players. I saw adults making fun of young kids when they lost and the adult looking very smug.

Now it is a simple conclusion to just say they are "bad" people. But I think the reasons lie much deeper than that. Take the parent for instance. I am sure that parent loved the boy. I am sure now that the negotiations were not deliberately sabotaged; in first example.

What I now see are emotionally damaged people. Their emotions are inappropriate to the situation. The only thing is that they cannot see that. They cannot access the tools to help them read situations. They do not have the full range of emotions.

For healthy learning, you need both/and. Mind, spirit and emotion. If you suppress your emotions because you believe that is the way to go or if you have suffered a trauma the net result is you have stiffled your learning. Ergo, you will continue to make the same mistakes again and again.

Can you see that? They cannot see where their mistakes are because they cannot go there. They cannot examine their fears because of past traumas etc. I cannot be more specific in your case as I do not know your personal circumstance. What I suggest is that you do your own introspection. See if your emotions are in tandem with situations.

A good way to start is to examine the thinking in the comment boxes of this blog. This blog is merely offering another view. And yet it invokes alot of anger. Try to see why.

Remember I said in earlier postings that before we can deal with our fears, we have to raise it from the subconscious to the conscious? Do you see that many who comment cannot read my other postings? Why? Do they not remind you of stuck tapes? The learning have stopped. This can happen to you too if you are not careful. So use your full range of emotions. There is a reason for all of them. Another clue. If you have an angry disposition, you will only see wrong things around you to continue to energise your anger. If you have humour, you'll see much that is funny.

Let me give you a heads up on the relevance of this to chess. I know you have good tools to improve your opening lines. Now consider this. Mark didnt have that. All we had for the longest of time was psychological profiling. But in order to use that you need to have a healthy range of emotions or the tool cannot be used. You will misread many situations. Now imagine that you now have both tools. Would that increase your chance for better results?

White knuckling only works to a certain level of pressure. Understanding emotions allow you to take on more pressure. Try this. If you succeed you will find that you will also be able to learn faster and faster. This understanding is very very important in the development of chess players. It is just too easy to damage the kids because of the intensity of competition. I hope I have helped.