How Focus Can Transform Your Chess and life === [00:00:00] Hey everyone, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer and today I want to talk about focus, because focus is so important for your chess improvement, but it's also gotten increasingly rare and unique for somebody in our society to be able to focus properly, well, and for an extended period of time. So today I want to talk about why focus is so important and the three main pillars of focus you need to be able to do your chest training better, and then obviously you should get also more improvement out of it. And most importantly, when you play your games, you should be able to focus because otherwise all the play training you do [00:01:00] doesn't matter at all. So now let's start with why focus is so unique in today's society. So the world moves faster than ever. And for years, we've been told to do more, to work harder and to push through. I've talked about this grind set in another episode. I think it was three weeks ago on why CEOs have a hard time improving their chess. And the main idea simply is that society has pushed us to value the quantity of things we do, so more, more, more, but the quality has dropped considerably. And with some things like, for example, answering to emails, that might work, we can just push through it, we can do more of it, we can do it a little bit mindlessly, and once they are done, we're finished with that task. But anything that needs a qualitative outcome, just like studying chess, you actually need to [00:02:00] remember what you did, right? It doesn't work this way. And so because focus has become so rare, it has been. Basically become a super power, and I know that firsthand because I've suffered from a traumatic brain injury for the better part of seven years, and this traumatic brain injury, the biggest problem that it gave me is a lack of focus. I've suffered from headaches. I've suffered from increased tensions. I've suffered from just not being able to focus properly. And I realized the huge difference between Noel without focus and my best self with great focus. And everything in my life changes with good focus. My personal relationships deepen, my work improves both in the quality and the quantity. And every coaching session I do is just so much more impactful: [00:03:00] if I manage to focus properly and to bring across the points in a crisp and well explained way. And the same goes for that podcast, right? If I record this podcast without proper focus, probably you guys won't take away as much, but if I try to be very focused and the quality is higher, then you, the listener, are taking more away from it. So this podcast alone won't fix your focus. If you struggle to focus, you will need quite some time, but I just want to give you the three main pillars and some ideas on how you can work on your focus so your chess training is becoming better. So first, let's try to define focus. The scientist Andrew Uberman, (by the way, he has a huge podcast, if you haven't listened to it, I really recommend it) he defines focus as the ability to concentrate our attention on the particular task at [00:04:00] hand. So again, focus is according to Andrew Uberman, the ability to concentrate our attention on the particular task at hand. So, for chess improvers, focus means concentrating on the puzzle or game at hand, not letting your mind wander to your grocery list, work worries, or tomorrow's to dos. To achieve this, you need the three main pillars of focus. Number one, a healthy mind. Number two, the ability to do one thing at a time. And number three, a system that eliminates tractions. Let's get into number one: a healthy mind. Now, I'm not talking about having the mind of a monk with perfect concentrations for 24 hours in the day. That is basically impossible in today's world and I don't want you to even [00:05:00] try to get there. But what I mean by a healthy mind is a mind that is a little bit taken care of and that has actually the chance to focus well. If you're drastically underslept, if you eat only crap, if you never move your body and just sit at a desk all day long, you don't give your mind the chance to even focus. So if you want to take care of your mind, have a decently healthy mind, I recommend three main things. Sleep seven to nine hours a night, preferably at consistent times. I generally go to bed between 22.30 and 23.00 and I wake up between 7.00 and 8.00 in the morning. Nutrition. Eat non processed foods that energize you, not foods that makes you crash. So if you're eating a lunch [00:06:00] and then you realize for the next three hours you're in a complete low and your mind just doesn't want to focus on the task at hand, probably you need to rethink how you eat your lunch. And then number three is movement. Especially in a day where most of us or many of us work at a computer just staring at this screen all day long, we need to get movement in our days. And I try to go for three things. to exercise, so twice a week I want to go lifting weights in the gym, even though I don't like it, but it's just helping me get this energy and feel better. Yes, it helps my body, but it also helps my mind. If you neglect this focus, probably you'll struggle with any activity that requires deep focus. And that will show in your chess game and chess study. So before you're trying some very deep [00:07:00] methods of, Oh, you should use the woodpecker method in chess, or you should play this opening, or you should play this end game this way, just think about how you can make your mind focus appropriately. If you don't have a good focus, nothing else really matters. And if you think you don't have time for these essentials, ask yourself this: what could possibly be more important than my well being and ability to focus? In my opinion, nearly nothing. Let's get to point number two, which is do one thing at a time and this is super rare. As a matter of fact, you probably listen to this podcast while doing something else. And that's totally okay, because listening to this podcast is something that doesn't require your full attention. But chess does. When you play a game of chess, if you don't have your full attention on chess, you will most [00:08:00] likely miss some obvious stuff, and blunder again, and lose a game. Also, if you study chess, but you're not fully there, you're not fully focusing, you might find yourself looking at the chess board for 60 minutes, but then the next day, if you ask yourself, "What did I actually learn yesterday?", you can't answer that question. So it's super important, when you do chess, to focus on it exclusively and chess is so beautiful because it can draw you into the world of the 64 squares and you can forget about all the other worries. So chess actually becomes more beautiful if you really manage to dive into the world and to just push out everything else and be able to focus on this one thing at a time. But getting there can be hard, especially if you're used to constant distraction, right? You might be a digital worker and, on your PC, you all the time, you have to pop [00:09:00] up. So for your emails, you have this thing, that thing you always do three, four things at a time. Maybe you even work with a podcast on, with an audio book on with music on whatever. So your brain is really not used anymore to do just one thing exclusively. You need to re-learn that. And here are three simple ways I recommend for teaching your brain to focus on one thing at a time. Number one is meditation. I know meditation is a very loaded word. Many people think it's super esoteric, but it's really just a technique. To try to focus on one thing at a time. I started meditating using an app like Headspace and I used to do two to 20 minutes, but at the beginning I would say do two to five minutes, just very, very short, and just try to follow the instructions. The very important thing when you [00:10:00] do meditation is that obviously your mind will wander and that's okay. The point of meditation is to bring your mind back when you realize that it wandered and then try to focus on this one thing again. You can then use that same skill during chess training or while playing a game. It's not expected that at all points you will focus on chess, but when you lose that focus, you will realize it more often and be able to bring it back and say, Oh, okay, I'm playing a game of chess. Let me focus. What is my opponent's idea? Let me play a good move. Let me really think and not just play with my hand, and then things will get better. Over time, if you do that you will realize that your concentration is getting better thanks to the meditation. Point number two or idea number two to improve focusing on one thing at a time is taking long walks or going for long walks without a [00:11:00] phone. I really love that because it combines two things at once. You really have that ability to let your mind think about things and you don't have that constant distraction from a phone, from a podcast, from an audio book, from whatever you might put on your ears. And you also get in the movement, which we talked about for that is very important for the healthy mind. So just taking long walks without a phone can be an amazing way to improve your focus and your health. And then number three would be train chess with intention. That's so important. Make your chess training your number one activity where you actually focus on this one thing at a time. Ultimately your goal will be when you play a game, right? That's the competition moment, then we want to be focused, but we can't expect to always be in super laser focus in competition when we don't train it. [00:12:00] So really use every training session as an opportunity to practice focus. Again, similarly with meditation, don't get upset with yourself if you lose the focus, but just try to bring back your focus and say, okay, let's try this again. My mind just wants to think chess right now. Restart. To be able to do that. Start with short, intense sessions. I highly recommend going for 15, 20 minutes fully engaged training sessions, then taking a break and then doing that again, rather than expecting yourself to focus for one and a half hours at a time, and then you lose focus after five to ten minutes and the rest of the time is basically nothing. wasted So, keep the quantity, the amount of time you try to spend on chess, keep that low initially. Really focus on your quality, quality of the focus, quality of the attention that you bring to only chess. And then slowly throughout the weeks, [00:13:00] increase the amount of time you spend on chess. Because then you will have taught that focus muscle to actually work longer and you will be able to focus on chess. Now we talked about how to get a healthy mind and point number two was how to do one thing at a time. And now the third thing I think might be even the most important one which is to eliminate distractions, right? Our world is full of distractions. If you want to study chess at your computer, for example, you might get distracted by an email pop up. You might get distracted by even sometimes a challenge from the chess server can distract you. There are so many things on your computer that try to get your attention. All the social media, all the All these quick dopamine hits of distractions that it's increasingly difficult to focus on one thing and stay focused on this one thing because of [00:14:00] these distractions. And I really don't recommend relying on willpower alone in this fight against distractions. Social media companies are engineered or they hire people that they make their apps so that relying on willpower alone to fight distractions is a losing game. Social media companies are spending billions to hijack our attention. They know where we are weak, they know our psychology, and then they try to use that to their advantage to gain our attention for their product, which makes them more money. But for us, that's not a good trade off, because we will just mostly waste time on things that we don't really want to do. After scrolling for an hour we're thinking why did I actually do that? Why didn't I just train properly? So we don't want to rely on willpower [00:15:00] because we just have no chance. We have to accept that. So instead we need to set up systems that remove distractions entirely. If your phone is a big distraction, put it on airplane mode when you train chess or place it in another room. That's what I did all the time back in the days when I still trained my own chess. If you have social media urges, delete the apps or block them during study. time. There is, for example, there is an application called freedom, which you can use to block certain websites or certain apps at certain times. That's very, very useful for me. And when I kept on logging into X, formerly Twitter, And I always got frustrated with all the content on there and I just wasted time. At some point, I just decided to delete my whole profile. I don't have any profile anymore. I can't log in anymore. I can't get back my [00:16:00] followers. Just, I just completely deleted it. And that's my drastic way of saying, Hey, I want to eliminate this distraction from my life. And it's amazing for me. If you get interruptions from family or people that you're living with, make sure to communicate clearly and set your own boundaries for how long you need to be there undistracted. And this is something that many people tell me, also my students. Hey, I can't do that I can't expect my wife to just not talk to me for two three hours a day when I want to train chess and this is a fair point. But then again, you don't have to study two to three hours with full focus. Probably at the moment you're spending two to three hours on chess, but you're distracted all the time. So 20 minutes. Just ask your partner for 20 minutes of uninterrupted chess study time. See how it feels, see how you improve your game, and then maybe next [00:17:00] week you can ask for 30 minutes, right? So, don't overshoot it, again, start small, and then slowly, slowly, improve. And then for everyone studying on their PC or phone, just make sure that all notifications are completely disabled. This is the most important thing because One single pop up might just make your mind drift somewhere, you might get a work email and, oh shit, I still need to think about this and your focus is destroyed and gone. So make sure that you have absolutely no pop ups, no notification, nothing that could bring, take you out of your focus moment if you actually manage to get in there. And you need to prepare for that. So I just. I don't have any notifications. I don't have my email on my phone, for example. Just a few simple steps to make sure that nothing is distracting you when [00:18:00] you're in the focus zone for your chess training. And in Next Level Training, my course on studying chess the right way, I teach the concept of creating your chess zone, which is a dedicated, space free zone. from distractions. So basically the chess zone takes everything you've heard up to now and makes a place where you can really use your mind to focus on this one thing. Your mind knows that when you sit down at this chair, when you sit down at this desk, when you use this user profile on your computer, you only study chess and you focus on one thing only. So these are the three things that are super important to win back your focus and you will realize that this focus that you gain is not only useful for your chest training but you can use it in every area of your life. So to make a short small recap you need to have a healthy mind which is not that [00:19:00] hard really just stick to the simple basics sleep nutrition movement then point number two is Re learn to do one thing at a time thanks to meditation, long walks, and training chess with intention. And then point number three is eliminate all distractions, set up systems that make it nearly impossible to get distracted while you are studying chess or playing chess games. And maybe to conclude, I just want to stress the factor again, how important this really is. You might have a good training plan. You might have the right resources to study chess. You might even train pretty well. But if you can't focus when you train or when you play your games, nothing else matters. I really see that with so many students, they tend to Put in so much time, so much energy. They [00:20:00] spend so much money on chess, but then on the important day, when it counts, they just can't find their focus and they blunder pieces and they get so frustrated. So really make this a priority. Focus is mandatory if you want to make progress on something meaningful and difficult, mindless grinding will not work. Maybe it works for a week, maybe you win a few hundred points in your first few months playing chess. But at some point, mindless grinding is going to stop working, you're getting frustrated, and what you need is proper focus. Okay guys, that's it from me for this one. If you want to check out my courses, make sure to click the links below in the description. And if you like this pod cast, consider leaving a recension, that helps me out a ton, and sharing it with a chess friend [00:21:00] that you think this episode could be useful for. See you next week.