A while ago, I listened to Tyler Cowen interview ex-World Chess Champion Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand.
One part of the interview really struck me.
It was all about how Vishy prepared for his World Championship games.
To put it into context, the Chess World Championship is the ultimate prize in chess. Chess players prepare for the World Championships as methodically as an athlete prepares for the Olympics. So they assemble a crack commando support team, play nonstop practice matches, analyse reams of chess variations, try to crawl inside the mind of their opponent, study their opponent’s strengths & weaknesses and use the latest chess engines to help them.
Nothing else matters for months before the World Championship.
All this is background for a quote of Vishy’s from the interview:
“The problem with preparation isn’t how detailed it is. It’s whether you can believe it”
I thought this was intriguing.
Vishy’s saying that the key isn’t the preparation itself, but how trustworthy it is. And if his team are crunching chess variations while hungover, using the chess computer equivalent of an abacus or playing practise matches against a washed up, world-weary Grandmaster has-been, then it doesn’t matter how detailed their preparation is...
There’s no way they can trust it.
As it happens, the question “can I trust this?” is something I’m asking myself more and more.
I’m asking other people more too.
I was sitting in a meeting at work a few months ago when a senior bod mentioned how confident he was that someone in his team would happily take on a certain project if they were asked.
That comment perked me up a bit. It sounded like a guess.
So I asked that senior bod how confident he was in his confidence.
“Very” came the reply.
Now, that reply wasn’t unexpected.
(woe betide anyone in corporate who admits they’re not confident)
The meeting moved on. But the question I would’ve asked next was “how confident are you in your confidence in your confidence”. And while I’m sure the reply would’ve been “very” too, I don’t think it would’ve taken many more layers of similar questions before that colleague would have to admit that no, he wasn’t actually confident in his confidence in his confidence.
Not if he really stopped to consider the question.
You might like to try this too. Just take one of your pet thoughts like “I need to decide”, “this is a problem” or “I know what’s going on here”.
Then ask yourself how confident you are in that thought and keep going down the ladder.
At some point, it becomes obvious that most of what we think we’re certain about is just thinking we’re taking too seriously.
I don’t know if that sounds like good news or not.
But I’d like to suggest that this is really good news.
When we stop being so certain, we stop needing to be right all the time. And once we stop needing to be right, everything gets easier. We become less defensive, new ideas occur to us and we might actually even listen to other people once in a while. Our sticky ways of seeing the world also start to lose their grip.
My coaching helps you question what you're taking too seriously.
If you like the sound of that, you might like this:
https://tomgrundy.coach/subtraction-method-coaching/
To fulfilment,
Tom