Your pawn is reaching the last square of your opponent’s area – what will you exchange it for through pawn promotion? Will you go for the most powerful piece of the game straight away or would you consider the current political landscape of the board to ascertain which piece would achieve your most important strategic goal?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famous Hungarian professor who spent years on researching his innovative principle of Flow, said that if we would like to create something new which has never existed before, learning the particular field in a thorough way has to be our paramount principle. And then, when the basic lessons have been properly learnt, our own visions and initiatives have to be added to the picture creating a more productive outcome.

In chess, it is quite obvious that we need to be aware of the basic rules, however, the art of chess is indeed to smuggle creativity into the strict aspect of this game in order to reach our ultimate goal of checkmating our opponent. This requires certain behavioural attitudes to practice in order to create a strategic plan and follow it through effectively despite of all challenges encountered in the path of execution:

Anticipation of the next steps of our opponent is a vital aspect in chess and can be applied in our goal-setting process: there will always be external factors that will function as hindrance of the successful implementation of a plan therefore anticipating risks and issues on our path is of paramount importance. Thinking ahead several steps and devising mitigating actions early on to neutralise the effect of any potential impediment enables a more successful delivery of our strategic initiative.

Being agile on the black & white board is also imperative to ensure that we think outside the box in the event of our strategy is being threatened with the opponent’s own strategic initiatives. In our daily life, this is not an act of random improvisation that would diverge us from our original path but a calculated flexibility we can smuggle into our goals once we have taken into account the effect of our ever-changing environmental landscape. This calculated flexibility may still take us once step backwards in our strategy, however, the consequences were not as severe in comparison with an arbitrary move made without any forth-thought.

Resilience is closely linked to agility in the sense of exercising the muscles of bouncing back from an unforeseen barrier with practising the before-mentioned calculated flexibility to achieve the least harmful effect on our strategic endeavours. This allows a quicker recovery from the unexpected diverge and enables a more efficient way to get back to our structured path to reach our overarching goal.

Overall, being an active participant on the chessboard and in our daily practices is the only way to triumph over the ever-evolving challenges we are facing in this wonderful life.