A friend I played chess with in college got much better over one summer. He spent three months on tactics puzzles on his phone, moved from around 1200 to about 1650 on the site, and by August was beating people he had lost to in May. Then the university tournament started. In the first round he drew a 1400. In the second, he lost to a 1300 in a position he would have won online with time to spare. By the end of the weekend his live rating was close to where it started.
Afterward he told me, "I am not really a 1650 player." That sentence is what I remember. He had raised his online rating, but he did not think of himself as that player at the board. I do not know why he played those games the way he did. I do know that one weekend of results was enough to make him question progress he had worked for all summer.
I have seen versions of that gap in myself. Skill can move faster than my sense of what I can do. A bad result does not prove that self-image is holding me back, but it can show me how quickly I reach for the old explanation.
At work, my standard changed when I joined a team where the least experienced engineer wrote better code than I did. I improved more in six months there than I had in the previous three years of studying. I read fewer books. The people around me changed what a normal Tuesday looked like. Their everyday work was the level I had been trying to reach. After a while, I started measuring my own work against it.
Private practice matters to this too. My chess friend had spent months solving puzzles, and his site rating showed that progress. At the tournament, he had to play a full game over the board. I cannot say a different practice routine would have changed the result. He had not built the same confidence at the board that he had on the site. That is my reading of the gap, not something I can prove from one weekend.
I do not think I can decide to change my self-image directly. Mirror affirmations have never done much for me, and I do not trust anyone who says they have. I can change what I practice and who I learn around. Over time, those give me better evidence for the sentence I use about myself.
See also
- /blog/difficulty-is-the-signal, how a hard practice session can show me what I still need to learn.
- /blog/unconscious-mind-is-what-youre-training, how repeated practice frees attention to read the game.
- /blog/focus-on-winning-not-on-not-losing, how I try to aim at a shot instead of avoiding a mistake.