Two Mental Skills That Help You Improve Your Tactical Execution
Most people focus so much on strategy and strategic thinking that tactics and tactical thinking is often an afterthought. While strategic thinking is important for success, tactical thinking is just as important. Unquestionably, a perfect strategy will fail if the person executing it has bad tactics.
Unlike strategic skills which depend heavily on research, tactical skills depend heavily on instincts. Furthermore, tactics are often reactions rather than planned actions. As a result, bad tactics beget more bad tactics unless you change how you think. This requires mental skills training. Specifically, there are two mental skills in particular that one must develop to improve how they execute tactics.
1) Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is a fancy word that describes your ability to switch between thinking about multiple ideas as you figure out how to approach a new environment. In the context of tactics, a person who has cognitive flexibility can use different courses of action from previous experiences to come up with a novel course of action in a new experience.
In order to do this, experience is a must. You just can’t have cognitive flexibility unless you have previous experience from different environments to draw upon. For example, a multi-sport youth athlete will have more cognitive flexibility than a youth athlete who only plays one sport. Or an entrepreneur who’s worked in many industries will have more cognitive flexibility than an entrepreneur who’s worked in only one industry their whole life.
Therefore, the easiest way to increase your cognitive flexibility is to constantly challenge yourself to try new things, experience new environments, and talk with people from different backgrounds. Then, each time you gain a new perspective or experience, try to apply that thought process to an unrelated context.
In addition, the next time you are solving a problem, force yourself to use your imagination. Imagine yourself living in another country or living 100 years in the past or future. Then think how you would solve the problem in that fictional reality. Record your thinking process and periodically review it and reflect upon it.
2) Inhibitory Control
Inhibitory control is a fancy word that describes one’s ability to keep themselves from choosing their default behavior when a better behavior is available. In the context of tactics, a person who has good inhibitory control will choose a better, non-obvious course of action even though they are accustomed to doing it another obvious, less effective way.
There is always a temptation to select the obvious choice. Especially when you have done something a certain way multiple times in the past. Therefore, learning how to exhibit inhibitory control is a skill not a talent. In other words, no one is born with a talent that makes them automatically good at inhibitory control. It’s something you must develop.
Chess is a great game for developing this skill because most people learn how to play chess by learning the obvious standard moves vs. the non-obvious winning moves. For example:
- Protecting the queen. vs. sacrificing the queen (or other minor pieces)
- Putting your opponent in check vs. ignoring the check to prevent or win with a multi-step checkmate
- Memorizing openings vs. identifying opening traps / blunders
- Reacting to pieces moving forward vs. pieces moving other directions
The only way to get better at chess is to use inhibitory control when your instincts tempt you to take the obvious standard move. This takes a lot of practice, and research suggest this practice will strengthen your ability to exhibit inhibitory control beyond chess.