Choose Your Own Adventure: What Do Your Experiences Mean to You?

“But the rook only moves forward, backwards, and sideways.”

One of my bright, new chess students says aloud as she tries to solve a checkmate in one move puzzle. She’s narrowed the solution down to a rook move, but from there, she’s stumped. 

“The rook only moves on straight lines,” she repeats the obstacle. 

But it’s not the rook’s movement itself that’s making the solution hard to find. It’s the way she’s perceiving the rook’s movement: focused on it as a limitation, instead of as an ability. 

In fact, I’ve noticed that one of the most common reasons students of all levels overlook answers to chess puzzles is when they focus on what can’t be done.

It’s all in the way you look at it. The rook is one of the most powerful pieces in chess. The answer to the puzzle was moving the rook along a straight line to capture a pawn and checkmate the opposing king. 

I’ve found this to be true in life as well: It’s easy to overlook solutions when you are focused on negatives and limitations. There is always more than one way to look at anything. You can focus on the negatives―what’s challenging and what’s lacking―or you can focus on the positives―what you can be grateful for and the unexpected opportunities.

There have been a couple major challenges in my life lately, but when I look at them more closely, I can be grateful for the opportunities they offer: for more self-awareness, better emotional health, and stronger communication skills. These are all qualities that are greatly important to me. Thus, these challenges offer me the opportunity to become even more of the person I set out to be. 

Viewing these challenges from this perspective, seeing everything that I can gain from these experiences, has made it easier to let go of the negatives and brought me a great deal of relief. 

Life is always a mix of good, bad, and neutral things. The key to feeling good about mine has always been seeing all the good within the mess. 

The study and practice of two skills have helped me get better at this:

• Perception: (a Stoic discipline) focused on seeing the world more clearly by realizing what’s within your control and what isn’t.

• Cognitive Flexibility: which includes the ability to adapt to new ways of seeing something

Cognitive flexibility allows us to see situations from more than one perspective, which is far closer to reality than getting caught in one, limited point of view.

How can you use these skills in real life? 

Personal Example

When I was 19-years-old, I was going through my first serious breakup. In anger one day, my ex-girlfriend told me that she never loved me. At the time, hearing this really hurt me. For days, I felt like there was a dark cloud hanging over me, no matter where I went or what I did. 

One morning, I woke up with a short story idea in mind that reflected on the words of my ex. I rushed to my laptop, and all the heavy words came pouring out of me. When I finished writing the story, the dark cloud was gone. What was left in its place was a story that gave meaning to my experience and a fulfilling feeling at having created it. 

Though, initially the experience seemed like only a negative, in the long-term, I gained a lot more than I lost: the understanding of how effective writing can be for self-expression and unloading my soul. 

Art is one way of many to turn negative experiences into something meaningful and beneficial.

Now here’s a totally different yet related way to apply these ideas: creative problem-solving.

Visual Brain Teaser Example

How can you remove six matches to make ten?

I’m sure you realized that there are 15 total matches, so removing 6 matches to make 10 seems like a mathematical impossibility.

One could easily get stuck on the limitation that 15 – 6 always equals 9, no matter where the matches are positioned.

Or you can apply perception and cognitive flexibility on what the question is asking for:

Try it out in your own life. Start small. Take a small negative in your life and see if you can flip it into an unexpected positive. See what opportunities and solutions come to mind when you do. 

Yes, the rook can move along straight lines―Look at how many squares on the board it can reach!