95 - Challenge Your Assumptions
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I wanna talk about our unchallenged assumptions.

So a month ago, I wrote an article, I made a podcast episode about my Q2 plan and how planning is frustrating because I realized, oh, I have so little time when I actually account for everything I'm doing.

And writing that article and making the podcast episode about it made me reflect, and also actually some replies that I got from you guys. And I realized that I had just this one unchallenged assumption for so long, and the solution was right in front of my eyes, but I couldn't see [00:01:00] it.

So in my five years as a chess coach, blogger, course creator, I always gave it for granted that this was a purely me thing.

I'm doing this alone. I'm self-employed, this is me. And at most, I would get maybe some help from freelancers or my wife, Alessia, and that's it.

And the reason behind that was that for a long time I saw myself as a lonely fighter, kind of, with my own ideas, not really the standard way, and someone who doesn't work well with others. At least my very few experiences of that haven't been going extremely well. Basically was never employed. I once had for I think two months a 20% employment at the Swiss Chess Federation, and I couldn't handle the nonsense there after a very short time and quit before the six-month contract was over. [00:02:00] So yeah, that wasn't great experience. And additionally, I had this history with a traumatic brain injury, so I just assumed that hiring someone would be a stress for me. It would not go well, and that's why I thought, "Well, I'll just do this on my own."

Until I made that article and someone also said, "Hey, why are you not hiring someone for your admin stuff? What's the reason there? You could have more time for your projects if you just had someone take care of the admin and the business side." And so that question popped up in my mind for the first time.

Not what if I hire someone, but what if I hire someone that I believe is great for my business?

And when I allowed myself to ask this question, like my full body was just saying, "Yes, yes, yes, that sounds amazing." If I have someone that knows my values, is great at the things that I don't really enjoy doing, so the business [00:03:00] side of things, accounting, or admin, all of these things, I could actually pour all my energy into helping you guys improve.

I could spend way more time reading, learning, creating, helping. That's what I love, and that's what I believe I'm also best at.

So basically my assumptions went this way because I see myself as different from mainstream. I could never find someone that would work well with me, and that's why I will always work on my own. And then when this shifted, it was like, "Okay, but let's think for a moment. Who would be the right person? And what if I would find the right person?"

I was like, "Oh, that would be insanely cool. That would be amazing. I would love that." And so the question suddenly became very different. It just became, "How can I find someone that is great to help me on my mission?"

And it's a totally different question with a very [00:04:00] simple but completely different answer. And simple doesn't always mean easy, but it's quite clear what the answer is.

And it was one of these moments that made me realize just how much of our identity is full of such unchallenged assumptions. We basically have shortcuts of like, okay, this is how I will live my life, and those might have been correct a few years ago, right? Maybe four years ago when I also couldn't have paid anyone a salary, so why should I have taken on someone for my business? But things have changed, and often the assumptions stay the same.

And when they get outdated, they don't serve us anymore and we stand in our own way. And that's why it's so beneficial to challenge these assumptions from time to time, and it's so beneficial to have people around me or to have readers who are challenging these assumptions. And I'm like, "Oh yeah, that, that's actually an assumption that is outdated."

And actually, I [00:05:00] have a example here from chess as well. Sometimes you have these positions where you don't allow yourself to, for example, look at a move that is different from moving your queen. Your queen is attacked, right? And then if a coach asks you, "Well, what if you left this queen hanging and searched for an attacking move instead?"

Once you change what is possible, what is allowed, right? You look at a move, you see, oh, there's check, check, checkmate. But in your brain, what happened is you had an assumption, "I need to move my queen." And so we have such a limited scope of things that we see that unless we can somehow work on challenging these assumptions and actually understanding that they are even there, we can't find the right solution.

And so today I just wanna leave you with a simple question: What assumption do you have that might be outdated and you need to challenge [00:06:00] today?

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