697: How to Keep Improving, with Maurice Ashley

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
There was a time you could get a degree or certification, and you’d be set on your learning for a while. Those days are long gone. With change happening at the speed of thought, we have to keep improving. How to do it is this episode. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 697. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:37]:
Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Virtually, everyone I work with and support has the goal to improve, to get better as a leader, to get better as a parent, to get better as a human being, and to learn. Learning is at the heart of so much of what we’re all trying to do. Today, someone who has made a career out of getting better, improving, and has so much to teach us on that skill. I’m so pleased to welcome Maurice Ashley. He is a chess grand master, an ESPN commentator, a 3 time national champion coach, and an author.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:16]:
In 1999, here in the title of chess grand master, making him the first black grand master in the game’s history. And in 2016, he was inducted into the US Chess Hall of Fame. He’s the author of Move by Move: Life Lessons On and Off the Chessboard. Maurice, what a joy to have you on. Thanks for being here.

Maurice Ashley [00:01:36]:
Thank you so much for having me. A pleasure indeed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:39]:
You found a book when you were 14 years old in the school library about chess. What is it that grabbed your attention about the game?

Maurice Ashley [00:01:49]:
Well, books are surrounding me now here in my library because I’ve always been in love with the learning process and how you can learn through books. Nowadays, everyone’s learning on screens. Me too. But books just have that special magic, and that book had the magic in it. I really wanted to learn chess because I wanted to beat my friend, Plotercolas, who was trash talking me in high school. But then I saw these amazing strategies, tactics, ideas, the history of the game, the great players, the grandmasters, and it just mystified me. It just captured my teenage mind, and I thought I wanna be like these people. And it was a love affair ever since.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:34]:
Reading your book changed my mind on a bunch of things and some of the myths that I had about chess. And one of the myths that I’ve had, and I realized reading the book that a lot of other people have too, is that we think about folks who have the skill set you do grandmasters. And the assumption a lot of us make is that folks like you have the capability to see 5, 10, 15, 20 moves ahead and can play out all the options and see into the future. And it turns out that that’s not really the case, is it?

Maurice Ashley [00:03:09]:
Well, we actually can see that far ahead, but only in certain limited situations. It is not the greatest skill. As you mentioned, a lot of people always come and say, I can’t play chess. I can’t look ahead like people do. No, you’re not gonna be good at this. Never been good at this. Well, the reality is we don’t waste our time looking that many moves ahead in the vast majority of positions. Most of the time, it’s about situational awareness, which I believe is probably the best skill you can have in life.

Maurice Ashley [00:03:42]:
Like, just absolutely know what to do right now to be aware of the situation, the problems, the issues, the threats, potential dangers at this exact moment and solve that and then go on and solve the next one. And that is what we actually are training for as chess players, to be able to assess the situation in front of us, not using the looking ahead, those kind of considerations about what may happen, future thinking, everything, because the game is so complex. It’s not tic tac toe. It’s so complex that you cannot solve for all the possibilities and anticipate everything your opponent might throw at you. But to be able to look at the situation and see concrete elements that tell you, okay, I’m going to have to avoid this direction and that direction. And I should only look in this limited subset of moves that the board is telling me is the right direction to go in. And that simplifies the thinking process and the decision making process, and therefore makes it much easier and unnecessary to have to look many moves ahead on every move.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:54]:
You write, “a chess player resembles a great jazz improviser who doesn’t necessarily think about every single note in each moment, but almost instinctively knows which ones will produce beautiful harmonious music.” I think about that analogy you draw and how much I think a lot of us can relate to that and have that sense. And yet, how do we actually get better? How do we get better at improvising? Because that is something that I think a lot of us, we don’t necessarily see a clear path on how to do that. As you’ve gotten better at this, what’s worked for you?

Maurice Ashley [00:05:28]:
You You know, it’s pretty stunning, actually. And as you were saying those words, I was thinking, who who are you quoting? I realize you’re quoting me.

Maurice Ashley [00:05:38]:
But the thing is that a grand master is in fact an advanced beginner. When I got to the grandmaster title, I didn’t realize how much more I didn’t know. There is really a vast ocean of knowledge when it comes to chess. And it’s almost like I was starting over to get that knowledge and people are shocked by that, but it is so absolutely true. And part of the way you you get to that kind of level of improvisation you’re talking about is first you have to recognize that all of us, no matter how good you get, you’re really not that good. I mean, it might look like these people are doing extraordinary things in whatever fields they’re doing. And it’s true. Extraordinary for us as humans.

Maurice Ashley [00:06:25]:
But the engines, the computers have really humbled us in chess. They have shown us that there’s so much more to learn. There’s so much better you can get. There’s so much more you can do that you still have that much more to actually study, look at, and break down even in the simplest places. You would think there’s some end games, little positions with just a few pieces on the board that all grandmasters would know cold. And I look back at some stuff that I know and realize, wow. There’s actually much more rich material here. So I always go back to the basics when I talk about becoming an advanced beginner.

Maurice Ashley [00:07:04]:
The mastery of the basics, when you talk about the great legendary players like a Kobe Bryant, you know, sitting in the gym for hours just on a pull up jump shot. Just that. Let me do that and do that again and do that again and do that again. And you start to see the hidden truths, not just in the repetition, but in the form, in the way the ball goes in the basket, the flight of the ball. All those things you start to see differently. And so I tell people it’s very important to go back to the basics. Whenever you wanna improve, go revisit the basics. It is incredible how much is there, how much juice is in those basics.

Maurice Ashley [00:07:45]:
And when you have truly mastered them, which you never truly mastered them, when you really start to get deeper insights, you’ll be able to play with them so much more and improvise just using the foundation in order to build on.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:02]:
That message came out loud and clear for me reading through your book that elite performers are always looking for ways to cultivate a beginner’s mindset. And on its face, I think a lot of times we think the opposite. Like, we think like, okay, if someone’s really good at something or getting to the advanced level that they would spend more time, wanna spend more energy on the advanced things, the things that are, on the edges. And have you found something that’s been helpful to you to find the discipline to be able to go back to the beginning fairly regularly?

Maurice Ashley [00:08:44]:
That’s a good question. I think because I’m so in love with what I do, because I’m so passionate, I’m playing this game now for over 40 years. And even the littlest things fascinate me. And I don’t think, for me anyway, that it requires any discipline. Because there is something beautiful in hidden simplicity. There’s something elegant when it just flows and it builds on top of itself. And when you see it, when you get to a high enough level, it’s as though you’ve been just given new eyes. To be able to look at the simplest material, fresh material, and say, wow.

Maurice Ashley [00:09:26]:
How is this underlying simplicity so beautiful? And I think that every every discipline, science, for example, which I’m truly fascinated by this the the scientific process and and discovery. But scientists will talk to you that if you can’t explain it simply I believe it was Richard Feynman or maybe it was Einstein who said, if you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t really understand it. And that’s the the search for unifying theory is all based on the search for simplicity. Now, by the way, simplicity is not easy. I mean, it’s supposed to something might be simple underlying, as we call it simple, doesn’t mean that it’s easy to arrive at. To take something truly complex, and this is something I perpetually do when I’m speaking to my students or or giving talks. To to to take something complex and explain it in a simple way is truly enormously difficult to do. And so to always search for the keys to the lock, to be able to unlock the mindset that says search for the truth in the simplicity of the subject.

Maurice Ashley [00:10:39]:
That could keep you up at night. That could have you spending years. I mean, Einstein spent a lifetime trying to unify the theories around his laws of gravitation and quantum mechanics, which he just simply rejected. And because it just couldn’t figure out how to make this all really, really simple. And so, again, I don’t think you need discipline to do this. I think you just need to understand that that’s the truth. It’s all it all comes down to simplicity, no matter how complex, it all comes back to that. And if you keep searching for that, you will, in my opinion, always be motivated.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:18]:
Speaking of simple but not easy, before you became a grand master, you got some advice after a difficult defeat from a mentor who said, in order to become a grand master, you must first be a grand master. Tell me about what that meant to you at the time.

Maurice Ashley [00:11:37]:
It was truly life changing. A lot of times, you’re chasing a goal. What I was chasing was the goal of the grand master title. I’ve been dreaming about it since those days when Clotaire was beating me back in Brooklyn, and I opened that that book that really entranced me and as it introduced me to this magical world. But when you’re chasing the Grandmaster title, there are specific requirements that you have to fulfill, and those requirements are called norms. And it’s really just how you perform in tournaments, the number of people you have to beat, the number of points you have to accrue. So that is a goal people set. They put it like, that’s the goal.

Maurice Ashley [00:12:12]:
I’ve gotta get that number. And when you become focused only on the goal, you start or some people do it and they often start doing the math. Right? I gotta do this. I gotta do this. You start penny pinching for points. And that attitude is destructive because it’s not about getting the points. It’s about being that good. Right? You need to be that good.

Maurice Ashley [00:12:35]:
You don’t need to win this game. You need to be so good that when you sit down, you win the game. You’re that good. Get yourself to a certain level of ability, a certain state of mind, a certain level of confidence, a certain kind of work ethic you have, surround yourself with excellence, be what you wish to become. And when you get to that, when you sit at the board, you’ll just make those moves. And that’s what hit me when the grand master Shabalov was the one who said that to me, hit me when he said that I realized that I was so focused on the goal. I had to get to these points that I had lost this idea. I didn’t even really understand the idea of being the goal, of being that grand master that I was trying to become.

Maurice Ashley [00:13:24]:
And that changed how I approach things. And it made me understand the kind of self discipline, self control, the kind of confidence, and the like that I needed to have. And it worked for me. And shortly after, I got the grand master title.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:39]:
One of the things you point out is that the best players spend time studying the end game. Tell me about that.

Maurice Ashley [00:13:47]:
Oh, man. The end game. The end game is just so beautiful. And, again, it’s all about simplicity. Right? Starting with simplicity. Jose Raul Capablanca from the great world champion from Cuba would say, if you wanna get great at chess, start with the end game. A lot of people wanna start with the opening. 32 pieces in pawns, highly complex state with 64 squares.

Maurice Ashley [00:14:08]:
You’re trying to move around and there’s gonna be a lot of chaos on the board. It’s hard to understand that advanced state, And yet people study the openings over and over so they don’t fall for tricks and traps and the like. But you learn about the internal properties of the pieces and how they interact in pure form when you study the end game first. And chess is a game where pieces leave the board and never come back. You trade pieces off. I take your bishop. You take mine. Those bishops are gone.

Maurice Ashley [00:14:36]:
They’re never coming back. So it’s always striving towards an end game. It’s driving to, again, towards simplicity. It’s driving to these kind of settings. By the way, again, simplicity is not easy, but it’s driving to these kinds of settings that you wanna be able to anticipate and therefore make sure you master. So I was actually giving a lesson to one of my students, and she was trying an idea out. I already knew what the endgame looked like. So when she was trying it, I’m thinking I was moves be moves ahead of her.

Maurice Ashley [00:15:03]:
We were moves behind in the position. But I already knew how it would play out. And it’s not because I calculated it. It’s because I knew that we were gonna inevitably get to this endgame. So I’m just sitting there and at some point it dawned on her when we finally arrived. She just went, Oh, shoot. And I laughed because I already had the oh shoot moment many moves before.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:29]:
Yeah.

Maurice Ashley [00:15:30]:
Because I had anticipated this end game. And that’s what it really is, is knowing how things are going to play out. And that’s what the end game gives you when you study it. You already know how it’s gonna play out even without seeing concrete moves you just already know because you’ve studied those future setups. And inevitably, it will reduce itself to simplicity. So we study the end game like a religion. I mean, we that’s our, bedrock for understanding more complex situations and why it is that a grand master will be able to beat you so easily. They’re not trying to beat you quickly.

Maurice Ashley [00:16:06]:
I’m not trying to beat you quickly. So, oh, you could probably beat me in 3 or 4 moves. Maybe if you’re dumb, but I’m not trying to. I just wanna know that I’m gonna win, and that’s because I know how the end game is gonna play out.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:19]:
You point out in the book several times that, chess is not a perfect analogy for life, nor is it a perfect analogy for leadership, but boy, there are some interesting parallels. And I think about what you just said, thinking about the vision that a leader should be casting for an organization and where you’re going and what that end game looks like. And, it is so easy to get caught up in the moves of the day and to miss the end game and the consciousness of the the thinking it through. And like you said, not easy, but the importance of simplicity of, like, having an eye to that in the context of whatever’s happening in this particular move at this point of the game.

Maurice Ashley [00:16:59]:
Really well said. I couldn’t say it better. In fact, that was extremely well said. And I like that word vision because you can get caught up in the minutiae. Often that happens and is often required, but I see a lot of leaders engaging in just putting out brush fires. Just constantly brush fire and the next one and the next one. And you really have to be about systems, about vision, like systems thinking. That’s more what a chess player wants, a whole system that’s just gonna work.

Maurice Ashley [00:17:31]:
And of course, there are gonna be individual challenges as you go from day to day. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re playing chess. We’re trying to solve for this situation finally get to that end game. But the eye is always on the vision for that future state. And if somebody comes to you and says, well, you know, I have this idea about da da da da da. You say, well, how does that fit our vision? How does that get us closer to the final target? Because this could be a major distraction. But if it does get us closer to the vision, I’m ready to listen. I’m ready to hear it.

Maurice Ashley [00:18:05]:
And it’s there that the leader has to really dissect and understand the differences between what sounds like a good idea and what is a good idea that fits your overall vision for your company. Because if you are gonna change, then you’re essentially changing your vision, not just your direction, your tactics, but your strategy itself. And that’s important to know the difference between the strategy and the tactics because a lot of people get tactical and remain tactical doing doing the how, the the how, the how, the how. Just tactical, tactical, tactical instead of understanding the why. And it’s when you really define that why do the tactics fitting that strategy really become powerful and effective.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:46]:
Yeah. And as I think about the tactical piece and the tendency sometimes to just zero in on that, one of the things you warn about is the most vulnerable time for a chess player is when they have a big lead. What is it about that that makes players so vulnerable?

Maurice Ashley [00:19:04]:
Humans are lazy. We we wanna put our foot up on the sofa and grab a brewski, relax, kick the remote on, the TV, and they’re like, yep. We could just chill. If we could do that, that’s what we’re going to do. We want to get into a relaxed state and you see so often a team in sports will be up 20 points, 30 points, and they’ll relax. Meantime, the other team is desperate. They’re hungry. They want to come back.

Maurice Ashley [00:19:29]:
They don’t want to lose. And then desperate. They’re hungry. They wanna come back. They don’t wanna lose. And then the momentum shifts. And when that happens, the team that had that advantage and now is complacent, finds it incredibly difficult to get back into that mindset. That mindset that made them take that lead in the 1st place, which was their own sense of urgency and desperation to get a big lead, to overwhelm the opposition.

Maurice Ashley [00:19:56]:
When you relax, it’s hard to get it back. And so it so often happens. Let me tell you, you stand outside a tournament hall. How many times a chess player will come out? You’ll get a laugh when they go, I was winning. Who’s winning? Welcome to the club. Because I heard about a 100 people come out saying the same thing. It’s so easy to blow an advantage. We have to always be alert that good times don’t necessarily last.

Maurice Ashley [00:20:27]:
And that’s not being paranoid. That’s just being real. And so you wanna make sure you are very focused at the moment when things are going really well, that you’re always focused on keeping it going in the same direction. And what do you need to do to keep that hunger, to keep that passion? You know, when you retire, you can relax, but until then, there’s always competition out there trying to take what you built. And so you have to always be focused on keeping the energy moving forward. I know it’s, it’s harsh out there in the competitive world, but that’s just the way it is. And so that’s always a danger to look for whatever situation you’re in.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. And you have a couple of invitations that you make for us on how to do this a bit better. And one of them is that word you said a moment ago, focus, Figuring out in advance where you need to stay hyper focused. Tell me about what you mean.

Maurice Ashley [00:21:27]:
Well, if you wait until the moment comes to train yourself or tell yourself what to do, then it’s already too late. Because you haven’t prepared yourself. And, you know, as the famous sage said, failure to prepare is preparing to fail. You need to be ready for the critical moments. And that’s one thing that chess players really pay attention to, the critical moments. There are a lot of decisions that are very easy and you can just make an automatic pilot. No problem. But they’re going to come a few times in a game when you won’t know exactly what to do.

Maurice Ashley [00:22:06]:
And you have to be ready with your state of mind ready. Not just your skill set, but your state of mind for those difficult moments. And that requires anticipation. That even requires self talk. It may require actual training itself. Where are the sticking points? And when those sticking points arise, what am I going to do? Because I don’t wanna waste too much time because the clock is ticking. I don’t want to become frustrated because I knew this was gonna happen. So why am I frustrated? I knew there’s gonna come a challenging moment that I didn’t have an easy solution for.

Maurice Ashley [00:22:40]:
So I don’t wanna get desperate. That’s for sure. Because then I’m just gonna make a quick decision and lose. So I want to know, I want to be ready, anticipate. There are going to be difficult moments where I will need to dig deep, keep my equanimity, and go about the business rolling up my sleeves and solving the problem in front of me. And while everyone else might have their hair on fire, I’m the cool one. There’s nothing that’s gonna faze me, and I’m gonna get this job done. And that takes training in advance.

Maurice Ashley [00:23:15]:
I mean, a lot of times people just have that personality and you might pick them to be Navy SEALs or or leaders of companies. But for everybody else, we need to make sure that everyone is trained to do that. Everyone on our staff needs to be trained to do that. Because if they’re falling apart around us, now we’ve gotta not only manage ourselves, we gotta manage people going crazy because something bad happened with, frankly, something bad is going to happen. It’s just the nature of the universe. So that is the kind of thing I mean when I when I talk about preparing to be hyper focused, preparing for those critical moments that will occur, planning it in advance, contingency plans, basically, but also having it in your spirit, making sure that you have it in your being, that you’ll be ready for whatever comes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:04]:
You do, of course, talk about losing in the book because that’s the reality of life in playing chess. Right? And, you say “poor performers avoid spending time with their mistakes, often trying to forget they ever happened.” The corollary, of course, is the best are spending time with their mistakes. How do you spend time with your mistakes?

Maurice Ashley [00:24:28]:
Thankfully, I learned this game when I was a teenager, and it taught me that your mistakes are your greatest teachers. The mistakes you make indicate where it is that you lack a certain amount of understanding, a certain amount of knowledge, the kind of strategic insights you need to develop, the tactical patterns you need to learn. I would get beat by my friends back in Brooklyn, great chess players who you’d battle for hours. I’d fight them tooth and nail and then suddenly, boom, a knockout punch that I didn’t see coming. And then I’d think, okay. I’m not letting that happen again because I learned what I did wrong, but I couldn’t possibly know everything I didn’t know if I wasn’t making the mistakes to show that I didn’t know them. And that was just our fact. And chess players, what we do after every game is we do what’s called a post mortem, where we look and we analyze exactly what happened and we look for not just mistakes in the games we lost, but mistakes even in the games we won because we wanna perform better the next time.

Maurice Ashley [00:25:36]:
It’s that debrief that allows you to improve and to always pay attention to it. And that doesn’t mean that if someone makes a mistake, you wanna harp on it. Nope. If one of your workers, one of your employees makes a mistake, you’re not trying to make them feel bad for the mistake, but you do wanna have them have that attitude. Like, it’s okay. Mistakes are tolerated in this company. Certain mistakes, okay, maybe not, but certain types of other mistakes happen, process mistakes happen. It’s okay.

Maurice Ashley [00:26:08]:
Let’s take a look at it and see how we can improve because that mistake may be part of a larger pattern and we don’t wanna see it happen again, maybe even in a critical moment. So we have to embrace mistakes and create an environment where mistakes are tolerated to a point, of course, and that they’re analyzed, broken down, and then the process is improved on. And that’s what we do as chess players. And it’s it’s been and not only as a chess player, I do that in my life. And I found it to be one of the most powerful tools to improve and eventually effectuate change.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:44]:
And you, quote Anne Lamont, who said, “you have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.” And the process of making those mistakes illuminates the path of where to go, but it also shows you where you don’t go. But to, your point earlier, simple but not easy. Right? Like, you just kinda have to go through that and learn from that and see that and experience that in order to know what’s the direction you do go.

Maurice Ashley [00:27:11]:
You know, one of the biggest problems we have in society right now is the amplification of mistakes to a point where no one wants to make them. And if they make them, they don’t wanna admit them. Social media has created such a toxic environment, sadly, that any mistake is highlighted and a light shone on them, the brightest light imaginable, And then, amplified, not just in social media, but in general media itself, we become so intolerant of mistakes and, and always seeking to find a one up people for their mistakes that we don’t allow for people to make them and for these mistakes to breathe. Right? For for it to just happen in a voice to say, you know, it’s okay. It happens. This kind of stuff happens to everyone. I don’t care who they are.

Maurice Ashley [00:28:03]:
And I find that to be a sad direction that the world has taken because any master or grand master knows that it’s your mistakes that teach you so much. We learn by trial and error. Human beings, unfortunately, learn best through trial and error. We really wanna learn best through other people’s mistakes, but it’s not the best way. It is one way, but it is not the best way. The best way is you screwing up and learning from it. Even when we were kids and we walked and we fell, we got right back up. You tripped got up again.

Maurice Ashley [00:28:35]:
That is how you finally learn how to be effective. And so it’s really important that we understand that and become far more tolerant. And not just tolerant, but even welcoming. I remember a story Neil deGrasse Tyson tells of him accidentally spilling milk as a child. He spilled milk onto the floor. And instead of his mother castigating him for it, she went down to the floor, brought him down to the level of the floor where the milk was. And she said, what shape does the milk make? And I mean, that is a story for life right there. She turned what could be a moment of embarrassment, of recrimination into a teachable moment.

Maurice Ashley [00:29:15]:
And not only a teachable moment, but a creative moment. When your mistakes become food for inventive thought. Now that’s when you’re really at the highest level using mistakes in this way. So, yes, we do embrace mistakes as chess players. I mean, a lot of times you just think I was so stupid, but when you get past that. You realize that it could benefit you so much.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:42]:
Well and the mistake I made picking up the book is thinking it was first and for foremost gonna be a book about chess. And, of course, the context is chess, but it’s really a book about life, learning, growth, leadership, how to get better at things. And so my invitation is I hope that folks will grab the book and learn from your analogies and your stories, especially those of us who have played jazz and aspire to get better what a great analogy for life and I think one of the reasons like so many organizations now are bringing you in to speak and to inspire through the lens of such a powerful analogy because there is so much that relates to life and speaking of life you’re a chess grand master your brother is a 3 time kickboxing champion your sister has won 6 world titles in boxing You’re all hall of fame inductees in your fields. Amazing. And you talk about your mom in the book and the sacrifices she made. What did she teach you all about how to keep improving?

Maurice Ashley [00:30:49]:
I appreciate you bringing that up because no one succeeds in isolation. And, yes, it wasn’t just my mother, but also my grandmother who sacrificed so much of their time. My mother left Jamaica where I was born and where we’re all from to come to the United States, spent 10 years away from her children. Now that I when I finally had children, I understood what that sacrifice really was. And my grandmother was 64 when she agreed with my mother to take care of her 3 grandchildren after she herself had already raised 7 children, and she spent the next 10 years of her life preparing us for the path that my mother was going to take us on. So it was a monumental sacrifice on the part of those 2 women, and I learned tremendous lessons about the effort you need, the dedication you need, the sacrifice that you sometimes, have to endure. If you ever wanna be, great. If you ever wanna be successful.

Maurice Ashley [00:31:48]:
And I definitely, and we definitely, did not wanna let those 2 women down. I should also include my dad in this because at first, he didn’t have his life together. He had certain issues that he had to overcome. And when he did, he straightened himself out and then he reentered our lives in a beautiful way. And so there was the person again lifting themselves up after making a mistake and changing mistakes and changing their direction. So I definitely learned many life lessons from my parents, my siblings, my friends as well, and from chess. And when you talk about the book not being a chess book, it is definitely something I’ve used to improve my life, the life lessons on and off the chessboard, as I title it. And life has also informed my chess.

Maurice Ashley [00:32:36]:
So it’s a wonderfully virtuous circle, and it continues to teach me new things even today, 44 years after I picked up the game.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:46]:
Maurice Ashley is the author of Move by Move, Life Lessons on and off the chessboard. Maurice, thank you so much for your work.

Maurice Ashley [00:32:54]:
Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:02]:
If this conversation with Maurice was helpful, 3 related episodes I’d recommend to you. One of them is episode 294, how to actually move numbers. Chris McChesney, his work at Franklin Covey, and our focus on the four disciplines of execution was the focus of that conversation. We talked about a distinction in that conversation with Chris between leading indicators and lagging indicators, of course, the results, the things that we most often manage or lead to. The leading indicators are the ones that oftentimes we don’t put as much attention on. You heard echoes of that in the conversation today with Maurice of, yes, of course, we have to be conscious of the outcomes and super important that we put in the right leading indicators, the work, the moves that are going to get us there. Episode 294. Some great distinctions there, especially if you find that you need to move some numbers right now.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:57]:
It is a great framework for that. I’d also recommend episode 660, how to prevent a team from repeating mistakes. Cujo Teschner was my guest on that episode. Former US Air Force pilot used to head up the debriefing program for the US Air Force. And in that conversation, we talked about the importance of a debrief. One of the things Maurice talks about in his book is the importance of reflecting on moves that did not work. The game that did not go the way you wanted to and learning from that in order to do a better job in the future. Cujo and I talked in episode 660 about the practice of organizations and leaders doing that well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:36]:
The military does that very successfully. Many other organizations and leaders do not. We’ve started doing some of that in the Coaching for Leaders Academy internally, and it has made a big difference on my own learning and the learning of others. Episode 660 for a bit more inspiration there. And then finally, I’d recommend episode 663, how to grow from your heirs. Amy Edmonson was my guest. Of course, her groundbreaking work on psychological safety, many echoes of that in the conversation on episode 663 on when you make mistakes, what do you do? How do you grow from that? A great compliment to the message today from Maurice. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:17]:
I’m inviting you to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com. It’s gonna give you access to the entire library of episodes that I’ve aired since 2011, all database by topic. So if you were looking for something right now that’ll be helpful to you, perhaps on your own personal productivity or handling difficult conversations or facilitating meetings well, all of those are topics inside of the free membership and inside the episode library. Just go there to find what’s relevant to you right now. And along with your free membership, you’ll get my weekly leadership guide. An email once a week to you with details of the episode. The episodes I have recommended to compliment it are always listed in that weekly guide. And, also, some of the relevant notes, reading, other podcast episodes, articles I found over the last week that I think you should know about and be reminding you of things you’ve heard from past conversations as well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:15]:
All of that’s in the weekly leadership guide each week. It’s part of your free membership for that and all the other benefits of free membership. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership, and you will have access to everything in just a few moments. And if you already are a free member, I hope you’ll consider Coaching for Leaders Plus. One of the benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus is access to our monthly recordings of our expert chats. Every single month, I sit down along with a few of our members with a guest who has been on the podcast recently, and our most recent guest was Ruth Gotian. Ruth has done incredible work on helping us to support and understand high achievers in our organizations and also mentoring. She was on the podcast a few months ago talking about how to help us be better mentors.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:03]:
And, I and a few of our members sat down with her recently and had that same conversation. But instead of me asking the questions, our members are asking the questions directly. That recording of that expert chat is one of the many benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus, plus a new recording every single month. For details, go over to coachingforleaders.plus for all the benefits there. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to have Steven Rokelberg on the show. We are gonna be talking about how to structure 1 on 1 meetings, something that almost all of us do, and yet virtually none of us have gotten any training on how to conduct a 1 on 1.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:49]:
Steven and I are gonna be looking at his detailed research on exactly how to put that structure in place and what we can do to benefit our teams. Join me for that conversation with him, and I’ll see you back on Monday.