Gaining Confidence

As I continue studying tactics pretty hard and steadily climbing the ladder, I'm learning two key things I need to work on at this intermediate level: 1) build a full opening repertoire to achieve positions I understand and 2) to play with confidence. The second point is the topic of this post.

I think an overlooked part of getting past the early-intermediate stage is the moment you start gaining confidence--or at least playing moves with confidence that they're the right moves. This includes confidence in your tactical awareness, confidence that you're making the right call that there is no tactic available so it's correct to play a positional move, confidence when your opponent plays an unexpected move, confidence to acknowledge you've messed up but it's still fix-able. You can fake it of course, but you're still not a grandmaster so you're missing things and your confidence is often misplaced, but at some point you might have to start faking it and trusting your training. I believe I'm at the stage where I need to be trusting my abilities more than I do and playing with that trust.

It can be helpful to train your instincts to say "I didn't expect my opponent to play that move, so it must be garbage, why is it bad?" instead of scared-y cat instincts. Likewise, if your first instincts say "this looks tactically bad for white" then go down that path. Don't shut ideas down in your head without a good reason.

You've practiced thousands of tactics, you know positional principles. You've presumably done the work, so honor that work and start playing with confidence that you're seeing things as they are. If you almost see a tactic in your game but you don't think it quite works, you have to learn to trust that instinct and play a solid move instead.

You train and study for a reason: to apply those things you've learned in games. When you do so, and the moves work out and they're the correct moves, it is positive reinforcement. When they are bad moves, you know to re-assess why you thought it was the right idea. To make these moves, you need to display the trust in your evaluations of the moves so that analyzing them afterwards will be the same as assessing if your training is being applied properly during game-situations. 

Have trust and confidence that you're getting better and that you're seeing better moves, then play those moves.