A Tale Of Two Mentors
Is it better to have one trainer, or several trainers helping you on your journey?
My own experience suggests that it's better to have one mentor that you rely on for your journey - unless all the mentors are working together and perfectly complementing one another.
Let me share a common experience from back when I was coaching students one-on-one (which I don't do anymore).
Most of the time, students I started working with had been coached before - not just in their school or club, but also privately.
What I found is that a lot of these students had picked up some unsupportive habits, that were holding back their improvement. That is not to say this was necessarily the old coach's fault - often I noticed these habits were the result of reading some book, watching some videos, or listening to poor advice from friends.
However, a lot of my initial work in coaching my student was to help them 'unlearn' the things that were holding them back and costing them many games, without them realizing it. For the most part, I was successful, as shown by the fact that, at that time, most of my students were gaining over 100 rating points each year.
It would be easy to celebrate the successes, but an elite coach is always learning and always trying to figure out how to improve their work, and figure out why some students are not achieving results.
When I couldn't figure it out, it would drive me crazy - literally.
Over time, however, I understood the main distinction in the manner of learning between those students who successfully improved with me, and those that didn't.
And the main thing I noticed is - the ones who weren't improving much, or at all, were the ones who were learning from other coaches at the same time.
The thinking that some people have is that different coaches have different strengths and weaknesses, and therefore, it seems 'logical' to find different coaches to help the student improve faster.
However, what happens in at least 99% of cases is that the student gets more confused, because in the best-case scenario, one coach explains an idea one way, and the other coach explains the same idea a different way.
In the worst-case (which is more common), the two coaches contradict one another (at least, in the eyes of the student) and in such cases, the more forceful coach (who pushes harder to get 'his way') will be the one the student tends to follow.
The problem with this is, one of the most common weaknesses of a coach (and I would argue, of humans in general) is the use of absolute words like 'always' (to show a principle), 'never', 'must', 'should', and phrases like 'have to', 'need to'.
The rules of chess may be absolute, but life is very far from it - if you cannot be absolutely certain of your current existence, how can you be 100% certain that to take is always a mistake? (One of my students never went above 1900, partly due to a failure to overcome this mental block).
I had almost forgotten this lesson, because I had internalized it for nearly a decade already, but a recent experience of my own, as a student, reminded me of this.
Recently, I had enjoyed some success working with my mentor, and the obvious thing would be 'this is working, let's keep following this'.
However, we know that people are never truly satisfied - as long as they achieve the 'dream', they quickly get hungry again and start pushing for the next level, much like in a video game.
So, I started looking for someone new to learn from, to complement the great stuff I was already learning and build my skillset. In fact, this approach of working hard on my own weaknesses helped me to get results from the work with my current mentor.
I worked hard on fixing my current struggles myself, rather than relying purely on the coach to give me all the answers. Of course, live any great student (and all great coaches must be, by definition, great students), I also asked questions whenever I could, to get the direction I needed 
In any case, I started learning from some training material by another mentor, and it actually pushed me and confronted me a bit, by making me much more aware of my weaknesses, and what was directly holding me back from achieving anywhere near my potential.
And yet, even though the training was very complementary to my other training, my results were not as good in that week, because I was chasing several things, rather than focusing on nailing one (as I'd done last week).
My own conclusion, many years ago, is that to be successful with having several coaches, they need to work together, as part of your team. That means that they are very clear on one's another roles and collaborate and share openly with one another, so that the coaches are on the same page.
Incidentally, this is where I think most group coaching programs (in general, not just in chess) fall apart in terms of effectiveness - the focus is on having as many 'big names' as possible or to 'leverage' the expertise of different people in different areas. Leveraging is a great idea, by the way, but not when it's done without considering how this integrates together for the student.
The key to making this work is ensuring that there are no misunderstandings between the different approaches of each person, given that there is naturally significant interconnectedness between the different themes. It's also important to have a strong support/communication system for the students, to ensure that any misunderstandings can be quickly addressed.
To express this graphically - let's imagine that our Venn diagram below is doubled - one representing the student learning from the mentors, and one representing the mentors effectively working together.
Both factors need to be at play - if the student is learning from 3 mentors, but these mentors are not working together harmoniously, the student will be confused and also spreading themselves too thin in their approach.
However, if the mentors are working together well, but the student is disengaged or not following through on the commitments their mentors assign to them - then the results will also be disappointing.
In fact, there are even better systems/methods for learning than what I've described above, and if you have followed my content for long enough, you may have already figured out the next logical improvement.
See you next time!
Your Chess Trainer,
