The most effective way to make your brain do something difficult is to give it no other option.

The easiest way to stop a bad habit is to make the habit impossible. The easiest way to create a good habit is to make not doing it impossible.

What we need is a forcing function – something that makes us do the hard thing, whether we want to or not.

It's a useful approach to learning, growth, and change: Don't use willpower where a forcing function would do.

I use one of these forcing functions each morning, or at least as many mornings as I can. I climb out of bed, down some water, make a coffee, sit with my notebook, and I follow Julia Cameron's Morning Pages method of journalling.

For the Morning Pages, you have to write three full pages longhand. You don't let your pen stop moving, you just write down whatever comes to mind. And you keep going until you've filled that last page.

You have to get to the end of that third page before you can stop. No excuses.

That seems like a lot of words to write first thing in the morning. And it is – but that's the whole point.

If you stick with the Morning Pages for a while you find a fascinating pattern.

The first page contains all the obvious stuff, whatever first jumped out at you. How you slept, how the coffee tastes, how you think your day will go, how annoying it is to write three pages every morning.

The second page starts to delve into what's really on your mind. You find the odd thing you don't expect. A little anxiety, or a tricky memory.

But it's the third page that matters.

Often the last half of the third page. Sometimes just the last paragraph of the third page.

That's where the insights that can rock your world live.

When you force your brain to spit out words for that long, it runs out of superficial things to write. You need to fill that third page to complete the task, and the deep stuff is all your brain has left to give you by the end. It has no other option.

Those deeper thoughts end up on the page where you can see them, and you can start to do something about them.

Our brains are naturally lazy, and they like to avoid hard work wherever they can. Whether it's confronting deep, uncomfortable thoughts, changing a habit, or mastering opening theory, our brains, like Bartleby the Scrivener, would prefer not to.

So we can create forcing functions, to make sure our brain simply has no other option than to do the work.

Blindfold training is one of those forcing functions. Without your eyes acting as a crutch, your brain is forced to come up with ways to handle all the information in a position or sequence.

That's a huge part of why it works.

There's another forcing function I use regularly with my coaching clients. It targets a critical issue I've seen in players from 600 elo right up to 2200.

Namely, that we often miss critical details about how a move changes the position.

There are some obvious things a move does to a position, some less obvious things, and some downright hidden things. And it's extremely difficult to notice everything.

We always miss details. If we're under pressure, we miss a lot of details.

And, inevitably, it's one of those details we miss that swoops up and gobbles us whole.

Recognizing all the things that a move does is hard, and our brain balks at it. But we can force it to do it in our training.

That's the goal of the Five Sentences Exercise.

And I recommend you give it a try.

Review a game, or your opening theory, or any sequence of moves.

After every single move, and I mean every single move, write five full sentences about what's changed in the position because of that move.

Don't go on to the next move until you've finished your fifth sentence.

Five sentences is a lot to write about a single move. But that's the whole point!

The first one or two sentences will be all the obvious stuff. This attacks this, this defends this.

The third sentence, you'll need to look harder. See the lines that have opened, the diagonals, semi-open files. Start to notice the second order effects.

But, like with that last page of the Morning Pages, the fourth and fifth sentences hold all the magic.

When you think you've written down everything you can, but you have to keep going anyway – that's when you see the dormant threat of the bishop's placement. Or the tactical pattern that doesn't work yet, but could be critical soon. Or that hidden defensive resource that could destroy your whole attack.

A coaching student of mine, rated around 1900, reported that this exercise helped him finally understand games by Mikhail Tal.

Previously, Tal games had always felt like perfectly normal, back-and-forth games until suddenly, out of nowhere, Tal does something insane and wins.

But the Five Sentences exercise changed that for him. He said it forces him to recognize all the effects of a move, including the little details that Tal himself must have recognized to create his ideas and plans.

Now he can see that Tal didn't pull the magic out of nowhere. Instead, Tal recognized tiny weaknesses in his opponents' moves, applied pressure until those weaknesses cracked a little, and then pounced when the time was right.

Still magical, sure – it is Tal after all – but no longer inexplicable.

Even if you do this to games or theory you know well, I promise you'll notice things you've never considered before.

The exercise gets easier the more you do it. You start to learn all the different sorts of effects that can make a difference. Your brain gets used to spotting them.

You start to see how often some tiny, easily-missed detail becomes the core of the winning idea later in the game.

The exercise trains your attention. And it pushes past your brain's natural tendency to dive into concrete lines and plans before taking in everything a move does.

This will start to flow into your own games as well. Brains are great like that.

Full disclosure: It's objectively a pain in the butt (not to mention the wrist) to write five sentences about every move of a game.

But I guarantee you'll be wowed by some of the things you notice when you commit to it.

And there are few better feelings in the world than being wowed by something your own brain just did.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden