Zoe Cunningham from Softwire Technology explains why we can learn a lot from playing board games!
“I play a lot of backgammon, and backgammon is quite like life. It’s more like life than something like chess is, because it involves dice rolls, so there’s luck. So just because you’re the best player doesn’t mean that you will win.
In 2010, I played in the Ladies’ World Championship in Monte Carlo and I managed to get to the final. I was playing against a lady who wasn’t as good a player as me, and we were playing to seven points and she managed to get 6-0 up.
I was quite unhappy, but I kind of went through a process of telling myself to sit tight and focus on playing well and not start counting to the end of the game before it happened. And the lady I was playing started to go to pieces under the pressure of winning. So it cuts both ways.
If you’re about to win, you can suddenly start feeling like maybe everything is slipping from your grasp and you can’t cope with it anymore. As I saw this, I realised that if I could just sit this out, I had a chance of winning, and that was all that was in my control.
I can’t control the dice, I can’t control luck, but if I can keep control of my emotions and sit it out, then I have a chance, even if it’s a small chance.
And amazingly, I went on from 6-0 down to win the Ladies’ World Championship in 2010!”
This is an abridged transcript of the video lesson – watch the video for the full story!
