How do you respond to fear? Are you a deer in the headlights or do you rise to the moment? What scares you? Do you confront or run from the aspects of life that make you most uncomfortable? These questions might seem startlingly personal for an essay about chess, but they are entirely relevant if you want to excel as a performer in any field. In competition and in life, pressure makes the fat boil to the top - I believe that it is important to confront these issues in a healthy introspective manner before things heat up so that fears don't become the silent decision makers in our lives.

	As you progress in your chess growth, you will run into many opponents who prepare specifically to compete against you. They will take observations about your personality and try to shape them into a game plan that will avoid your competitive strengths and expose your weaknesses. If you are a controlling person, they will lean towards positions of overwhelming complexity where you have to be at peace with the unknown and trust your intuition to guide you through labyrinthine complications. If you are exceedingly abstract, your opponent might make the game very concrete by giving you difficult problems to solve. If you are impatient, strong players will lead you towards closed, positional games. Chess players are keen psychologists and they will pick up on the subtlest nuances - and so will you.

	Most players prefer to have the initiative over being attacked. I am no exception. Feeling the wind behind your back is titillating, and can sometimes give you enough momentum to simply bowl the opponent right over. It is also important, on the other hand, to be aware of the inherent danger in being the aggressor. If the position is roughly level and you try to make something out of nothing, you may overextend and weaken the soundness of your position. Also, keeping to the wind analogy, if you are in a dead sprint you will often miss some things that you would see at a jog, and you may get out of control if an extra gust pushes you faster than you are prepared to run. Sometimes the defender can apply this little gust. Defense doesn't always involve stopping the attacker - on the contrary it is often quite convenient to let him run on by and help him along to boot. 

	Even if you prefer to be the aggressor, there will inevitably be moments in which your opponent is the one attacking. This does not necessarily mean that things have turned south - Anatoly Karpov has spent his entire career feeding off the botched attacks of over-zealous opponents - but it does mean that the stakes of every decision are high. In these moments it is important to be aware of the inherent strengths and weaknesses in your opponent's attack. I discussed similar ideas in my annotated game entitled "The Space Left Behind." You may find it useful to review this lesson to get in touch with the rhythm of noticing emptiness on the chess board. Strangely, this concept is key to handling aggression. When an attacker smells blood and is hurtling towards you, there will often be some carelessness left in the wake of his speed - but you must be clear headed enough to spot his vulnerabilities amongst the passions.

	Awareness. Presence. Feeling the flow of the game. All of these descriptions relate to an enhanced state of alertness when everything is on the line. Some chess players panic when in danger. Others simply perk up their ears like a cat tapped into attention. Fear is a natural response to danger and it should not be avoided, but understood. We can learn from those moments in which things are a little out of control - we can embrace chaos as food for growth. Here are some games in which I was under attack and reacted with varying degrees of success.