Afraid to lose, afraid to win, afraid to play!

In the latest edition (2014-2) of New In Chess, Levon Aronian gave a very interesting interview and said something that struck me as fairly obvious and yet it took me a while, in my early Chess days, to realize how powerful this is:

We are living in a society that is fixated on numbers, rankings, things like this. It's difficult to forget this, even though that's what we should be trying to do. Sometimes you think, "oh, I don't want to lose this rating, I want to gain more". As soon as you allow yourself to forget it, that's when you start playing well.

Being not too focused on your Elo rating will definitively, in the medium-long run, help you improving your overall play!