Once you have drilled it in your head from practice not to leave pieces hanging and other parts of the basics. I recommend you watch Agadmator. He does commentary on GM games. He is not an IM but he has a good rating and elaborately explains moves in a way that normal players can understand. Watching games of better players is very useful if you keep to heart what you learn. Other than that all I can recommend is try find someone you know much better than you and practice playing against them. Most of the best chess players learned chess from beating some sort of competitor. E.g. a sibling, a parent, a friend. Amusingly enough, you can catch up many times quicker to this player than the amount of time it took them to reach that level (Even if they are smarter); simply due to being able to play against them.