Mini Ep. 48: Kaizen

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models Premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models Premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And this week, I want to talk about the concept of Kaizen. If you're not familiar with the term, Kaizen is a Japanese word that means continuous improvement. And it's a really important philosophy to adapt on any journey where you want to be getting better over time. I first encountered Kaizen in the world of software development. It's a term that you'll hear in that field quite often. And the reason why is because modern software development practices encourage you to focus less on these big, massive wins and rather on small incremental improvements over time. That's the spirit of continuous improvement or Kaizen. You are trying to make sure that every day you get just a little bit better somehow. And so rather than looking at things as these big massive projects, you're looking at things as small incremental steps of improvement. The way this manifests in Jiu-Jitsu is that in the training room, we should be trying to make sure that we're always taking a step forward every day if possible. And that also means that we're looking at long-term improvement, not just wins and losses. Wins and losses are inevitable. Sometimes you're going to win, sometimes you're going to lose. And if the only thing that you care about is wins and losses, then first of all, you run the risk of really emotionally destroying yourself when you lose. You also run the risk of emotionally puffing yourself up when you win. And additionally, you get distracted from the real goal, which is to get better. Kaizen is all about getting better. So the way that I recommend you do this is break down your Jiu-Jitsu training into small chunks and do little feedback loops on each of them to try to make sure that every time you do something for your Jiu-Jitsu, you got a way of not just doing it, but also assess how it went and how to do better. So I would suggest, look at every Jiu-Jitsu class that you go to as part of a feedback loop. And every class you go to, you go through that loop again. In terms of what that loop should look like, first of all, before you go to class, think a little bit about what your goals are going to be for that class. And these goals should not be things like, I want to tap out five people. These goals should be related to the skills that you want to develop. And to the best extent possible, you want to make sure that they are process-based goals, not outcome-based goals. So in other words, you don't want a goal like, I want to tap out five people with arm bars today. What you do want is a goal that is more like, I want to spend maximum time getting into arm bar related positions today and working from there. And whenever I'm in an arm bar adjacent position, I'll try the arm bar. This is a really powerful tactic for just kind of figuring out what the focus is going to be for each class. Then of course, you go to class, but the other part of the Kaizen loop is that after the class, you want to reflect on what you did during the class, how it went, and what you could do better for next time. And then when you come into the next class, you use those reflections to figure out what the goals for that class should be. So if my goal for the day was to spend maximum time attempting arm bars whenever I got into an arm bar adjacent position, then afterwards, I might reflect on what kind of challenges I had. Maybe I found that it was just too hard to pull the person's elbow free enough to get the arm bar. Maybe that was the obstacle that I encountered. And if that's the case, I can brainstorm on how to fix that obstacle. And maybe that involves focusing on attacking my opponent's base and structure so that I can pull their elbow a little bit freer from their body before I attempt the arm bar. And through that insight, it might occur to me that maybe by getting moving first and foremost before trying to do an arm bar, or maybe by trying to make my opponent move, I can open up that elbow and my attempt will be more successful. So that's a reflection that for my next class, I can use to improve how I train that arm bar. If you do this every day, you go through this assessment loop, odds are, you're going to get better a lot faster than if you just show up at the gym on autopilot and don't think about what the objectives are for your training. Also, as we've talked about in the past, reflection is an important way to improve recall ability in Jiu-Jitsu or really any skill. So when you reflect on how the class went afterwards, it's a form of effortful retrieval. It helps strengthen the neural pathways in your brain so that you can recall that information more effectively later. In Jiu-Jitsu, what that ultimately means is that you can execute techniques quicker and more seamlessly without hesitation. So by implementing this Kaizen loop, you get more value out of every class, plus you also improve your ability to recall and execute those techniques in the future. I really like this concept not just for Jiu-Jitsu. Kaizen is a powerful concept for anything in life where you want to constantly be getting better, whether it is Jiu-Jitsu, something to do with business, or even something to do with your social relationships. I hope you like this chat. If you did, you can get more of it at BJJmentalmodels.com. All of the episodes of our main feed podcast, plus many episodes like this, are completely free there. You can also get our newsletter, which I definitely recommend signing up for. And if you want to level up your Jiu-Jitsu with us, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. All of that information is available at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you again for hanging out with me here, and I'll talk to you in the next one.