Ep. 369: Real Talk About Humility, feat. Nick Salles

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. Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 369. I am Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And today I am pleased to be joined by Nick Salas from Movement Art. Nick, my friend, how are you? Speaker 2: Great, man. Thank you for having me on. I'm super excited to, you know, talk all things Jiu-Jitsu with you and kind of give a breakdown of how I approach teaching Jiu-Jitsu and, yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation. Speaker 1: I am excited, man. You're someone I've wanted to have on for a while, especially to talk about Movement Art, your platform, and also your coaching style. Now, that's what we're going to get into here, but first, just in case people aren't familiar with your work, do you want to give yourself a quick intro? Speaker 2: Sure. My name is Nick Salas. I'm based out of Pennsylvania. I co-own Movement Art with Daniel Myra, who's another black belt. We both got our black belts from Mikey Musumeci. And I would say we're pretty active in the competition scene. For the last five years, we've been both running Movement Art and competing all over the world. Danny has placed at multiple international and national tournaments. I've been competing and placing internationally and nationally as well. So, we have a cool, you know, dynamic where we're not only coaches in the room, but we're also out in the world testing our Jiu-Jitsu against other high-level competitors. And I think that's what makes Movement Art such a dynamic ecosystem because we're constantly, you know, going outside of the gym, collecting data, bringing that data back to our students and, you know, trying to give our students the best education that they can get. But with that said, you know, I feel like the path to Movement Art has been a long one. It has been one where, you know, often times coming up through the ranks, we didn't get the guidance or the tools that we needed. And so, I feel like in that road from white belt to black belt, Danny and I have had to experiment with a plethora of different ways to learn and to organize our Jiu-Jitsu. And so, one of our goals with Movement Art is to make sure that our students have these tools. And so, a lot of that came through understanding what we didn't have or what we didn't want to do in our gym by looking at other gyms and seeing what we didn't like about those environments. And then, of course, I would say coaching is a process of development. So, I'm not going to say that I have it all figured out. I'm far from it. Uh, coaching is something that I'm still fine-tuning. I'm learning new ways to improve my teaching. And so, the idea is, you know, with Movement Art at least, is that we're continuously learning how to best teach Jiu-Jitsu and that comes with the participation of our students. And that comes with also, you know, retrospectively looking at all of our experiences and seeing what about those experiences should be left out of the learning process. Speaker 1: Amazing, Nick. Well, I know you guys also make online material as well, and of course, I want to make sure we get a chance to plug that as well. But let's first expand on what you just discussed there, some of the ongoing teachings that you guys have encountered. I mean, getting black belts under Mikey, right? That's a very great lineage you got there. Obviously, you have access to some really great athletes and coaches. What have you found here in this journey where you are trying to come up with the best product to put forth in front of your students, what do you do differently? What have you discovered that you think more Jiu-Jitsu gyms need to adopt in terms of how they teach and how they learn? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I I would say to back it up a little bit, it kind of starts with the coach's disposition and how they orient themselves. I would say that's probably one of the most important things. So, at least for us, you know, training at so many different gyms, you know, before the pandemic, I was an assistant instructor at Marcelo Garcia Academy in Manhattan. I was training with world-class black belts day in and day out. And one of the things with all the experience and gyms that I've been a part of and that I've been able to train in is understanding how these different gyms go about cultivating their environments, go about structuring their curriculums or their classes. And for me, just looking at all these experiences, seeing what I can learn from them, seeing what I can implement and as well as trim so that I don't perhaps integrate those aspects into my gym. But I think this all starts with this idea of epistemic humility. So, the idea here is that in order for a coach to be successful, the coach first needs to acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge. I think this is crucial because I think we live in a world where there's a lot of coaches who think that they do have a monopoly on knowledge or they do believe that they have access to truth with a capital T. And I think this is incoherent and I think this is something that we need to address and something that we need to talk about. Before we talk about epistemology and all the epistemic tools that we can use to improve training design. So, constraints led approach being one of them, you know, this is this conversation about ecological approach that Greg Souders has injected into the Jiu-Jitsu landscape, which I think is amazing. I think it's really, you know, disrupting this Cartesian approach to Jiu-Jitsu that we've been, you know, uh, kind of dogmatic about for a long time now, which is also, I would say, a reflection of the broader way society approaches education and approaches things in general. But I would say more so when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu coaches, we need to understand that our goal as coaches is to create an environment that best optimizes our students learning and best encourages them to become creators of their own knowledge and not so much as, you know, authoritarians that tell our students what to do, how they should do it. And that's why I think it's really important that we first start with what do we want our environment to look like? We can't start with how are we going to run practices, you know, what techniques am I going to teach? Because you can have all the best epistemic tools available to you, you can understand how embodied cognition works inside and out, but if you don't understand how to democratize the learning environment and to engage your students so that they can participate in their learning, then I would say that there's a contradiction there. So, for me, I think what makes Movement Art different is this idea that, and like I said, I don't have everything figured out. I'm constantly developing and changing and learning how to do things better. But it starts with this orientation of humility where I need to constantly remind myself that my Jiu-Jitsu is my Jiu-Jitsu and that my goal is not to develop or reproduce clones in my academy. It's to instill my students with the tools they need to be knowledgeable in Jiu-Jitsu. Knowledge in this case being, you know, knowledgeable of how to apply knowledge, not so much just knowledge about Jiu-Jitsu, but knowledge of their personal Jiu-Jitsu. So, I think this is a conversation that often goes overlooked. People want to talk about positional sparring, constraints led games and all these things, but if you're not looking at the overall structure of your gym as a whole, I would say that you're kind of missing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something that has been on my mind for a while. People in Jiu-Jitsu are often looking for the the silver bullet, the magic answer that'll solve all of their problems. And sometimes coaches talk about Jiu-Jitsu like it's some math formula where if you just use this approach or this method or copy this person, you're going to create great athletes. But, you know, as I look around at some of the coaches out there who get results, yes, a big part of that is your knowledge of actual technical coaching skill, but we overlook the human element quite often when we talk about coaching. I mean, you can be the most technically proficient Jiu-Jitsu coach in the world, but if your students hate training with you, then it really isn't going to make your case better. It isn't going to help you produce better athletes if they're all just leaving and they despise your gym. So, I've realized that, man, if you get a coach who is just really good at connecting emotionally with their students and motivating them and making them feel like they belong in the room and they want to come and train and they want to be consistent. Man, if you can instill those feelings into your students, that matters a lot more than whether you're using cutting-edge practices in the actual room itself. And sometimes in our enthusiasm to learn the best techniques, I think sometimes we overlook the most obvious things, which is just basic human interaction. My thought has been that, you know, for most Jiu-Jitsu coaches, if you wanted to get better, before you crack open that Rob Gray book about ecological dynamics, you're probably better suited cracking open a book about emotional intelligence or something like that. Speaker 2: No, 100%. And this is like literally at the center of this conversation. It's that students need to understand even from a ecological or embodied perspective that they already inhabit a world of meaning, right? And so, it's important that, like you said, coaches understand how to tap into that. So, if your learning environment has all of these cutting-edge tools, but it's not democratized, it's not participatory, there isn't this dialogical process happening where the instructor is able to connect to the students as you're describing. And I feel like you're still going to be constraining the students to the norms and to whatever the coach wants Jiu-Jitsu to be. So, I feel like we need to take a step back and look at almost like the superstructure of the Jiu-Jitsu environment itself and look at how that might even influence or constrain the actual training. So, I think first, in order to even design constraint-based games, this the instructor has to realize that there is a limitation to what they know. It's impossible for an instructor to know the infinite variations that there are in Jiu-Jitsu, all the different ways you can move your body for different body types. And so, if we can, like you're describing, engage our students in a way where they're not just participating as a third person, but they're actually co-creating what Jiu-Jitsu means for them, they're actually being pushed and nudged to explore, then I think we can start actually talking about what epistemic tools we can use to guide our students to find these movement solutions because at the end of the day, yes, Jiu-Jitsu is based on skill, but the skills are always going to be influenced and shaped by the broader ideology and norms of the Jiu-Jitsu gym, of the Jiu-Jitsu environment. And so, for me, when we talk about authoritarian versus a democratic approach to education, we first need to understand that what is the role of the coach? Well, the role of the coach is to facilitate this environment, to structure the environment. It's not to center themselves in the learning process and to monopolize the knowledge so that students are consist constantly dependent on them for information, for answers. And so, in my experience and what I'm figuring out for myself is that the best way to do this is to, and just like you said, engage the students and we can, of course, talk about all of the different ways you can do that. But I just think it's important that we realize that because I feel like I don't hear this conversation happen all too often. I feel like a lot of people are quick to skip to the techniques or how to make these skills or patterns emerge in the training, but hardly ever do I hear people talk about the culture of the room, how the room is structured in terms of hierarchy. Is it top to bottom? Is it horizontal? And, you know, this is something I I talked a little bit about on the Jits and Giggles podcast, and I actually got a lot of backlash for it, you know, I was kind of talking about how this traditionalist hierarchy that a lot of gyms have, kind of reinforce some of these structures that only function to reproduce rigid students, students who only know to mimic their coaches and can't think for themselves and actually are disincentivized to explore and figure out for themselves what their Jiu-Jitsu is. So, I think this is a really important conversation to have and clearly a lot of people are resistant to it because of the backlash I got, you know, BJJ Eastern Europe put up an article on it and a lot of people were like, what is this guy talking about? Blah, blah, blah, you know, this is a martial arts. But I think we also need to understand that the way Jiu-Jitsu is evolving, it's it's kind of transcending this self-defense martial art that maybe it was initially and it's becoming more of this cultural space. And I think instead of resisting that, as coaches, we need to grow with that and learn how to accommodate the direction Jiu-Jitsu is going. Speaker 1: I'd like to maybe expand and get a definition here. Something that you've talked about as the theme for this conversation is epistemic humility. What exactly does that mean to you? Speaker 2: So, like we were kind of talking about previously, the coach needs to first come to terms with what their limitations are and they need to realize that they don't have access to all of Jiu-Jitsu. And the reason this is important is because with this input, with this realization, with this awareness, every time you show something, it's coming from the point of view that this is your Jiu-Jitsu and it's not anything that you're expecting people to mimic or replicate. And these are just your ideas and how you've come to embodied these techniques, right? And these movements in Jiu-Jitsu. So, this shift from coaches believing that they have access to truth with a capital T, meaning these abstract or idealized forms of techniques of Jiu-Jitsu, we need to break out of that. We need to humble ourselves and realize that as coaches, that we don't have it all figured out, far from it. And in order to compliment this orientation of epistemic humility, we need to then resort to this democratic approach to education where we allow students to chime in, we allow students to participate in the learning, in the knowledge creation, rather than expecting them to just show up, listen to us lecture about our Jiu-Jitsu and then treat students as if they're just empty containers in which we deposit information into, right? So, these aren't just students, these are people situated in their lives with histories. So, I think it's important that we speak to that and that we allow them to connect to their understanding of the world that they already have, right? And an example of this to kind of illustrate what this kind of looks like in the real world, is like imagine you go to some isolated civilization, right? You go to the Amazon and you're talking to the indigenous population there, and you're trying to teach them about, you know, temperature or you're explaining that the boiling point of water at sea level is X, right? And so, you're trying to explain these concepts in very abstract ways to these people, and there's no way for them to connect to that because it's so detached from their lived experience. So, we have to understand that even these abstractions and these tools we use to think about our Jiu-Jitsu are not Jiu-Jitsu itself. So, your best bet is when you're communicating with these people is to talk about temperature in terms of sensation, right? You can start the conversation there, you can ask them what it means for them to feel cold and hot. Because the idea of temperature itself is something that is based on subjectivity, right? It's the subjective experience of temperature. And, you know, science has gone successfully so down this path of abstracting that sensation, that subjectivity and standardizing in a way that we can create models of our reality. But it's important that we understand that these abstractions aren't reality itself and reality itself is our experience and sensations of hot and cold. So, what I mean by students engaging and participating and co-creating knowledge is that we do something similar where we start with what they understand and what they know, rather than skipping to the abstractions that are so far detached from their experiences. And I think this gap is what makes it difficult for people to maybe progress. It makes it difficult for people to really embody, you know, the skills that we want them to have. And so, that's really what epistemic humility, all it really is. It's it's understanding not only the limitations of our own knowledge, but the limitations of language and when it's appropriate to use abstractions and idealized techniques and when it's more important that we allow our students to participate and apply their experiences and knowledge of the world into their training. Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting because this makes me think of something that I once read, you know, while we're talking on this topic specifically, about experiences doctors have had when they travel to developing nations to try to convince people to adopt hygienic or medical practices. So, for example, I'm trying to convince developing country or developing population that you should sanitize your water, right? A lot of the time, these messages don't get received as well as you would think because, I mean, regardless of how right you are, regardless of how accurate your facts are, you still have to earn the right to be listened to. And if you walk into a population of people who just don't know who you are and they inherently distrust you, are you really in a place there where you're going to be able to be persuasive, regardless of how good your data is, because these people don't want to listen to you at that point? So, often you've got to earn that right first before you launch into the diatribe. And this makes me think of Jiu-Jitsu coaches and how they teach sometimes. I do feel often with many coaches, there does seem to be almost um, you use the word humility, but I would also say a lack of empathy, a lack of being able to put yourself in the shoes of the student and see things from their perspective. Often when I hear coaches talk about Jiu-Jitsu and what the right and the wrong answer is, I get this distinct impression that they're telling me from their personal perspective of Jiu-Jitsu how things should be. And they often forget that I might not share those beliefs. If we have a fundamental disagreement about what our goals even are for training here, you're not going to be able to persuade me to use your methods. The common example that comes up is coaches who are laser-focused on the competitive side of Jiu-Jitsu. And I always have to remind people, you know, look, if you are making Jiu-Jitsu competition the cornerstone of your focus, you're very much an outlier. The majority of your students either care little or not at all about the competitive scene of Jiu-Jitsu. And if you are laser-focused on that and you're saying things like self-defense is dumb, well, that might be your personal belief, but why are your students in the room? Because if they're all there to learn self-defense, which probably a lot of them are, you've got a bit of a mismatch there. And unless you can meet people where they are, you're going to have a hard time persuading them, no matter how cutting edge your methods are. Speaker 2: Yeah, and this kind of speaks to the fact that a lot of gyms will look at students as dollar signs rather than actual people. And you really see this in these big gyms, these franchises where there are hundreds of students or sometimes even a thousand students. And for us at Movement Art, we're constantly, you know, reminding ourselves that we're not just running a business, but we're facilitating a community. Which I think it's really important and it kind of goes back to the argument about is this a martial art, is this a sport, is this a cultural activity? And I would say it's more of a cultural activity in the sense, like you said, not everyone is showing up to compete, some people are there to socialize, some people are there to get in shape, some people are there to just blow off steam, right? They had a hard work day, long day, they just want to, you know, get out there and just do something that's different from sitting at a desk 9 to 5. And we need to create an environment that accommodates all of these different goals, rather than constraining people and forcing people to fulfill the role that we want them to be in. And that's why I think it's so important that the environment should be one where students participate in a way that is true to them, rather than a way that is true to us. And this is like what you're saying is literally at the center of what it means to democratize the learning environment. And what it means to listen to students and their needs and their goals. Because it is a community and as much as people might be competing and and I'm more than happy to facilitate that and organize things so that they can get what they want out of the training to make that possible, but there is also the cultural component where people just want to feel like they're learning and they're creating something. And that's not something that I feel like a lot of different uh train designs successfully capture. Sometimes I feel like if you're too focused on movement solutions, you kind of remove that cultural activity. And then on the other hand, if it's too authoritarian and it's too focused on this monological, like lecturery learning environment, then it detaches the student from their learning experience and it treats them like just vessels in which information is deposited into, and we can have a whole conversation on that, but I would even refute that being learning in the first place. For me, that's not true knowledge just being able to recite what the coach is showing you. So, I think it's important that we look at these two extremes and we understand how to create an environment that compliments everyone's needs. And in my research and in my own learning, I feel like the person who best touches on this is Paulo Freire with his, you know, problem-posing model. Uh, where there is space to, you know, introduce CLA and task-based games and there is space to use more explicit instruction and maybe, you know, show students, you know, using an intervention where you are showing them what your ideal technique is. But most importantly, at the center of this uh problem-posing model is, you know, starting with the question of what do you guys think about this? What if, when this happens, what are you thinking? And getting students to actually participate in the knowledge building. Because then, not only is that going to benefit the competitors who are trying to expedite their learning process, right? They're trying to get to that black belt world champion level as quickly as possible, but it's also going to give everyone else the tools they need to become better critical thinkers and and better at discerning their world. Because these skills do, I would say, transcend the mat space. They do apply to other aspects of our lives. And I understand that people live busy lives, they're not everyone can, you know, read philosophy or engage themselves in a way where they can expose maybe their ideological constraints or their dogma. So, I feel like using Jiu-Jitsu as a way to get people to test themselves and to become uncomfortable with the process of understanding their weaknesses, but also tapping into their strengths and telling them that it's okay to be frustrated and it's okay not to be given the answer right away because the process of learning is not something that should be convenient. It isn't something that should be easy, right? The same way that I learned a lot of the things that I do, I didn't have a coach to spoon-feed me all these things. I had to go off on my own and develop my own systems and and how I think about Jiu-Jitsu, essentially my philosophy of Jiu-Jitsu. Just that same way, I would hate to steal that opportunity for my students. Why should I monopolize that experience and then just have my students just regurgitate the very process that made me who I am? And so, yeah, I think it's really important what you're saying in terms of connecting to the students and understanding that at a human level that an educator needs to be empathetic. And I think part of empathy is also respecting that even a white belt has knowledge that they can inject into the learning environment. Just because they're a white belt doesn't mean that they don't know anything. And what I love most about this approach is that it is open and that it is uncertain, right? So, because I'm sure a lot of people are going to listen to this and be like, okay, that sounds all fine and dandy, but how do you apply it? Like, what's the prescription? And the point is that there isn't a prescription and that there shouldn't be a prescription for teaching, especially Jiu-Jitsu, because everyone is different, every environment is different, and what works for a group of people one day might not work for a different group of people another day. And so, this approach, what makes it fun and what makes it so effective is that as a coach, I get to embrace ambiguity, I get to embrace the uncertainty of learning and teaching. And so, every day I can look forward to stepping on the mats and allowing students to participate in their learning in a way that might be different. The next day, but yeah, I think everything you said is important and also plays into this idea of a democratic learning environment. Speaker 1: Now, something that you said a few times is that the learning environment should be democratic. And I I want to unpack that here. I think many people listening to this, when they hear you say that we should avoid authoritarian learning environments, I don't think that would be particularly controversial. But when you say that the environment should be democratic, I can understand a lot of coaches might think, oh, okay, well, that's maybe farther than I would take it. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say a democratic learning environment? What does that look like in the context of a Jiu-Jitsu class? Speaker 2: Yeah, so like you said, authoritarian is pretty self-explanatory. You have a teacher or instructor come in and the class is very much structured top to bottom. So, you have the coach, you have the students, and this is what Freire refers to as the the banking model of education. Essentially, the instructor is there to just feed the students information and the students role and their job is to show that they were able to internalize the information or the instruction that their, you know, teacher or coach has given them. Whereas a democratic learning environment is the complete opposite, right? So, instead of looking at it from top to bottom, we try as much as possible, and it's and it's very difficult, but the goal is to create a horizontal learning environment. So, my goal or my role as a teacher is not to be authoritarian. I can still have authority in terms of structuring the class and and guiding the students to what the objectives of this lesson are. But I'm never prescribing exactly what the students are required to know because an important part of democratizing the learning environment is allowing the students to participate. So, for example, if I pose a problem, I want to hear how the students are thinking about the problem, how they're approaching the problem. Often times we'll go around the room, often times I'll have other students share what they think or like how they would solve the problem, so students are being exposed to a wide variety of solutions. But most importantly, we're not starting with the abstract technique, we're starting with the problem. So, for example, if the lesson is to guide the students towards understanding how to control an opponent's upper body, we can start with the problem of in this situation, and of course, this is audio, so I'll try to describe it as as best as possible. But in this situation, we'll have like one student on bottom, one student on top, and the student on top will be approaching, right, with their hands or leading with their shoulders forward, with their legs back. And so, we can use this prompt to pose a problem to the students, in which I'll ask, in this situation, what would you do? Like, what are you thinking? And the goal of that problem-posing model or the goal of this problem that I'm posing is to get students to think about what their opponent is leading with and how that recognition and how that information can, I guess, influence how they think about going about their Jiu-Jitsu. So, for instance, if they say, oh, like, in this situation, I'm going to go for De La Riva. Then my goal is to get them to see how that, in this situation, might not be the best solution, right? Their legs are back, if you go for De La Riva, you're going to be overextending yourself, you're going to be opening yourself up to getting passed. So, okay. So, I like how you participated and I like how you're already thinking about attaching to a position, but let's take a step back and let's look at what is being offered to us. And then the goal is to get the students to realize, oh, okay, so if the top player is leading with their hands or their shoulders, their upper body, our goal is to address the upper body. And then from there, we can start, you know, evolving the questions towards, okay, well, if they're moving towards us in this fashion, what's more important, hooks or frames? Now that they're understanding, okay, upper body is coming towards, I need to stop them from closing the gap on us, right? I need to prevent the opponent from getting chest on chest or controlling our head. So, now we can start to introduce the importance of frames. And then slowly we can get them to almost rediscover for themselves how they can start playing on the upper body, whether that leads to collar sleeve or spider lasso. But the idea is based on the knowledge they already have, they can start formulating this idea of Jiu-Jitsu. And only then can we now look to the abstractions. Now that they understand the problem, we can analyze the problem conceptually. So, I think it's important that instead of just starting with, okay, this is collar sleeve, right? We need to understand with how did collar sleeve come to be in the first place? Well, it started because at some point, someone was confronted with the problem that the opponent kept leading with the upper body and they realized that, okay, I can frame the upper body, but I can't win the game if I'm just framing. And slowly that developed into a guard where they can frame and also attack. And the idea is to get students to recreate that knowledge for themselves. Now, we can expedite that, so it doesn't take them years to reinvent just one position. The goal is to do it maybe throughout a week or, you know, you can even do it with some things in a matter of a class, right? Just within the class time. But the idea here is starting with the problem, starting with the lived experience and then using the abstraction later or mapping the abstraction on the problem that they're answering. And in this way, it's more participatory and you can see, and hopefully I'm I'm explaining this well enough, you can see how the students are a part of the process. That's what democratizes it. That's what makes it democratic. It's that they're not just vessels that are receiving information or vessels in which the coach is just depositing information. They themselves are a part of the creation of knowledge. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes, yes, definitely. Now, coaches will sometimes push back on this. I've heard coaches say, I can't take this approach because it would take too long. I've got all of these students in the class and if I try to lead them all through the Socratic method, we'll be here all day. Another defense of, I guess, the old methods that coaches will sometimes use is they will say things like, well, if we let white belts teach, then we'll be correcting mistakes all day and what if they do something dangerous? What if, because the white belt is new at Jiu-Jitsu, if we let them teach or self-guide their journey, what if they choose to do something that gets someone injured? I mean, I have my counter arguments to those points, but I'd love to hear them from you. What do you say about that when people use those excuses to shut down the process of democratizing the gym? Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that I hear the frustration and and a big thing for coaches is convenience, right? They want teaching to be convenient for them and that's why most people resort to the banking model or often times referred to as show and tell. It's it's a lot easier to just show up, show a technique and leave it at that and then do some positional sparring and then do some regular rounds and that's class, right? But the problem with this is what is the goal of education? And I guess every instructor has to think about that question and realize for themselves what their goal as an instructor is. So, my goal is to create knowledgeable students that at the end of their journey, they're able to say, wow, like that was fun. And my Jiu-Jitsu is not only something that I participated in, right? Not only did I have a say in the co-creation of my world of Jiu-Jitsu, but now they can use their experiences to inform if they so choose to, to teach other students if they maybe, let's say they open up a gym or they start teaching classes. And so, this culture of democratic learning now becomes instilled from one generation to the next. And the beautiful thing about this is that the Jiu-Jitsu process that people are engaging in is the process that is most true to their lived experience. You know, uh, when people think about their earlier years, you know, learning how to walk, they don't remember someone prescribing to them exactly, you step this leg forward and then you step this leg back and then you do this, right? It's it's very intuitive how we learn to walk and how we learn to navigate the world. And so, that's not to say that when it comes to this model that every opinion is valid. You know, my role as a coach is to make sure that people realize that there are patterns in Jiu-Jitsu that keep re-emerging, very stable patterns that create concrete knowledge, right? Like the arm bar, for example, is a pattern that emerges time after time. And no one would refute that the arm bar is not a staple in Jiu-Jitsu. And so, there are things that we can say are pragmatic truths, right? These are things that have withstood the test of time and our goal should be to nudge students towards these stable patterns. But that's entirely different than just saying, here, this is how I do an arm bar, do this, you know, 50 times and, you know, try it in live sparring. Because in that example, the student isn't learning how to do an arm bar, they're just copying what the abstract arm bar is that you show them. And I know a lot of people will be hearing this and and they're going to be thinking, well, what's the difference? If they're doing an arm bar versus them learning how to do an arm bar and and I would argue that there is a very big difference between those two things. You know, the difference between, let's say, like AlphaGo Zero, which is an algorithm that can play a complex, you know, game, is not the same as someone who can actually play the game as a person, right? They're able to feel the board, they're able to see the player across from them, they're able to, you know, reflect on their decisions and anticipate certain things. And so, I think students need to realize that there is a situatedness and a context that is important and if we can best guide them into understanding that, then in the long run, they'll be better for it. And, of course, this is something that it's a little newer to Jiu-Jitsu, especially with, you know, I would say CLA is something that has really taken the Jiu-Jitsu world by storm. It has completely changed the way we think of skill acquisition and how we think about, you know, promoting skill development in the classroom. But this is not just a Jiu-Jitsu thing, this is a worldly thing. You know, this is something that, you know, I'm taking ethics right now, I'm getting my master's in bioethics, and even, you know, contemporary bioethics is very much a victim of this Cartesian dogma of we're just a operator in our brains and that we create these representations in our brains and then our subjectivity is just an illusion. And people don't realize, but this way of being taught is very internalized in how we see the world. And so, this is going to be a major paradigm shift, I think, in the coming decades, not just in Jiu-Jitsu, but in everything, right? I'll give you a quick example. So, right now I'm writing a paper and one of the things is looking at consent through a phenomenological lens, right? Looking through it as, you know, embodied consent rather than abstract consent. So, in this post-enlightenment world, we think consent is something that can be just verbalized and once you verbalize consent, that essentially you're giving someone the contractual agreement that they can do whatever it is that it is, right? In this case, let's say it's a medical intervention, right? Or or some sort of treatment. But the problem is is that there's a lot more to consent than just saying yes or no. People can be coerced to say yes psychologically, people can be coerced to say yes materially, and the problem with this is that the abstraction of the idea of consent being that the person is consenting to something completely ignores their situatedness. It completely ignores the material conditions that give rise, right, to them saying yes. And, you know, not to go too much off topic, but I feel like this is how Jiu-Jitsu is being taught. And this is how Jiu-Jitsu has been taught. And, of course, if people are just training day in and day out, eventually they're going to be able to put it all together and piece it together so that they're able to do Jiu-Jitsu. But I would say this isn't the most effective way of teaching Jiu-Jitsu, of learning Jiu-Jitsu, and most importantly, it's not true to how we learn and it's not true to how people see the world. So, I think, yes, people are going to resist this idea. Yes, people are going to say, well, you know, that's just not feasible, you know, it's way too complicated, it takes too much time, white belts are going to be getting hurt. But I would say to those people that I think that they're being too simplistic and they're not even willing to try it and understand that there are ways for us to navigate those problems that are being posed and and there's ways for us to implement a democratic learning environment where maybe these things that they're concerned about aren't actual problems at all. In my experiences, I don't see white belts, you know, getting hurt or white belts doing, quote unquote, dumb things. I don't feel like it takes all that much time at all, actually. In fact, me posing a problem and getting a few students to interact and have other students see that interaction and maybe, you know, next time we bring it in, we can bring those students back in. Often times I find that that happens a lot quicker than when I visit other gyms and I see this the the teacher lecturing for 10 minutes straight, right? Or sometimes even more than 10 minutes. I'm able to sometimes get in and out of a, you know, quick dialogical interaction within five minutes. So, I would implore those people to at least try it, at least experiment with it. Because a lot of those complaints or fears are not true at all and and a lot of them can be demystified if they just, you know, open up their mind to other ways they can approach their teaching. Speaker 1: There's also some really significant logistical limitations to a completely top-down approach where the instructor is the source of all knowledge. One of them, the most obvious, being that if you insist on that structure for teaching, a complete top-down approach, then the instructor is now the bottleneck for knowledge because techniques and ideas have to come through them. And that means that you're going to have a lot less information coming into the room. Now, an instructor using that method may defend it by saying, well, I do this to gatekeep bad ideas. And I understand that, but by doing so, you're also gatekeeping the good ideas. And if you're putting yourself in the position of being the gatekeeper of ideas, you're making a lot of assumptions about how good your ideas are that probably aren't going to pan out in reality. The other problem, too, is just the sheer logistics of it. If only the instructor can provide ideas and information, what that means is that only the instructor can teach. And so, you now have a teaching bottleneck of only one person in the room who is able to provide that service and that instruction. And that's just going to completely stunt the growth of your room if you get more than a, you know, a few dozen students. I would say that even a reasonable-sized class of about 20 people, it gets challenging for one instructor to have full eyes on everyone at the same time and to provide good information. So, really, as soon as you possibly can, you want to start trying to raise the level in the room and get other people comfortable sharing info and helping the people around them. And that might mean that, you know, you've got white belts who are quote unquote teaching. That doesn't mean that they're getting up at the front of the class and giving a sermon, but a two-stripe white belt can probably provide at least some degree of support to people who are just starting out, right? You don't have to be a black belt to provide some useful info. Now, traditionalists will argue that approach and they will say, well, that's how you get bad information circulating. If you let the white belts teach, what if they make mistakes? And to that I say, so what if they make mistakes, right? The majority of mistakes that get made in the gym are recoverable and not serious. Now, it's different if we're talking about people gouging eyes or spiking each other on the head, right? That's something that we need to put some constraints on right away. But if we're talking about your arm bar is slightly off from a technical standpoint, that's a mistake that can get sorted out in the wash. And as Scott Siveright has said, mistakes are a feature, they're not a bug. If you are trying to create an environment where no mistakes get made, what you're actually doing is creating an environment where no learning happens. And so, we need to encourage mistakes because that is the vehicle for learning. I've been talking to my kid about this a lot recently, who's um, you know, like a lot of kids her age, she's younger, she's mistake-averse. She doesn't like doing things where she makes a lot of mistakes because she doesn't feel good at it. And so, I've been having that growth from discomfort chat with her about how that's actually where you want to be going. You want to be pushing yourself to the places where you make mistakes because even though it doesn't feel good to your ego, that's actually the the zone of of proximal development. That's where learning happens. And so, you've got to spend time in that area, even if it feels like it sucks at first. And a big hack, a big breakthrough to everyone in their learning journey, is reframing that problem so that instead of hating and avoiding places where you make mistakes, you learn to love and enjoy those places and seek them out. Speaker 2: 100%. Anyone who's been training long enough understands the importance of mistakes and the importance and the reality of self-organizing, right? If you are trying to shortcut your students process by giving them what you think is the refined or idealized form of the technique, and this goes back to that idea of epistemic humility, understanding that if you think you have a monopoly on education or a monopoly on knowledge, then you are not giving your students knowledge, you're just giving them your ideas of knowledge, right? You're not allowing them to create their knowledge. And so, a good example of this is, you know, in Freire actually, talked about this. He he discusses the idea of expertise in society. And the idea being that there's the idea of an expert, right? Who is a, you know, middle-class professor who has a PhD in, let's say, you know, West Bantu African culture. But we need to question the definition of expert in this case. Are they actually an expert or are the people that they're studying in the Bantu region of Africa, the actual indigenous people who, you know, wake up in the morning and hunt and live in that society, wouldn't you say that those are the true experts? And so, I think kind of going to what you're saying, we need to realize that true expertise comes from our students living the process of failing and learning. Not from us trying to make them look like professors as quickly as possible. And this goes back to the idea of, you know, stepping away from just showing abstractions. And actually embracing the lived experience, which, to your point, is filled with problems and filled with mistakes. But mistakes are not noise to be eliminated. Mistakes are the very tool that we can use to refine our understanding of Jiu-Jitsu and refine our perception of what's possible in Jiu-Jitsu. So, I think it's important that students feel what it feels like to use De La Riva, those combination of hooks and frames first, before they can abstract from it, before they can organize it into concepts. Speaker 1: Well, thanks, Nick, so much for sharing all of this information. If people like your approach and they want to learn from you, let's talk about your gym and your online work. How can people find you, train with you and learn from you? Speaker 2: Yeah, so Movement Art is located in Warminster, PA. So, people are more than welcome to come through. We have an open door policy. We actually encourage that people just come in, see what Movement Art is about and experience what it is that I'm explaining on this podcast, uh, what it is for themselves. And, of course, we also have Movement Art online, which is an online platform where we are consistently posting courses, you know, games, sparring footage. So, you can have access to all the things that we're working on, our ideas on Jiu-Jitsu, our philosophy on Jiu-Jitsu on there, as well as our Instagram pages. So, you can check us out at Movement Art Jiu-Jitsu or you can check me out at That Nick Salas. And one thing I like to remind people is that one of my goals with Jiu-Jitsu is to make myself as accessible as possible. I love talking about Jiu-Jitsu, I love learning. So, if you listen to this podcast and you're like, nope, you're completely wrong, please reach out to me, let's talk about it. Maybe you know something that I don't know. I'm constantly trying to improve my approach to teaching Jiu-Jitsu. I'm always trying to refine my skills as a coach. So, I highly recommend people to reach out to me and also just ask me questions about Jiu-Jitsu. If you're a big fan of my Jiu-Jitsu and you want to learn from me, feel free to reach out. But most importantly, go on the website. We have a bunch of of content on there. And if you're ever in the PA area, please, please swing by. I'll highly recommend training with us. You'll 100% be able to roll with us and uh there's really good food in the area as well. So, yeah, it's a win-win situation. Speaker 1: Nice. Well, thank you so much for all of that, Nick. I will put links to Movement Art in the show notes to make it easy for people to find. I'll also throw a link to all of our stuff. We're easy to find too. Everything we make is at BJJmentalmodels.com. At the bare minimum, you want to check out the podcast. That's got full-length episodes like this, plus mini episodes. If you just want to get to the concepts quicker and learn some of the biggest ideas in Jiu-Jitsu in the quickest possible time. Our newsletter is definitely worth signing up for as well. It's free. It's got about 15,000 subscribers, so please do become one of them if you're not already. And the next step up with us is BJJ Mental Models Premium. We had a a ton of growth this year, especially getting into the tail end of the year, and I really want to see more people join there as well. In addition to being the best way to support the show, it's also the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio content. If you like Audible, MasterClass, if you like this kind of style of learning Jiu-Jitsu, that's what we're for. That's what we do best and better than anybody else. We've got a lot of great long-form courses on strategy, concepts, tactics. These are things that don't fit well into traditional video instructional and we tailor everything we do around that. We also have coaching services. If you need to get your roles reviewed, if you've got a tournament coming up and you want to help building a competition game plan, if you need footage analysis, we've got access to the best black belt team in the world online to provide that service. And also, we're increasingly expanding into business services as well. So, if you are a Jiu-Jitsu gym or business owner and you understandably need support with the marketing or sales side or just reputation building, this is an area we can really help out with. So, if you want any of that, you can go to BJJmentalmodels.com for more information. I will put a link to that in the show notes as well as Movement Art. But Nick, thanks so much for coming by. I really enjoyed this chat and I'm glad that we were able to make it happen. Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Steve. I love talking about Jiu-Jitsu, so whenever you want to revisit any of these topics or hell, we can talk about anything. Just invite me back on. I'll be more than happy to, man. But seriously, thank you for inviting me on and yeah, this has been a great chat. Speaker 1: Most welcome, sir. Thank you as well. Thank you to the listeners too. Truly appreciate everyone spending their time here with us each and every week and we will talk to you soon.