Mini Ep. 68: Defensive Thinking

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 in this mini episode, I want to talk about a concept called defensive thinking, which you might have heard me discuss on the main podcast before. Defensive thinking is a problematic mindset where you start excusing yourself for failure or poor performance before it even happens. So you may have seen people do this in Jiu-Jitsu where before stepping out onto the mats for a competition, they'll say something like, well, I don't expect to win, I'm just here to have fun. And that sounds admirable and humble, but it's also a self-defeating mindset because you're excusing your failure before you've even tried. Often, where you see defensive thinking is in people who are entering a competitive endeavor and they don't quite have the confidence in themselves to think that they can win. So they're kind of pre-excusing themselves for failing. And you can see why that's a problem, right? If you start excusing yourself for failure before you even try, that runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy where you impact your own confidence. Or maybe you never believed in yourself in the first place, which is why you are thinking defensively. Additionally, it can result in you failing to take your training seriously because you've already set the expectation that you don't expect to perform particularly well. This is not just a problem that can happen in Jiu-Jitsu, you will often see this in any high-pressure field where people have a risk of failing at their goals, they will sometimes create excuses for why they failed to meet those performance goals before they even did. This can also impact your interpersonal relationships. Sometimes people are just way too quick to say no before they've even considered an idea. You've probably worked with someone like this or trained with someone like this where you present them with an idea and you're trying to get a dialogue going and they just shut you down right away. That can also be a sign of defensive thinking that means that someone is not open to an exchange of new ideas. One of the main reasons why defensive thinking is especially dangerous is because it can be easy to mistake it for humility. Sometimes when people say things like, oh, I'm not that good at Jiu-Jitsu, I'm just going to go out there and have fun and who cares if I win. That can masquerade as humility, but really it's a poor self-image. It's making excuses before you've even put forth your best effort, and often when you speak like that, it implies that you're not planning to put forth your best effort. The reality of any activity that has stakes, like a Jiu-Jitsu competition, is that there is a degree of vulnerability involved. Competing is about vulnerability. It's not just about winning, you are exposing yourself to the possibility of loss. That's vulnerability. And defensive thinking happens when someone is not willing to appear vulnerable. So they are excusing failure rather than accepting that failure is part of the learning process. The problem with defensive thinking as well is that it can lead you to say no to opportunities because if you don't think you're going to win, eventually you can just disengage and then you never even try. And that's probably the worst case scenario for someone who has goals they want to achieve. So what do we do about defensive thinking? I always tell people focus on succeeding rather than on avoiding failure. And this touches on the concept of loss aversion, losing tends to be more psychologically painful to humans than equivalent gains. So we want to take our mind off of the possibility of failure and instead focus on how we can succeed. That's not to say we want to be delusional and just completely disregard any possibility of losing, but rather we want to structure our activities and our practice so that the focus is on how we can be as successful as possible. And of course, the next part of that is when failure does happen, someone with a truly strong competitive mindset is going to be better able to deal with that. They take that as feedback and they move on to improve the next time. The problem with defensive thinking is that if you're afraid of losing, that can lead to fear of engaging, fear of trying, and it's really hard to do anything amazing if you don't try. So this is one of the mindset concepts that we talk about at BJJ Mental Models. If you want more like this, you can get our full-length episodes and our mini episodes at BJJmentalmodels.com, as well as leveling up to BJJ Mental Models Premium, which is the world's largest library of audio courses on Jiu-Jitsu concepts, strategy, philosophy, mindset, tactics. These are things that don't fit well into traditional instructionals and they do a great job because of the audio vehicle of fitting into the busy times of your life when it's otherwise hard to study and learn Jiu-Jitsu. So please do give that a try if you haven't already. The first week is free. All of the podcasts, plus our newsletter, plus BJJ Mental Models Premium, live at BJJmentalmodels.com. So please go there, give those a shot and we'll talk to you in the next episode.