Mini Ep. 66: Abundance Mindset

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 week's mini episode, I've got a powerful mindset concept that is probably going to help you quite a bit on and off the mats. It's the notion of an abundance mindset. An abundance mindset basically tells us that we should learn to be happy for other people and understand that their gain does not necessarily mean our loss. The opposite of an abundance mindset would be a scarcity mindset, and this is where you look at your environment as a fixed pie, a fixed set of resources that we all have to compete for. And that means that if I take something from the pie, that's something that you can't have. And so then you and I have to fight for those scraps. An abundance mindset takes a different approach. It assumes that the pie can always be made bigger and that there can be more for all of us. So someone with a scarcity mindset is more likely to be the kind of person who's really, really cheap and scrounges every penny, whereas someone with an abundance mindset is more likely to try to figure out how can we create a system that benefits all of us. In the context of jiu-jitsu, a lot of people carry scarcity mindsets, and that's understandable because jiu-jitsu competition is one-on-one, and most of the time one person's going to win and one person's going to lose. So, if you win, you are taking away from the other person. However, an individual match is only one data point in the much larger ecosystem of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Overall, we all train and we all get better together. We all get better together if the sport grows together. And unfortunately, sometimes jiu-jitsu people bring that scarcity mindset out of competition and into places where it doesn't really make sense. You've probably heard stories of gym owners who create a bunch of drama because someone left to start their own gym or maybe they left and went to train at one of their competitors. This is the example of a scarcity mindset where you think of the loss of one of your customers as something being taken away from you, or the creation of another gym in your community as business being taken from you. A better approach is to think of how we can all grow jiu-jitsu together. So there's many ways that we can bring an abundance mindset into jiu-jitsu. One way is to be grateful for our training partners, the ones who challenge us and tap us. Don't get mad when someone taps you in the gym, be thankful that you get to train with someone that awesome. Look at losing as a learning experience. Don't look at loss as something that's been taken away from you, but look at it as an opportunity to get more data so that you can improve and be more effective in the future. Seek out training partners and coaching from the people who defeat you. Don't look at them as enemies, look at them as potential collaborators. If someone is able to beat you at jiu-jitsu, maybe rather than looking at them as an enemy, you should look at them as a friend who can teach you how to be as good as they are. And similarly, thank your opponents. After sparring, after a match, regardless of the outcome, thank them. Be grateful for the opportunity that they provided for you, rather than being upset that they made you look bad. So again, the abundance mindset can help us really with some of the main mental blocks that we hit in jiu-jitsu. If you have an abundance mindset, you're less likely to dodge tough rolls, you're less likely to be envious of teammates, you're less likely to resent others for their competition success, and you're less likely to think that you're a loser because you lost in competition. It's easier to understand that even a loss is a great data point that can help you get better. That's ultimately our goal in jiu-jitsu over the long run. So this concept is a tremendously valuable one. This is the kind of stuff we talk about on BJJ Mental Models. If you want more of this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. That's where you'll find mini episodes like this, plus our database of concepts where we have these ideas written up. And if you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the audible and masterclass of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on concept, strategy, tactics, mindset, and philosophy. Get that at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thank you as always for listening to this, and I will talk to you next week.