Mini Ep. 65: Process Over Outcomes

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 want to talk about process over outcome. You may have heard this saying before. We've also on the podcast said habits over results before. A lot of this ties around the same idea, which is that the best way to achieve long-term results is to build and maintain short-term habits. It's easy to get really focused in the desire to chase results in jiu-jitsu. When you ask many people starting off in their journey what they want to do in the sport, they will say things like, I want to be a champion. And it's fine to keep those aspirational goals in the back of your head, but on a day-to-day basis, it's really not super helpful to be focusing aspirationally on something in the future. It's more effective to be focusing on short-term processes and habits that you can build so that you can get measurably better on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. If you just think to yourself about the result you want, which is I want to be champion, but you don't really have a cohesive plan to get there, it's easy to wind up kind of making suboptimal use of your time as you try to get closer to that goal, and there's also no guarantee that you'll get to that goal. A better use of your time is to focus on curating and maintaining a process and habits that you can do on a daily basis. So setting long-term goals is important, saying, I want to compete in a tournament, I want to win a championship, I want to get promoted to a new belt. But what I would suggest is, don't just think about that. Also figure out how you can break that goal down into small habits which will help you get to that long-term goal over time. This is important for a few reasons. First of all, because a long-term goal without a plan is much, much harder to hit. And second, because short-term habits and processes are much more motivating to follow. If your goal is something that isn't going to happen until years from now, you could wind up being unmotivated every day up until the point you hit or don't hit that goal, because you aren't having any wins on a regular basis. However, if you're measuring by process and looking at short-term habits, then you can have little wins every single day. That gives you motivation on an ongoing basis, and also helps you measure your progress over time. I'll talk about the world of software for a while. There's an old-school way that people used to build software. They would call it the waterfall method. The idea would be that you would put together this big complicated plan saying, I'm going to get this project done one year from now. So you set a deadline, and then you work out on paper how you want this thing to work, how all of the pieces of the software are going to fit together. You send everyone off to go build it, and then the hope is at the end of that year period, everything is done and it's built as expected. What you often find is that once you get to the end, you missed the mark wildly. Projects like that have a terrible reputation for failing. A big part of the reason why is because life happens. You can't just put together a plan for exactly how things are going to go over a long period of time. There's many things that could pull you away from that plan or force you to adapt or change. Instead, modern software development practices encourage you to break things down into smaller, quicker, measurable chunks that you can deliver so that you're getting a constant flow of quick wins. In addition to the earlier reasons that I brought up, why breaking things down is a good approach, this also helps you because it will identify if you need to pivot. One of the reasons why it's important to break things down into small chunks is because once you actually get the ball rolling on anything, you're going to realize this is not working out the way that I thought, and you're going to have to change plans. As an example, let's say your goal was, I'm going to be a jiu-jitsu world champion. I'm going to train like crazy for two years, and then I'm going to show up at Worlds and I'm going to win gold. It's extremely unlikely that you would succeed at that. A better path is to do smaller, more frequent competitions to get experience, because the act of competing is a skill in and of itself. And you can't just show up to a competition and win merely by being good at jiu-jitsu. You also need experience competing. And so it would be crazy to assume that you're going to win a world championship in your first competition. Similarly, we can break that down further and talk about the value that we get on a daily basis with every training session. What are the little habits that we can do every single day to make us better? These don't have to be big habits. They can be as simple as committing to spend a bit of time doing a jiu-jitsu related training practice every day. Maybe you go to class, maybe you do related strength and conditioning, maybe you do some study. There's a lot of ways that you can add value on a daily basis. And that's an example of breaking things down into smaller chunks. So you will hear many coaches say process over outcomes. This is what they're talking about. Yes, it's important to set this big lofty long-term goal, but really where you want to have your attention focused on is the small processes that you can do on a daily basis, the small habits that you can create, which over time will compound into bigger results. Now, I do want to mention the flip side of this, which is that it is possible to get stuck following the wrong process. Sometimes you've got a process, you're following it, and after a while you realize this is just not getting the results that I want. And it wouldn't be a good use of your time to continue down that road of adhering to habits and processes that are not achieving results. So how do you know if if the process that you're following is a good one? Part of that is listening to people who have some degree of experience. That's why we have coaches, that's why we study what's working in competition. If there's other good ideas out there, we might want to give them a try. Part of that is just putting in the time. Maybe it takes a bit of time to start getting results from a process. But if you've been sticking with something for a long time and you're still stuck at that plateau, it might be worth considering whether you need to shake things up. So the flip side of this process over outcomes debate is there are times when the process is suboptimal, and you want to keep an eye out for those situations just as much as you want to be adhering to processes to be consistent on that path too. So this is a great and powerful concept that really we should use every time we've got a long-term goal. We want to be thinking about process over outcome, habits over results. How can we create short-term measurable wins that over time will compound into incredible results? This is a great example of the type of concepts that we talk about at BJJ Mental Models. There are many more mini episodes like this, plus database articles writing up how these things work, plus long-form podcast conversations, all at BJJmentalmodels.com. And I always tell people, if you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is where you go. That is where you get access to the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, concepts, philosophy, and mindset. If you like Audible and Masterclass, you'll probably like BJJ Mental Models Premium. That as well can be found at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks a lot for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.