Mini Ep. 63: Self-Competition

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 1: 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 episode, I want to talk about one of the most harmful mindset problems that most grapplers encounter, which is our nature to compare ourselves to others. You have almost certainly heard the phrase, comparison is the thief of joy, and that is absolutely true. One of the quickest ways to make yourself miserable is to compare yourself and your results to the people around you. Of course, I think we all know this, but ceasing this behavior is easier said than done, especially in a sport like Jiu-Jitsu where we roll against another person and the objective is to positionally dominate or submit them. It's going to feel like one person won and one person lost. And in the context of an individual roll or match, it is true. But in the context of the broader journey, really the only thing that matters is your performance against yourself. Really, if you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, and again, I don't want to make it sound like this is some huge fundamental error with your mindset if you do, because everybody does it. But also, everybody should focus on trying to stop doing that. Focus instead on comparing yourself to the person that you were in the past. Who were you yesterday? That's really the person that you want to beat if you want to grow over time. It's not about whether the guy in the training room or the girl in the training room is tapping you out. The most important thing is, how would you perform if you rolled against a version of yourself from yesterday, or a month ago, or a year ago? That's really the journey that we want to measure on. Here's some examples that I often give. If you're a weightlifter, you want to look straight ahead when you're lifting. You don't want to turn your head to the side, right? That weakens your spine. You want to be looking in the proper direction. If you are a runner and you are in a race, you want to be looking straight ahead. If you turn to the side to see how the the people in the lanes next to you are doing, that's going to screw up your ability to run faster and to maximize your own performance. Now, these are kind of pithy examples because we're kind of bringing body alignment into the conversation, but hopefully it illustrates the point overall. So, if you want to know how to do this, one of the best ways when you're caught in an emotional trap like self-competition, if you want to get over that, try to be as objective as possible. Try to make it a matter of data. So, instead of just tracking your feelings or tracking your perception of the people around you, track your individual performance. Keep records of the things that really matter. And again, not just the results you're getting, because chasing results is its own problem. There's a whole fallacy called resulting, in which you overemphasize the importance of results and underemphasize the importance of the process. That's probably best suited as a topic for a different mini-episode. But overall, you want to make sure that you're tracking important things like training time, or how you're doing relative to how you did before. Nick Perler, the head of the Perler Wrestling Academy in the United States, has said that you should keep two sets of records. One set is your absolute performance record, your win and loss record, because that does matter, right? I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say wins and losses don't matter. If you're a competitor, it absolutely does matter, and it would be foolish to pretend that they don't. But they're not the only thing that matter because they don't measure how good you're getting relative to your own personal journey. And much of Jiu-Jitsu or combat sports in general are about your own personal journey. So, Nick recommends that in addition to keeping track of our absolute win-loss record, we keep track of our own personal records, our personal bests. So, if you are a weightlifter, there's a very easy and obvious way to do this, right? You keep track of your lift, how much you're lifting, uh, in both in terms of weight and in terms of reps. That's one way that you can easily measure your own performance versus who you were yesterday. But even in the context of combat sports, you can still measure this, right? Based on the quality of the opponents that you're you're grappling against. How well you're surviving and performing against them. Even if you didn't beat someone, if that's someone that you have a history of grappling against and you are closing the gap, you're getting better against that person versus who you were, that's still worth measuring. Maybe you didn't win that tournament, but if you made it further than you had in the past, that's still a win worth measuring. And that's how we compete against ourselves, the best person to compete against. Always we should be competing against ourselves. There's a whole series of conversations we can have about how to reframe our mindset when it comes to resulting, that fallacy of chasing results instead of chasing the process. We can also talk about how to stop being envious of the people around us and their successes. Really, reframing that mentally and being happy for the people around you when they achieve good things, that's an important part of having a healthy mindset with any endeavor like Jiu-Jitsu. So, I hope this helps. There's also an amazing piece I would recommend you watch. I will put a link in the show notes. There's a very well-known YouTube essayist who goes by the handle Super Eyepatch Wolf. He also trains Jiu-Jitsu. He's not currently as experienced in the art as maybe some of us are, but he's incredibly well-spoken on this topic, and he posted a great video about how to stop comparing yourselves to others and how to find joy in your own practice, specifically in relation to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I will put a link in the show notes and I really recommend that everyone go watch that. As always, I hope this helps. If you want more like this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. Our full-length podcast episodes and the mini-episodes like this and our newsletter are all completely free and worth your time, so please do sign up for those. I also ask that if you haven't already, consider leveling up with us at BJJ Mental Models Premium. That is the best toolkit we have to improve the quality of your grappling across the board, and I'm not just talking about your actual individual performance. I'm talking about mindset concepts like what we're discussing here today. So again, all of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Please check it out, link in the show notes, but I can't thank you enough for listening to this. I really appreciate it and we'll talk to you soon.