Ep. 346: Tryhard Hobbyists, feat. Rosie Miller

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 BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 346. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach, and I am here with a first-timer. I've got Rosie Miller on the line. Rosie, how's it going? Speaker 2: Hello, I am good. Thank you so much for having me. How are you? Speaker 1: I am doing excellent, especially because I think this is going to be a really cool chat, and I'm going to turn this over to you in a second to open up the topic. But before I do, why don't you just give everyone a quick intro so they know who we're dealing with today? Speaker 2: Yeah, so my name is Rose. A lot of people know me online as Rosie, either one is fine. I'm a brown belt out of Atos HQ here in San Diego, and I have an online platform that helps Jiu-Jitsu people, but it's really tailored for beginners to kind of find their way in the sport, simplify the learning process, and most importantly, remember to make it fun. So, I think it's really easy to kind of get caught up in the webs in Jiu-Jitsu, and it was kind of my way of reminding myself to do those things too. Speaker 1: Sounds great. Now, I'm going to give you a chance to plug this at the end, but let's make a marketing sandwich here. Why don't you tell everyone about that platform, just so they can check it out right now if they're interested? Speaker 2: Absolutely. So, on Instagram, I'm @rosierolls. Similar, I think that's my handle on YouTube. On TikTok, it's rosierollsBJJ, and then I have a website, thegrapplerslab.com, and I do coaching for Jiu-Jitsu athletes, but also just gen pop that wants to be more active, perform better, and live better, because my background is in nutrition. So, heavy emphasis on nutrition with all of that. It's kind of funny how everything has come together. We can get into that later, but I feel like everything I've ever studied has kind of culminated into this. Speaker 1: I have some stories to tell on that front too, but I think first, like you said, let's let this conversation rip, because you told me that the topic you wanted to discuss is the try-hard hobbyist, which I think is going to probably resonate with a lot of people. But what do you mean by that? When you say try-hard hobbyist, how do you explain what that means? Speaker 2: Well, I think Jiu-Jitsu is unique in the sense that, you know, we have professional athletes training alongside people who do this for fun or do this recreationally. And I think that there's this huge pressure to kind of identify yourself or define yourself and put yourself in this category. And I think sometimes that might be helpful, but I think a lot of times people maybe limit themselves and think they either can or can't do things. Oh, I can't compete because I'm just a hobbyist, or, you know, I can't consider myself good, quote unquote, whatever that means, because I'm just a hobbyist. And I have spent my entire career in Jiu-Jitsu training in professional environments, big teams, very competitive teams, and I never really knew how to identify myself. All I knew was I cared a lot about my progression in Jiu-Jitsu. I cared a lot about Jiu-Jitsu, and I wanted to try really hard to get better at it, whatever that looked like for me. And the more I've worked with people one-on-one, I find that a lot of people find themselves kind of in this in-between space where they want to take it seriously, you know, but they're almost scared to take it too seriously and feel like they're not worthy because it's not their profession, or they aren't the highest-level competitor, you know? And it's easy to compare yourself to the top one or two percent. And so, I'm just kind of trying to reframe that and say, hey, it's cool to be a try-hard hobbyist. It's cool to try hard at things. Pretty much anyone, anywhere, all the people at the highest level, that doesn't come easy to them. They are trying hard to be where they are. And it's okay if you try hard and you don't get there. Let's just find out where you end up. You know, let's find out what that looks like for you. And so, yeah, you know, how to define what good means to you without taking yourself too seriously. So, that's kind of where it's all come from, I guess. Speaker 1: Well, I will give that a golf clap. I think that's very well said. And I want to ask you some questions about this, but first, it occurs to me we might want to explain what we mean when we say the word hobbyist. I mean, it's a word that gets thrown around a lot in Jiu-Jitsu, but it's actually quite unique to the sport. You never hear people who, you know, play recreational volleyball calling themselves a volleyball hobbyist or anything like that. It's just a term that in Jiu-Jitsu, we seem to assign to the 99% of people who kind of just do this for fun. But how would you describe the word hobbyist? When we talk about this, who are we really talking about here? Speaker 2: You know, I think about this question a lot, and I come up with different answers to it so often, right? I think some people think the hobbyist is the person that just literally just comes in once or twice a week. And I've even had people ask me, is it okay to not care about my progress in Jiu-Jitsu? Is it okay to just show up and take each training session in isolation and be there because I enjoy it, kind of like someone might go to a Zumba class, you know? And so, I think some people think hobbyist is that. I think some people think hobbyist is someone who does not do Jiu-Jitsu professionally. And I think I honestly almost lean more to that. I think there's gradients to it. I just think the hobbyist is someone who doesn't make their living off of Jiu-Jitsu. They can still care about it a lot. Their livelihood doesn't depend on their performance, you know? And they're doing it purely because of desire, not because of necessity. I think that's kind of what I've settled on at least, but again, I think it's also just semantics. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such an interesting label because it does seem to be something that you hear quite a bit in Jiu-Jitsu. And even the people who are, quote unquote, hobbyists, they often find themselves trying to pattern themselves after the pros and train like the pros, be like the pros, and they tend to beat themselves up when they can't get results like the pros. That's a very interesting aspect to Jiu-Jitsu that you don't see in a lot of other sports. I mean, as a Canadian, you know, we've got the notion of beer league hockey up here, which is basically where, you know, people just recreationally go and they just play for fun. They have no aspirations of getting drafted to the NHL. It's just a an excuse to get together with their buddies on the weekends and maybe have a beer afterwards. And they never beat themselves up because they're not as good as the absolute greats at hockey. One of the things about Jiu-Jitsu that's interesting is that the hobbyists and the pros tend to train together. And maybe this is why hobbyists often compare themselves so much to the pros, because they're in the same room as them. That's a very unique thing about our sport that you don't see in other sports. You often won't see professional soccer players playing with just regular weekend warriors. It doesn't happen like that. But in Jiu-Jitsu, the fact that these populations mix together, maybe that is why hobbyists tend to, you know, look at the pros and wonder, why can't I be like them? Speaker 2: I think that that's part of it. I also think that we're in this really interesting place in Jiu-Jitsu where it is becoming professional. And this is why I make the distinction between a hobbyist and I don't even want to say competitor, I want to say a professional Jiu-Jitsu athlete, right? Because it's no longer between competitors and hobbyists. It's really between people who are making this their career and people who aren't. And now it's actually even cooler because there's more ways to make Jiu-Jitsu your career than there were before. And so, we are in this really interesting place where it's not only people who are competing every weekend, right? That was me for years and years and years, trying to compete as much as possible. But there's another layer to it now, I think. And I think that we're seeing Jiu-Jitsu grow, we're seeing it evolve, we're seeing it change. And I wouldn't be surprised if even training rooms in the future look different. I mean, we are already seeing B team Jiu-Jitsu operate their pro training sessions a little bit differently. They're a little bit more, I think, reserved for a specific population. And now I'm not saying I think this is good or bad, but we are seeing things change. So, now it's not only a distinction between, oh, do you enjoy competing? Do you compete? Is it this thing you do? But it's also what function does it serve in your life, right? I think that that's important for a lot of people to remember. If this isn't your livelihood, you can still do it. You can still do it seriously, but it might look different for you than it looks for someone else you're training next to. And that's okay. It doesn't mean make you better or worse as a human, which is another interesting thing that we see in Jiu-Jitsu about Jiu-Jitsu making you better. But that also comes with a high degree of intentionality as well. Speaker 1: What I love about Jiu-Jitsu is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. There are people who train Jiu-Jitsu with the intent of competing and winning at world-class levels. There are also people who do it once or twice a week for fun, just because they want to get some, you know, burn some calories. And that is a really unique thing about Jiu-Jitsu. It's malleability, the fact that you can customize it to whatever your needs are. You don't see that in a lot of other martial arts. I mean, wrestling, for example. I've talked with a lot of wrestling coaches, and they often marvel at the differences in culture between Jiu-Jitsu and in wrestling. If you want to be a wrestler, you have a very hard ceiling at which point you just really, it's not viable for you to be wrestling anymore, because the whole point of wrestling is often to get into, say, you know, a high collegiate level or get into the Olympics. And then after that, unless you get a job as a wrestling coach, you're probably going to go off and do something else with your life. And wrestling will just be this memory of something that you did competitively when you were young. Jiu-Jitsu isn't like that. You know, with wrestling, you don't see a lot of 60-year-old wrestlers on the mats who are still hanging out in the room every week. With Jiu-Jitsu, you absolutely do see that. You see all walks of life. And part of that, part of why that is, is because Jiu-Jitsu can kind of become whatever you want it to be. If you want to train it at a world-class level and make it a profession, you can do that. If you want it to be something that you do every Saturday after you drop the kids off at dance class, you can do that as well. There's a lot of wiggle room in terms of how you can define what Jiu-Jitsu is for you, which is part of what I love about this sport. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think because of the longevity, I think something that a lot of people run into, especially those who might find themselves kind of transitioning more into like a try-hard hobbyist type of, you know, Jiu-Jitsu approach, is that what you want from Jiu-Jitsu can change over time. It is something, like you said, that can follow you into your 60s, your 70s. And it probably won't look the same for you in your 60s and 70s as it did, you know, even in your 40s or your 30s, especially your 20s, right? And so, I think understanding that it can evolve and change, it is a relationship. Understanding what you want from it, what you're willing to put into it, I think is so important. And there's actually a framework that I use. I started using this with my nutrition clients, but I've started kind of incorporating it for my Jiu-Jitsu people as well, because I think it's, you know, we want to mimic what we are around, right? I've trained at Gracie Humaitá South Bay when they were at the peak of having their women's team. Now I train at Atos HQ, you know, I'm in the room with phenomenal world champions every single day. And I think for the longest time, I kind of tried to just copy and paste. And for a long time, it worked. I'm in my mid-30s now. You know, life looks a little different. And I've had to do a lot of soul searching on what that means for me and my Jiu-Jitsu. And I think being able to define your relationship with Jiu-Jitsu and know what your intentions are with it, know where you are relative to your goals with Jiu-Jitsu, and then align your actions with your values. Not only your values within Jiu-Jitsu, but your values in life. Everyone talks about the Jiu-Jitsu lifestyle, but I truly believe the Jiu-Jitsu lifestyle can look a little different for everyone else. And when you're able to act out of those values instead of just what you think you should be doing, because this is what everyone else around you is doing, you are going to find more fulfillment and more success. And that's where you can do it for decades instead of just a season or a short period of time. Speaker 1: You mentioned that your reason for training can change over time, and I'm really glad you brought that up, because many young people might not be thinking in those terms, and as you get older, if you don't realize that it's okay to change your reason for being here, it can kind of mess with your head a bit. As an example, I discovered Jiu-Jitsu in my 20s. I'm in my mid-40s now, and my reason for training and the way that I train has completely changed. When I started Jiu-Jitsu, I trained much the way that I now criticize a lot of the young guys for training. You know, I was I was on the mats every single day, you know, I was trying to get two sessions in a day, you know, maybe one Jiu-Jitsu, one weight training session or something. I would go super intense. Every round was a fight. You know, I I remember losing 10 pounds in my first week of Jiu-Jitsu, and I was already in pretty good shape. I didn't have a lot of weight to lose. It just it was something that completely took over my life, as it does with so many young people. If I got injured, I would train through it like a moron, because the idea of taking time off Jiu-Jitsu was the worst thing in the world, right? To have to take time off of Jiu-Jitsu. And so, I just I always tried to find a way to stay on the mats. But now, of course, being in, you know, getting close to my mid-40s, I've got a family, I've got kids, I've got other obligations. Jiu-Jitsu has taken a very different role in my life. And I, you know, recently, I have really barely trained at all. Now, there's extenuating circumstances there. I had shoulder surgery a few months ago, and so my my physio will murder me if I go back to to the mats before he tells me. But even so, my training is significantly reduced. And a big part of that is because at my age, after, you know, going through this journey and getting my black belt years ago, for me now, the thing about Jiu-Jitsu that gets me excited is the culture, bringing it to other people, helping connect people, helping give other people Jiu-Jitsu opportunities so that they can really get the most out of the sport. That's a very different reason for training from when I started, where it was all about me. And now what I love to do is kind of bring Jiu-Jitsu to other people. And I got to be honest, I really struggled with this for a while, because I felt like I was kind of, you know, losing my abilities, because I was gravitating away from this need to just be on the mats all the time and focusing more on Jiu-Jitsu like a community. And I I really kind of struggled with this for a while, because I felt like I was losing my my skill in Jiu-Jitsu. I was kind of walking away from it. But I realized at some point, no, it's just my relationship with the sport has evolved, which is a very natural thing to happen as you get older. And I think for many people, they will eventually encounter that kind of cognitive dissonance as they get further into the sport. They will hit a point where really their reason for wanting to be involved in Jiu-Jitsu changes, and that's okay, right? It's okay if you want to not train as intensely as if you used to. It's okay if you're no longer interested in chasing the meta or every single technique. It's also okay if you want to go in the opposite direction and you want to go from, you know, just doing this for fun to becoming a professional at it. All of these are are okay. And that's the great thing about the sport. It is it gives you that ability to make it what you need it to be. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think that when you become very rigid in what you think your relationship with Jiu-Jitsu needs to look like, I think that's when people quit, right? But if we look at any relationship, even a relationship between people, we go through that initial kind of honeymoon phase where I'm we're attached at the hip, and we think, you know, I can hear the greatest person I've ever met, right? Everyone goes through that phase with Jiu-Jitsu, the honeymoon phase. This is going to change my life. This is the best thing I've ever I've ever done. I wish I found it earlier. Where have you been my whole life? And then I think there's this period of disillusionment sometimes, where maybe it gets really hard. The training gets really hard. Maybe life circumstances happen, and you realize this either means something different to me than it did before, or I want something different out of it. And being able to recognize that, grow with it, and change with it, it's so important for staying in it for the long term instead of just thinking it has to be this one thing in my life. It can only serve this singular purpose. And really realizing that there are so many dimensions to it. It's a multi-dimensional sport. Doing Jiu-Jitsu is one thing, but then we have the whole community around it. There's different ways to participate. You're running a podcast, teaching classes, running kids classes, outreach. There's so many ways you can participate in Jiu-Jitsu, right? And that includes just showing up to class, even if it's once a week, because it makes it adds to your life. And so, I think remembering, I'm doing this to add to my life. This is not a demand I'm putting on my life. This is something I'm doing to develop myself and contribute to this community. And how can I do that? And it it will look different for everyone. Speaker 1: I've said on the podcast before here that there were, I'd say, two times in my journey where I kind of hit that disillusionment phase that you talked about, for very different reasons, at blue belt and then again at brown belt. But maybe tell me your story, because I'm guessing you explain this because it's something that you've been through yourself, I presume? Speaker 2: I you know, I think I have experienced this a few different times in different ways, if I'm being honest. I think COVID for me was the first one. And, you know, I was a blue belt during COVID. I had been a blue belt already for about five years. So, I was a blue belt for a really long time. And I was, you know, in my peak grind mode where I lived and breathed Jiu-Jitsu. I was living in a fighter house, you know, sleeping on the floor. I didn't have a bed. I was training every session I could get into. I had already torn my ACL, gone through ACL surgery, you know. None of that, none of that discouraged me. But when COVID hit and Jiu-Jitsu got taken away from me for a short period of time, we found ways to train, you know. I realized that I had kind of lost so many pieces of myself. I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy. I love reading. I love studying. I love I'm I'm just a curious person, right? I love learning. I grew up in a musical family. I love music. There are all these kind of side quests that I had completely let go of. And when Jiu-Jitsu was kind of put on pause at the start of COVID, I remembered all these little pieces of me, and I realized I had, you know, not been doing things to take care of myself because I thought Jiu-Jitsu was enough to take care of me. And then I realized it wasn't, you know? And that doesn't mean that Jiu-Jitsu was any less important to me, but it means I realized that in order for Jiu-Jitsu to be a form of self-development instead of this thing that I compulsively sought after to validate myself, that I had to take care of myself in other ways, right? Jiu-Jitsu wasn't going to do that. And I had to be intentional with how I showed up in Jiu-Jitsu, with how I trained, with what my goals and intentions were, not only what I was doing, but how I was doing it. I think a lot of people say, you know, Jiu-Jitsu is going to make you better. It's going to make you a better person. But I really think for a few years there, I became a lesser version of myself because I was so singularly focused on Jiu-Jitsu instead of how I was developing as a human. So, I think that that was the first kind of realization for me. And then, you know, I start training again. Uh, in 2019, I switched teams to Atos. So, that was right before COVID. 2021, I got my purple belt, and I kind of went through another competing spurt in that period of time. But I was approaching it differently this time. This time, I felt like I was using competition as a form of self-expression, really something that I wanted to do because I wanted to do it. And I felt like I had kind of redefined, or so I thought, my relationship with Jiu-Jitsu and with competing. And then I started having concussions. And it kind of put into perspective what Jiu-Jitsu long-term looked like for me. So, I kind of changed the way I trained. I changed my relationship with Jiu-Jitsu. But I really kind of when I started suffering from concussions and it became chronic concussions, where something small would happen, something that shouldn't give you concussion symptoms, because I had so many and I had had so many so close together, small things would trigger my concussion symptoms. And it kind of made me look at what Jiu-Jitsu means to me through a different lens now. Now my overall health. Now, man, is this something I want to do right now for a short period of time, or is this something that I really want to be able to do for the rest of my life? Um, and it kind of made me reevaluate, you know, my training methods, what my game looked like, how hard-headed I could be at times, and kind of, you know, fighting instead of having finesse. And so, I think that that was maybe my second phase of disillusionment where I realized, man, you know what I care more than training and competing really hard right now. I care about being able to have Jiu-Jitsu in my life for the rest of my life. And that was a big game changer for me, because I I don't think I had ever seen Jiu-Jitsu being taken away from me forever until I started having those concussions and I started questioning, huh, am I going to be able to keep doing this? Am I going to be able to get back on the mat? And I kind of had to come to terms with myself that maybe I won't, but if I'm able to, I'm never going to forget that feeling, and I'm going to implement it into my decisions for the rest of my life. So, I can protect myself and take care of myself and continue doing this. Speaker 1: That's a really interesting angle to discuss, and something that I always encourage everyone from day one in Jiu-Jitsu to deliberately think about, which is what level of risk are you willing to undertake in order to achieve your goals in the sport? The good news about Jiu-Jitsu is, you know, it's it's probably safer than a lot of other combat sports, but that doesn't mean it's safe. You can get badly hurt doing Jiu-Jitsu, and your willingness to accept risk should always be part of the the considerations you make in terms of like, what am I going to get out of the sport? When I started Jiu-Jitsu, I just showed up and rolled hard, right? I didn't really I didn't really think about like, well, you know, what level of injury risk am I willing to tolerate for this hobby? I just showed up and went as hard as I wanted to go. And I got really lucky, because there's a lot of other people who came in with that mindset, and they got just crippled within their first year, and they were never the same afterwards. Maybe they had to quit the sport. A friend of the show, Matt Curtley, best known as Asopean on on Reddit, has talked about how one of his regrets was that at white belt, he racked up a ton of unnecessary injuries just because he was training in a hard training environment, and they weren't thinking about this kind of stuff. And I think that everyone should sit down and kind of weigh the risk-reward profile for what they want to get out of Jiu-Jitsu. And there is no right answer on this. I mean, if your goal is to be a world-class competitor, you're probably going to have to accept some degree of injury risk greater than a casual practitioner would. But at the same time, that's not to say that's right or wrong. It's just in line with your goals. For myself, you know, I've never competed. I've been training for, you know, a long time. I I was a black belt before the pandemic happened. But for me, competition was just never something that really appealed to me. I I love Jiu-Jitsu, but it's just there was never a moment where I thought, man, you know, this going out there and competing is going to fulfill some void or some need in my life. I've always got my, you know, flexed my competitive muscle through other activities that made me happy. And so, for me, Jiu-Jitsu was always like a fun thing to do. And as a result of that, because, I mean, my objective isn't to, you know, go out and win gold medals, I really tailored my game to remove things that I felt were extra risky. So, I specifically avoid doing a lot of things that are probably considered good technique and that most other people would do, but I just don't like the risk profile. I think I've talked about this before. I really try to avoid any situation where I have to rush head first into my opponent. I like to kind of keep my head behind a few layers of defense just because, especially as I was younger in Jiu-Jitsu, I had a lot of scares. You know, there were times when I I remember, you know, I was trying to shoot a double on this gigantic dude, and he sprawled, and I felt my neck like almost go. And I thought, you know what? We're not going to do that again. So, the thing is, I don't shoot a lot of blast doubles or, you know, there's a lot of techniques I just don't do, even though they're completely valid, technically sound, effective Jiu-Jitsu, but for me, they're just more risk than I'm willing to take through that lens. And the end result is my game is a bit neutered, probably. There's a lot of effective moves I could put in there, but, you know, I've been training 20 years, and I don't have cauliflower ear, and I'm quite happy about that. And it's because I don't rush head first into things. Speaker 2: Oh, I was about to say, but that's the other beautiful thing about Jiu-Jitsu is that you can weave your own game, and you can include what you want to include and what resonates with you, and, you know, omit what doesn't. And you are aware of those techniques, and that's something that you've done very intentionally, which I think is, you know, the whole point, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I agree completely, right? I mean, I would never prescribe my method to someone who wants to compete, because you're losing a lot of really effective weapons, but for my situation, and similarly, your situation, I presume as well, I'm guessing especially if you have a concussion history, you probably avoid a lot of situations where you could get an errant, you know, knee or elbow to the head, I'm presuming. Speaker 2: Well, it's funny. So, I have changed I have gotten back to where I feel I'm I'm about 100% now. Prior to my concussions, I was training Judo as well, and I have always loved stand-up. I've always loved takedowns, wrestling, Judo. And so, I think that that is the biggest thing that I have shifted is I now pull guard, which I never thought I would be a guard puller. And I have now I feel I am more well-rounded than before my concussions. I feel before my concussions, I was almost siphoned into this, you know, pressure top person game. And now my confidence has increased so much because I know I can play anywhere. So, for me, it's made me more well-rounded. I still like pressure. I still dive head first into a cross-grip pass. You know, I still I do get knee'd in the head quite frequently, or I take feet to my face pretty often. But that concerns me less than getting thrown. And I think my biggest hesitation, and I have competed since my concussions, and it's been a very interesting experience because I do still feel a bit of hesitation when it comes to stand-up, which is new for me. I have never really felt cautious on my feet until going through all of this. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I remember I was sparring with this giant bodybuilder white belt many, many years ago, and he accidentally clubbed me in the face with his elbow and like split my lip right open, just busted me up. And unfortunately, due to the nature of my work, I have a lot of really important, you know, meetings that I have to attend. And I had one the next day, and I didn't want to go in looking like I just had the shit kicked out of me. So, I had to tell my wife. I had to be like, honey, I need you to teach me the ways of the concealer. How do I apply concealer properly? So, I am actually quite adept at using concealer to cover up all of my bruises and shit, because for the nature of my work, I can't be seen, you know, like going into a a high-stakes meeting with like black eyes and stuff. But that was kind of when I realized, I've got to rethink the way that I train here, because the realities of my off-the-mats life, they they conflict sometimes with the way that I may otherwise want to train. And in order for these two things to coexist, I might need to make some concessions. I might need to kind of dial back or take some elements out of my Jiu-Jitsu game because they will start impacting my real life eventually, and I don't want that. My situation has changed since then in terms of the work that I do, but I think it's okay to kind of figure out how Jiu-Jitsu fits into your life. The big concern I see when I I talk to a lot of try-hard hobbyists is often they look at what the pros are doing, and they think to themselves, how can I be exactly like that? And unless your goal is to live that life, I don't think you want to be exactly like that. There might be certain aspects to the way that a professional lives their life and trains on the mats that don't make sense if you don't share those life goals. So, this is where I I often coach hobbyists, especially the try-hard hobbyists who really do care. I often coach them to understand, your journey is a unique individual journey. And don't feel bad just because the greats are training in a way that you are not. Your goal is not to copy them. Your goal is to be the best version of yourself. And it's up to you as you train to figure out what that's going to look like. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think that it's very easy to glorify the professional athlete lifestyle. And I say this as someone who has spent years, you know, on that grind, training alongside all of the pros, every session, multiple times a day, as someone who has kind of evolved out of that, but still sees that every day. And I still hop in there a lot, you know? So, I'm kind of in this weird in-between place. But I think it's very easy to glorify that lifestyle from the outside without realizing two things. The first thing I think a lot of people don't realize is when you have the freedom and the power to choose if and when you go to that pro training or that comp class, if and when, for or for how long you adhere to that schedule, that is a freedom that you have where a lot of people, you know, just as as the try-hard hobbyist might be at their nine-to-five job wishing they could be at Jiu-Jitsu. Sometimes Jiu-Jitsu pros wish they could be doing something else with their time. So, the grass is always greener on the other side, you know? And then I think the second thing is there is still so much power and admiration in being someone that balances doing something hard like Jiu-Jitsu with having a, quote unquote, normal life, a family, another job that you have to show up for and be present for. And you don't get to go train and then, you know, recover and then go back to another training session. Each journey has its own hard. Each journey has its own challenges. Each journey has its own joy. And so, you can't really compare the two as one being better or worse. And it's hard to say that you would still want that pro lifestyle if you were in it and having the challenges of that pro lifestyle every day, right? And I think that that's something that I think gets looked over a lot. Speaker 1: I can confirm what you're saying there, because I've had many conversations with elite-level athletes, and it's gone basically the way that you described, where I'll tell them, like, man, I'm so envious of your incredible Jiu-Jitsu ability. And they'll reply to me, like, man, I'm so envious of the fact that, you know, you actually have a a stable place that you can live in and a family and, you know, actual, you know, like stable revenue that you can use to pay the bills. There's pros and cons to whatever you choose to to do with your life, and the grass always appears greener on the other side. So, I think many people, if you haven't had the chance to really get to know a lot of the pros in the sport, you might assume that, like, oh, man, these guys have these amazing, blessed lives. But it's hard being a Jiu-Jitsu professional, right? Speaker 2: It's a hard lifestyle. Speaker 1: This isn't soccer. I mean, these people are not making like $30 million a year. It's a very hard lifestyle to be a Jiu-Jitsu professional, and it gets harder over time. I mean, if you want to know what I'm talking about, go take a look at some of the people who were at their peak in the like early to mid-2000s, right? Their bodies by now are all super beat up. The benefit to being a hobbyist is that you can kind of have a more healthy relationship with Jiu-Jitsu where it takes less away from you physically. The thing I love about being a hobbyist is I can avoid doing the things that will harm my body long-term. I can take the time to recover properly if I need to, whereas most pros, you know, being a full-time competitive athlete in a combat sport, you're going to rack up a lot of injuries and wear and tear over the years. So, again, like you said, there's pros and cons to every way to live the Jiu-Jitsu life. Speaker 2: And you know what's crazy? Because a lot of people, I was actually just hearing a conversation with a young competitor. I'm not going to mention any names, but a young, very successful, high-level competitor talking about that he has to be very picky with the competitions that he chooses to participate in, just because he already has racked up so many injuries and he doesn't feel like he has much longer left competing. And for someone still in their early 20s, that is a wild thing to conceive of, you know? And so, you are every every work day, you know, putting more and more miles on your body. And to have your career really left up to that is a big thing to consider. We see a lot of people at the highest level are just the ones who have made it by with minimal injuries, the people who were able to keep going. But we also see that in the hobbyist realm as well. The people who are the black belts who have been training for 20, 30, 40 years are the people who were able to do that and minimize injuries. So, regardless of what your goals are, competitive or not, it's a huge consideration how you train and how you proceed. Speaker 1: Now, here's something that I want to explore with you, and you're probably the optimal person to have this discussion. How do you build the try-hard hobbyist? So, you're in a unique situation where, of course, you're, you know, you live the Jiu-Jitsu life, but also you run a coaching business to help other people of all skill levels, including hobbyists. If someone were to, you know, work with you and go through this process, what does the process look like of how to coach them to kind of find their path in Jiu-Jitsu? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it started with how I approach nutrition and helping people understand what they need out of nutrition. And now I've kind of expanded that just to the athlete as a whole. So, my coaching company is called Shift Coaching Systems, and I named it that because I felt like we needed to not only shift the way people were eating, but how they were thinking. And I think the same is true for Jiu-Jitsu. We need to shift the way not only we're training, but how we are thinking about training, how we are thinking about our Jiu-Jitsu. And so, I think the first step is self-study. Get to know yourself. What am I currently doing? How is it what are the metrics saying with what I'm currently doing? Basically, where am I currently? How do I feel about that, right? We need our starting place, our baseline. The next thing is having a clear idea of where you want to be and what the gap is between where you are now and where you want to be. So, identifying that gap. Now, we're going to have to take some actions, but we need those to come from our values, not from a place of what we think we should be doing or what other people are doing around us, but truly what we want for our lives. So, we're going to identify our core values, and we're going to turn those into being expressed through action. So, if I can bridge the gap between where I am and where I want to be, I need to take action, and I need those actions to be an expression of my core values. So, that this is no longer something that I have to do, or I feel like I should be doing, or that is externally demanded of me. It's something that every time I do this, I know I'm expressing a piece of myself. And I know it sounds woo-woo, you know, hippie woo-woo, but I promise it it's not that. It is really a modality to increase adherence and consistency, because when we feel like we have to do something, or it is a demand on us, I'm not saying it's always going to be easy, or it's never going to take effort. But it is much easier to stay consistent with something that we want to do long-term when we feel it is building a part of our self at a deeper level. It's not this surface-level thing that we're doing. So, that's why I emphasize so much on values. And then we're going to proceed, and instead of judging ourselves on the metrics of am I winning or losing? Am I good enough, which is a question that I think is just so crazy. That's something else to get into. We're going to approach it with curiosity. So, we're going to foster curiosity. Now, how are these actions making me feel? Am I getting closer to where I want to be? Yes or no? Am I getting the results I thought or hoped I was going to get? Yes or no? Now, let's proceed with curiosity and see what happens, because that's going to allow us to continue to track this progress. And so, then we can adapt the steps as we move forward instead of just blindly committing to a process and then either feeling frustrated or confused or unfulfilled and not being willing to make any adjustments. So, for me, it all starts with that self-study and that deep understanding of our values, and from there we create a plan. It is not one size fits all, whether it is developing a training routine, right? How many days are we training? What's our intention for each of these sessions? What am I trying to improve? Or a nutrition strategy, you know, whether I want to lean up, bulk up, maintain, find my optimal weight class, right? We're not going to just blindly jump in toward that goal. We're really going to understand what purpose it's serving in our life, what function it's serving in our life, and how we can make it all align. Speaker 1: I love that. I love the topic of values. We've actually explored that a lot on this podcast recently, and I know, like you said, it can be a hard sell sometimes to tell people you've got to really focus on your values, because it does kind of sound like you're just, you know, turning into a motivational YouTube channel. Of course, the meme in Jiu-Jitsu is like all the fucking black belts are always giving this unwanted life advice. And but, you know what? It is really important to be laser focused on your values. I can say this now as someone who, you know, I'm in my, like I said, my mid-40s almost. And a lot of the reasons why I lived my life the way that I did in retrospect, I was chasing something that wasn't really authentic to who I was. And I've had to really recently rethink this. A lot of the things that I thought would bring me happiness, they didn't bring me happiness. And what actually wound up being a more authentic representation of who I am was very different from anything that I would have thought it would have been 20 years ago. And I'm still kind of reckoning with that. Values is also very hard to pin down, because it's often challenging to know what your values actually are. Like I said, I uh a lot of the ways that I looked at myself and my goals for the first, you know, 30, 40 years of my life, looking back on that, they didn't really take me down the road that I expected. And a big part of that is because I think I was really chasing more external validation or material validation than I was something tied to my intrinsic values. And I mean, anyone who's old enough and has been through this will tell you, if you do that long enough where you kind of chase shiny objects and you chase external validation and you chase material stuff, but it's not in line with your values, eventually that rubber band is going to snap. You're you won't be able to do it forever, because it's hard to live inauthentically. It's hard to to live in a way that is not in tune with your core values. And as you mentioned, knowing what your values are is actually not easy. I always encourage people, sit down and do this. Like, take out a pen and paper and try to actually figure out what your values are. You probably think it's going to be a five-minute exercise. It can wind up taking you, you know, months. You you may never complete it because your understanding of what your values may be may change over time. And I can tell people that having a clear understanding of what your values really are makes decision-making so much easier, because if you're clear about your values, then in any given situation, it's going to be a lot easier to know what the best decision is for you on the spot. So, one of the big things for me was being more in tune with my values helped me make better decisions. So, that's another reason to do this, right? If you don't know what your values are, it's hard to know whether you're doing the right thing long-term for yourself. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And somewhere that I like to have my clients start is actually, especially if they're having trouble kind of identifying what their values are. I'll just ask, hey, if you could only look at the actions that you have taken, if you've only look can look at the choices you've made without hearing your justification for them, what does it say that you value? What would you think it says? And this is just a starting point, a thought experiment. It is not perfect, but it can at least start to get your mind going of what could this choice say about me? Actions are rarely, you know, objectively the the choices and actions we make never directly line up with a specific value, right? It's not like I made decision A, I decided to compete, and so that means my value is this. No, it's all about how we're doing it, why we're doing it. But when we start to ask ourselves the question about why am I doing these things? Why am I making the choices I'm making? We can at least start to get some perspective on what potential values could be. What why do I think I'm making this choice? But there might be an even deeper layer of why I actually am making this choice or taking this action. And I think that's where a lot of the dissonance can come in when we think we're doing it for one reason, but then we find out, oh my gosh, it's actually been this other reason the whole time, this external validation. Well, once we realize that, okay, well, I know I'm struggling with worthiness. I know I'm struggling with purpose. I know I'm struggling with, you know, being good enough, whatever that means. Well, now I know that these are things I want to pay attention to, but I don't want that to come from competing. So, what can I do to satisfy that need that I have that is somewhere in me? And once I'm able to satisfy that need and redefine what that means for me, it's probably not going to come from competing anymore. But now maybe competing can serve the original purpose I wanted it to. Maybe now I've freed myself up from that baggage, that weight of external validation by recognizing it, that I don't have to change the actual action, but my relationship with it is different. Other times, we do change the action. Other times, you know, the action itself might change instead of just the relationship changing. But it opens up so much opportunity for fulfillment and showing up, like you said, as your authentic self. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Something that my coach Emily Kwok has talked about about is how when she was younger and she was competing at adult, you know, she's a multi-time world champion, that in a lot of ways it was very challenging, but after she took time off to have kids and grow her family, when she came back and started competing again at masters, she found it much easier. And part of that was because she just didn't feel like she had anything to prove anymore. So, she could do it because she wanted to, without having all of this baggage attached to it, right? She wasn't there for anyone else to prove who she was. She was there because it was just something that she intrinsically enjoyed doing. And she said that after getting to that state, not only did she enjoy it more, but also she feels that she's performed much better as well. So, I think that's really an interesting aspect of performance. When you're authentic to who you are, it's actually easier to perform better. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Absolutely. You're not covering anything up. You can let go. You can be you, which is the most important thing to do if you want to have kind of that unconscious flow state performance. You can't be trying to hold up any expectations. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Now, I've got two common problems that I want to run by you. And I think pretty much everyone in Jiu-Jitsu deals with these, but hobbyists especially, and probably the try-hard hobbyists doubly especially, deal with them a lot. And we'll take them maybe one at a time. The first one I want to ask you about is imposter syndrome. So, I think probably pretty much everyone knows what this is, but it's basically just the persistent feeling that you're not good enough, or you're not worthy, or you don't deserve what you've got. Hobbyists are especially vulnerable to this, because Jiu-Jitsu, ultimately, we tend to measure ourselves by who we're sparring against. If you're a hobbyist in a room full of pros, you're probably going to eat a lot more losses on the mats than you're going to eat wins. And it's really hard to detach your ego from that and to be okay with that. So, often hobbyists really get into their own heads about this, and they're constantly battling with imposter syndrome. They never feel like they're good enough. I am guessing this is something that you have to coach people through. So, I would love your perspective on how to solve for this problem. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I hear this a lot, especially once people receive their blue belt, right? And it's always, I mean, I'm sure people experience this at different belts as well, but I very, very commonly hear this, I got my blue belt, and I feel like I'm not ready, right? And I tell them a couple things. One, your instructor did not give this to you based off of your best days. They have seen you tap to everyone. They've seen you do all the dumb things, and they still thought you deserved it, right? So, this is not a judgment based only off of your best days. This is a representation of your whole journey. And so, that's the first thing, I think, to recognize, whether it's a blue belt or a different belt. We are not solely judged and praised off of our best days. If it has to do with a Jiu-Jitsu promotion, our instructors are seeing the full spectrum. And I think that that's a really great perspective to also be able to give yourself compassion, especially for the parts of you that you think are less impressive, right? They're still part of your whole, and they they still deserve that recognition too. And then I think especially for Jiu-Jitsu, the belt system is so subjective. And so, we've talked a lot about everyone's journey is going to look different, and you have to own your journey. And I think that it is so easy to compare in Jiu-Jitsu, but it's really a place where especially if you're doing it as a try-hard hobbyist, that that is not serving you. That comparison is not serving you. And so, recognizing that everyone's journey is their own, and yours doesn't have to look like anyone else's. If we look at what it means to be a black belt, it'll mean different things for different people. It used to just mean a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu is someone that can defend themself against an untrained person. Okay, well, you can do that pretty early on in Jiu-Jitsu, right? But defending yourself against a skilled opponent, much less defeating a skilled opponent who is training competitively, that's something else completely. So, also understanding the different functions that Jiu-Jitsu can serve and the different lenses that we can look at this through, right? You don't only have to compare yourself against your toughest round. Yes, have that round, take notes on how it went, learn from it, move forward from it and with it, but don't only judge your success or your worthiness based off of your hardest round. Look at the totality of your journey and what you have learned. And the different ways you can roll with different people. I mean, when you start to realize that you have levels in Jiu-Jitsu and that you can manipulate how you roll with different people based off of either their experience, their game, you know, their skill in relation to yours, that is a huge point of progress. And you will probably still get, you know, smashed by the best people in the room if you're in like an elite room, but that doesn't mean that your progress is less valid, or your deservingness is less valid. Speaker 1: Now, this lines up with the next thing I want to ask you about here then, which is self-competition. I always tell people that in Jiu-Jitsu, we always actually, pretty much any endeavor where we're trying to perform, our most important competitor to measure ourselves against is our self. And that's easier said than done, because when you're in a training room with a bunch of great athletes, maybe people who train much more frequently or much more professionally than you do, it's easy to compare yourself to others, to the people around you, and then to feel inferior because you don't like what you see in that comparison. So, what do you tell people in this situation? If someone is really struggling because they feel like, and where this often comes up is people will say things like, I feel like I'm the worst person in the room. I feel like nobody needs to no one wants to train with me. I always lose every roll. I feel like everyone else is getting the techniques faster than me, and I always struggle. We all know that comparing ourselves to others, as they say, you know, comparison is the thief of joy. It's a path to misery. But it's way easier said than done, right? It's way easier for me to just tell people, don't compare yourself to others. But it can take a lifetime to learn how to apply that wisdom properly. When you have to coach someone who's struggling with this problem of comparison, how do you help them? Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a funny video I've been wanting to make kind of on this topic. At least I think it's funny. Maybe the world won't think it's funny. But it was inspired because I got done with a really, really tough comp class at Atos. All the best people are there, and I'm looking around the room, and everyone looks defeated. Everyone looks absolutely defeated. And this was a day where I came home, and I was crying. I was crying after training. I called my husband. I was sobbing. That was the hardest training session I've ever been through. I don't feel like I performed well. I don't know what I'm doing there. And now my husband's a strength coach, and he trains out of Electrum Performance, and he works with the pro and and competition team at Atos. So, he's working with all, you know, the big tough guys that look indestructible to me. And he had a training session with these guys that day, and he called me that afternoon, and he said, Rose, I want you to know something, you aren't the only one. Everyone had a horrible training session today. Everyone had a horrible training session today. They told me that they even cried after training. And I just had this image of everyone feeling how I felt in that moment, thinking everyone else was better than them. And in my head, I'm just thinking, who's lying? At least one person must have been here beating everyone else up, because how did everyone have a bad training session? So, I think I share that story on the one hand. We don't know what other people are experiencing, right? We don't know what their perception of us is. We don't know what their perception of the training room is. We don't know what their experience is, right? So, whether we want to or not, we are really only comparing our experience to our experience. And then we're adding expectation and weight and assumptions on it, which is just not helpful at all, right? So, I think putting into perspective that really I really do only have my own experience to go off of can be helpful. And realizing we don't know what anyone else is experiencing, because I was shocked to find out that I was not the only one that day that was having such a hard time. And then I think the second thing is, now I'm a pretty analytical and rational person. I really like data. I really like having tangible things that I can improve. And when I feel like I have something tangible that I can work on and change, no matter how I'm feeling about it, I am able to kind of separate my feelings and realize that my feelings aren't always indicative of reality, right? I'm making changes. These things are improving. And so, I will keep journals and logs of various things from training, whether it's what was my self-talk like today? Because the way we talk to ourself massively informs our reality and how we experience things and what our perception is. We can have whatever feelings we have, whatever feelings spontaneously come up, but we don't have to let them drive our perception of that experience or our reality, right? So, maybe it's tracking my self-talk. Maybe it's being very, very specific with what I'm working on, right? If my guard gets passed, or if I get taken down, or whatever happens, cool, all of that can happen, and I can simultaneously be succeeding with the other goals I set out for myself. Maybe I'm working on a specific position, and I'm willingly putting myself in that. I'm gathering data in order to inform how I'm going to improve next, right? And that might come with what appears to be more public, larger failures, but personal victories can still exist within that. And I think recognizing that and being able to identify both, you know, big public failures and personal victories is extremely important. And that could look like anything from self-talk to working on a specific position, specific submission, you know, specific aspect of your game. And so, that's how I think that it's it can takes the emotion out of comparing yourself to yourself. Yeah, well said. Speaker 1: Advice that I often give to people who get into this mindset is to ask yourself how you would feel in a different situation. If it would be reasonable to feel this way. So, as an example, right? It's tax season. You hire your accountant. You pay them some money. They go and they do their taxes for you. It takes them like no time to do it. They just bang it out. You would probably think, hey, great, my taxes are done. I'm happy to have it done. What you would not think is, man, I suck. My accountant is so much better at accounting than me. Look at me, I'm such a loser. Look at how much better they are than me. This guy got the, you know, he was way better at math than me. I am completely inferior. No, you you would not feel that way. Of course not, because you're not a professional accountant. They are. They chose that life. That's their thing. You can benefit from their services and their abilities there, but you would never hold yourself to that standard because that's simply not the life you chose for yourself. In Jiu-Jitsu, hobbyists often expect that they should be as good as the competitors, even though that's not the life they chose for themselves. It's totally okay to just want to be like merely good at Jiu-Jitsu and to not want to be as good as the professionals, right? So, I think it's an unrealistic expectation and an unfair comparison on yourself to to compare yourself to someone who's built their entire life around this. Now, I know that in Jiu-Jitsu, it's a bit different because it's a combat sport, right? Your accountant is not kicking your ass on the mats every week. But once you realize that, hey, this is just a profession, and this person has chosen to make it their profession, whereas for you, it's something you dabble in, I think that helps give a lot of perspective and helps people understand they shouldn't beat themselves up so much over something so silly. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that that's a very helpful perspective. I think the one area that it can get dicey and what I see with people is I never cared about being good at math. You know, I never cared about being good at math. And so, it's easy for me to let that go. But when you care still about being good at the thing that someone else is better than you at, I think that that's where it gets so hard, and where you really have to remember that there is a difference between making it your profession and making it something fun. And I think that there are I think some people may struggle with feeling like their goals within Jiu-Jitsu are invalidated if they aren't professional, right? And so, I think that that's kind of where it gets murky. And so, understanding how I can still improve at this, even if I'm never going to be at that level, right? How I can still fulfill myself within this, even if I'm never going to be at that level, because I think that emotional space where it it's different, but it's so, so similar. It's hard to distinguish at times. And then I think the other thing too, I was having a conversation with someone, and he said, you know what? I'm always going to suck at Jiu-Jitsu. And I said, you know what? There are worse things to suck at. So, also realizing like that's okay too. It's okay. There are worse things to suck at than Jiu-Jitsu. You could be a terrible human and be good at Jiu-Jitsu, and that's not impressive in my eyes, right? Or you could work really hard at personal development, self-development, and be mediocre, bad at Jiu-Jitsu, and that's pretty cool, you know? You're still spending your time doing something pretty cool out of most people's comfort zones. Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of people who are great at Jiu-Jitsu, but bad at being humans. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: If I had a choice, I'd rather be good at being a human than being good at being Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 2: Exactly. So, you know, when all else fails and you can't pull yourself out of that murky emotional space, that's something I always remind myself of at least is there are worse things to be worse at. Speaker 1: Well, let's walk through maybe how people can work with you and what to expect then, Rosie. Let's plug this stuff. If people want to follow you, or if they want to work with you, how do they go about doing that, and what should they expect? Speaker 2: Yeah, so on Instagram, I that's probably the best place to find me is on Instagram. I'm @rosierolls, r o s i e r o l l z. My website is in my bio. There's an application to fill out to jump on a free strategy call with me. So, that's how I start with everyone. We just jump on a free 20 to 30 minute call, get to know each other, see if we are even a good fit as far as goals and personalities. And then from there, everything I do is completely custom for the individual. We'll go through all the steps that I talked about earlier about, you know, setting a baseline, getting to understand values, whether it is for, you know, nutrition, performance. Most people come to me for some combination of both. And then I create a plan and a road map specifically for that person. We touch base every single week, and we continue to track and adapt and progress that plan as we go. Speaker 1: Awesome. And what's the site if people want to check that out? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's thegrapplerslab.com. Speaker 1: Sweet. So, I will put links to all of that in the show notes, both your social and the grappler's lab. Make it easier for people to find. If they're like me, they've probably already forgotten the URL. So, just pop open your podcast player and go to the show notes or the description, and there should be a one-tap link to find Rosie. I'll also put a link to all of our stuff. Everything we make lives at BJJ Mental Models.com. The podcast, our both our full-length episodes like this and our mini episodes, which quickly introduce key Jiu-Jitsu concepts to you. All of that's completely free. There's a ton of content there. Our newsletter also has over 13,000 subscribers, and there are some great thought pieces there. And all of that is completely free. So, I really encourage people, if nothing else, grab all of that stuff. If you do want to go deeper with us, that's what BJJ Mental Models Premium is for. If you like Audible or MasterClass, that's the best way to think about what we do. It's the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses. Why you would want audio courses as opposed to the traditional video that everyone gets? We talk less about individual techniques or steps, and we talk more about the things that kind of more broadly apply and help you get better across the board. Things like mindset, mental models, of course, right? Systems thinking, how to make better decisions on the mat, how to avoid hesitating, how to deal with, you know, complex problems like burnout and imposter syndrome. We've got a massive library there, of course, featuring some of the best coaches in the world. We also host premium podcasts with some of the greats like Rob Bernacki and Emily Kwok. All of that stuff is hosted there as part of that. And we've got some amazing coaching services. If you've been looking for high-level black belts to break down your rolling footage, this is where you go to do that as well. So, again, I'll put a link to all of that. It's all at BJJ Mental Models.com. That is ultimately how we fund this thing. It's the reason why we've never run an advertisement. It's the reason why I'm not here trying to sell you on Bluechu. So, if you want to keep things that way, please go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check out Premium. Again, links to all of our stuff and all of Rosie's stuff in the show notes. But thank you so much for doing this, Rosie. I'm super glad that we got a chance to have this conversation. Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. It was great. Speaker 1: Most welcome. Thanks to the listeners as well. Always appreciate you as well, and we will talk to you in the next one. See you then.