Ep. 341: Jiu-Jitsu Is a Team Sport, feat. Francesco Fonte

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 341. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm here today with a first-timer to the podcast, but someone that I I know quite well through reputation. I got Francesco Fonte on the line. Francesco, my friend, how's it going? Speaker 2: Hi, Steve. Everything's fine here. Thank you. How's it going? Speaker 1: Going well for me myself. Maybe tell everyone a bit about yourself. This is the first time you've been on here. People again, might know your name by reputation because I know you travel in a lot of the same circles as many of our former guests here, but maybe give yourself a quick introduction for the audience. Speaker 2: I will start by saying that I kind of dislike introducing myself, talking about myself, but if you really force me to do it, I'm a Jiu-Jitsu and MMA coach. I'm Italian, but I live in Germany since 17 years now, and I own a gym, I run a gym nearby, not too far from Frankfurt, so pretty central in German. The gym is called Sportschule Next Level. It will be German for School of Sport Next Level. It's open since almost six years. Actually, it would be six years in August. And that's pretty much it, unless you ask me more specific questions. I really feel hard to talk about myself, sorry. Speaker 1: No worries. I always get a kick out of when people struggle with that question. It happens all the time. I would ask, one of the things that you guys just did is you ran a pretty cool camp over there. I think you guys just wrapped it up as of this recording. Maybe talk a little bit about that because people will probably then better understand how you kind of fit into the BJJ Mental Models ecosystem here. Speaker 2: Yeah, rightly said, the ecosystem. Yeah, two weeks ago, we finished, we had the third edition of this camp. Brit Brit Migelson and I, we run the camps together. The camp is called Eco Versus the World. And uh, yeah, the idea of this camp was two-folded. On one side, we wanted to offer our expertise, to share our expertise, our expertise, it might sound, you know, it might be a bit weird, but, you know, what experience we have, we wanted to share it with whoever was interested. And on the other side, running a camp was a very good way to gather like-minded people and coaches that we would be happy to work together with. This year, we had for this edition, we were in Florence, in Italy, and we had Kabir from Canada, your co-citizen. It was a very good weekend. Funny enough, we also had Joseph Chen on the mat. He joined the camp together with a friend of him, David Way from Singapore. Great guys, really. Before that, we had Ed Ingamells joining us for the first edition. We tried to work with Carl Jones also, but it didn't work. It didn't work out at the very end. We will see. We are thinking now towards the end of the year to about the next edition. We are sorting out details as we are talking. Speaker 1: Awesome. Awesome. Well, I will make sure we get a chance to plug your social at the end of this so that people can follow you for more details on that for the next one if that happens. But let's get into the topic here that we wanted to discuss today. When I was asking around and trying to source a topic for this conversation, something that came up attached to your name, which I thought was really cool, was this concept of Jiu-Jitsu as a team sport. And I think that's really interesting. You're not the first person I've heard who's said this. I've heard people say before that Jiu-Jitsu is actually more of a team sport than people think. Ultimately, when we compete, it's us versus another person. Even when we train, it's just one-on-one. But the team dynamics of how you build a gym where everyone is collaborating and working together for mutual gain, that's a really interesting coaching culture conversation. So, I'll maybe turn it over to you to provide an overview here. Where does this philosophy come from and how what is the main reason why you would say that Jiu-Jitsu is more of a team sport than people may think? Speaker 2: So, if you, you know, when we started Jiu-Jitsu, well, we, I, we, I'm pretty sure you also practice from about 20 years, probably. Since how long you practice Jiu-Jitsu, Steve? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's about the same. I started in 2008. Speaker 2: 2008. Yeah, I started not too long, yeah, I think my very first class was 2003, but then I couldn't really get into it before more or less one year after and then the beginning was slow with my teacher being 600 kilometers away. You know, it was a different era of Jiu-Jitsu. And back then, the concept of team family almost was just part of the culture. It was very, very strong, very felt at every level, you know, it was the idea of the Creonte was very felt. Luckily enough, we moved away from this almost, you know, because I always found it a bit cultish. So, luckily enough, we moved away from this kind of cultish approach with this idea of having to be loyal to your family, otherwise you're a traitor and things like that. But still, you cannot avoid to form a certain bond with people with whom you share hours every week, testing each other and pushing each other to be better at the sport. This is not just Jiu-Jitsu related, in pretty much every sport, the team plays a role, plays a super important role because these are, the team are the people that you will see regularly, the people that get to know you, the people that, hopefully, get to motivate you. And part of the gym experience, let's say, it should be wanting to see these people regardless of the training. You should be happy to go to the gym to see your training buddy at a personal level, not just because it's going to give you a good training. Ideally, the gym should be a third place. I heard about the idea of the third place reading randomly almost about Starbucks marketing strategies. And what Starbucks wanted to do was to become the third place where people go, you know, when people are not at home, not in the office, but they still want, if maybe stuff to do or whatever, you know, they still need to sit at the laptop and do their their work, then they go to Starbucks. That was the positioning, let's say, of of Starbucks, right? And this idea of the third place, in my opinion, fits perfectly to what a gym should be. A gym should definitely be a third place. You're not in the office, you're not at work, you are not at home. You go to the gym. The people in the gym should, your relation with the people in the gym should make it so that even if, for example, you are injured or tired, you still feel like going there and sit in a corner and banter a bit with the people on the mat, tease them, have a conversation with whoever is available there. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about this on the show as well. This idea of Jiu-Jitsu's potential as a third place. One of my friends, Jeff Shaw, he's the head coach at Bellingham BJJ in Washington, has said before that he thinks Jiu-Jitsu has untapped potential to become kind of a a community staple. Sort of like how you know, when you go to a downtown in a small town, there's often a store or a place where people kind of congregate, like a coffee shop, a place where people get together outside of work and outside of home to focus on socializing and community networking. That kind of stuff is very attractive to me as a Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. I love the idea of Jiu-Jitsu being a third place where people can get together to socialize. And I think the older I get and the longer I'm involved in the sport, the less I really care about the combat sports side of things and, you know, even how effective the art is, and the more I care about the community side of things. Because I think you're right, it is the community piece of Jiu-Jitsu that's going to turn this into a lifelong art for people. They might get into Jiu-Jitsu because of self-defense or because they want to get in shape or maybe they want to achieve competitive success. But the thing that's going to keep them in Jiu-Jitsu for the rest of their life is the fact that this is where they go to see their friends. So, I really think it is wise for coaches to lean into this and to never underestimate the importance of their gym as a place of community. That is something that many coaches, in my opinion, neglect to think about because they're so focused on teaching the technique. Speaker 2: Absolutely, absolutely. And uh, truth be told, I'm not particularly good at that. I'm very, I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm not an easy person and I come out very often as extremely blunt and people might complain that my jokes are, how do you say, old school. But, um, luckily enough, I gathered around myself other coaches who do a probably a better job than me at making the gym a place more welcoming. I benefited from it and that changed myself. It made me an easier person to the people around me. So, that's an a very important point for me. I've always been aware of the fact that Jiu-Jitsu and the gym, the combat sport gym in general, it is not strictly Jiu-Jitsu related, as a the gym has the potential for to become a third place. Not just the potential, but almost it's just what it should be. A place where you don't just go to train, you also go to enjoy the company of people that you are happy to have around. A personal challenge I had there is that, as I said, I am not an extremely sociable person. I can come off as very blunt. I can make jokes that upset people. But I still wanted to push the gym in this direction. And I found coaches, I brought in the gym coaches who actually contrary to me are very good at this. They helped me a lot in creating this third place feeling for the gym, especially the kids coaches, Alice, our latest addition to the team, the kickboxing coach, Sam. And the side effect of this is that while the gym was becoming a more relaxing, fun, easy place to be with a better feeling of community, I myself became less hard to be around because I could enjoy a lot more all the the things and the time that goes around training. Does it make sense? Speaker 1: 100% makes sense. I've said before that I think the most important thing for Jiu-Jitsu over the long term, it has to be fun. It has to be something you enjoy. We can talk all day about what training method is most efficient or how to maximize every moment in the gym or the science of skill development, but none of that matters if people hate the experience and they don't stay over the long term. So, I think it's very smart for coaches to make sure that the culture and the team dynamic is something they're actively focused on building. Many coaches are so focused on the Jiu-Jitsu side of things that they neglect everything else about running a business. It's very common for Jiu-Jitsu business people to be so focused on the teaching that they're not thinking about things like sales or marketing or financials. But I think also community and team building are a really important topic for every gym owner to think about. How do we make this gym not just a good place to learn Jiu-Jitsu, but a place where people want to come and hang out? I think that the best gyms are places where people would want to go and hang out even if there was no Jiu-Jitsu. I think that's an important lens to look at things through. The gym should be the kind of place that people enjoy going to, regardless of whether they're training or not. Speaker 2: That's what, that's exactly the goal. From a coaching perspective, if you are the head coach of a gym, you are going to hire other coaches who who are more specialized in something that you know, but not as deep as it's necessary to elevate the level of the gym, right? So, in my case, I'm the head coach, whatever head coach means, right? I can coach pretty decently for Jiu-Jitsu and for MMA. When it comes to striking, it's better if I hire a specialist. And uh, it's the same about the social aspect of the gym. If it's an area where I know that I am not so skilled, I'm going to surround myself with people that are better than me at that and benefit from this in two ways. One way is again, the effect on the gym and on my clients. The other way is my personal benefit because, you know, we all become better person if we are surrounded, if we are immersed in a positive environment where we feel relaxed, we feel at home, the stress melts a bit down and we can forget about the office for a while, not just because we are rolling, but because it's nice to be on the couch with that other guy that I only see on the gym and we can bully a bit each other and then throw jokes around and stuff like that. Speaker 1: Yeah, this might be a dated reference, but it reminds me of the old sitcom Cheers, right? The place where you go where everybody knows your name. That's kind of what Jiu-Jitsu is to a lot of people. And many people don't think about it that much, but I can tell you, back when, you know, the pandemic happened and I wasn't able to train for the first time in a long time, it really made me realize how much Jiu-Jitsu mattered to me as a piece of my life, not because of the self-defense or competitive aspect actually, but because that was a social outlet. If I don't have Jiu-Jitsu, my life is nothing but like work and stuff I got to do around the house and home life. So, Jiu-Jitsu added an entire third place dimension to my life that wasn't there elsewise. And that really made me realize this thing is more important to me and presumably to a lot of other people, it's more important than just learning how to defend yourself or how to get in shape. Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. The pandemic, yeah, that was going to the gym and finding this empty mat. The fact that people were not there hurt more than the fact that I had nobody to train with. I wanted to have my guys there. I wanted to throw a joke at them. I wanted to talk a bit with them. I just wanted to see them. It's, you know, it might sound a bit cheesy or whatever, but it's just what it is. Again, the goal definitely is to have a gym where people go even if they're tired and they don't want to train, but they're still coming because of the place. Maybe they're injured, they can't train. They're still coming, sit on the mat and advise, corner, yell something, crack a joke, train, you know, it's a sign of success when at the end of the training, they change, they shower, they change, and then they go on the couch and they sit there. They're still not going home. You know what I mean? Speaker 1: Yep, absolutely. I've even heard many coaches talk about how one of the things they would love to do if budget permitted it would be open a coffee shop or a juice bar inside their gym so that people have an excuse to come even when they're not training, right? To make it more of a place where people can just socialize. I think that that is a really cool vision for the sport. Speaker 2: Yeah, for the place gym, that's definitely something that we should aim to. Speaker 1: Here's a question for you. Jiu-Jitsu is, when it comes down to, you know, after you slap and you bump, what happens, it is ultimately a one-on-one competitive endeavor. Or you could, you know, you can argue that when you're training, it's not really a competition. You're both there for skill development with your partner. But at the end of the day, many people, especially beginners, they struggle to get out of that one-on-one competitive mindset because they look at Jiu-Jitsu as a combat sport. It's me versus the other person. And it can be hard sometimes to think about Jiu-Jitsu as a team sport or to think about the team dynamic when you're in the middle of a roll with someone else. How do you coach students out of that process of kind of looking at Jiu-Jitsu as this thing where they come in and it's a fight club? How do you help them along that journey so that they get to this point where Jiu-Jitsu is more than just a place to beat people up or get beat up, and they realize that the other people on the mats are actually their friends and their partners and not their rivals? Speaker 2: I don't know if this is the answer that you want to hear, but I don't really have a process for that. What happens is that the general atmosphere of the gym is pretty relaxed. Even my competitors, even those who are serious about fighting, and I'm talking about people who fight MMA, I'm there's a lot of bunch of guys who are moving to professional level in MMA. Even then, they will welcome you with a smile and they will crack a joke with you and they will just involve you in the training. Now, this might come, you know, again, it might sound like I am really trying to shoe it in, but it's just what it is. Training with games all the time helps because the general atmosphere of the training is not about beating beating your partner, is about, you know, playfully overcoming something, scoring more points than you. Beside the fact that we can also play more group games where where we can have fun all together trying to steal the ball from the other team. The fact that training is not made in a way where you come, you do your exercise and now you go and you spar, but rather you come, you start to play the game, which not always has a direct resemblance with fighting, helps in in my opinion, this helps in shifting your perspective. It's a combat sport, yes, but it can still be playful and we can still tease each other when we are winning the game instead of winning the fight. There is a subtle shift in how you psychologically deal with the exercise if you talk about a game instead of a fight. Now, of course, this is not everything that there is, but it definitely plays a role in my opinion. Also the fact that we have a lot of inside jokes on the mat that people gets introduced to helps to create interpersonal relation. So, it's more about the general atmosphere than about having a checklist and a process on how to introduce people to it. Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's funny you bring this up because this is, in my opinion, one of the shadow benefits of taking a gamified, games-based approach to Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, we can talk all day about scientifically why that might be preferable to a more traditional approach where the instructor just gives orders to people. But the other reason why this is so beneficial, the games-based approach, is because of framing. When you are playing a game, your mindset and your mentality and your understanding of your relationship with your training partner, it's very different from if you're trying to learn a combat sport. When I started Jiu-Jitsu, you know, there really was no talk about things like ecological dynamics or a gamified approach to Jiu-Jitsu. There were people who were doing it, but sort of just they kind of stumbled upon it. It wasn't necessarily a conscious thing that they were doing, at least not where I was training. And the mental shift that happens when you look at Jiu-Jitsu as a game is very different because now you're not fighting, you're playing. And this I think is one of the more profound shifts that's happened in the sport in the last 20 or 30 years, the move away from marketing Jiu-Jitsu as a combat sport, a fight club, to teach people how to be better at violence, to move away from that to this is an activity where we use games to develop skill. Regardless of what we're actually doing, the framing of the problem changes the relationship that people have with it. And I think all sorts of good things happen when people come to Jiu-Jitsu to play a game rather than to learn to fight. I'd love to hear if you agree with that or kind of what your experiences line up with there. Speaker 2: I absolutely agree with that. Most of what we do, like easily 80% of our training is playing. Playing and trying to win the game, not to beat each other. Then, of course, when it comes performance day, eventually, I need to crank it up a bit. But with the background of a gamified approach and a gamified mentality to everything, even when we crank it up, it's very rare that people get angry at each other or they start, you know, there's no being a hothead. It's the general atmosphere just doesn't allow it. It doesn't happen. What I am trying to now, the next step that I am trying to implement, let's say, especially with the youngest people, because you said, there has to be a shift in culture where people understand that they're going to Jiu-Jitsu, yes, of course, self-defense, yes, of course, fighting, but to solve problems in a playful atmosphere. Do you know a place where you do something like that? Skateboard, for example. So, that's something else, that's a kind of atmosphere, a kind of mindset, there it is. This is a mindset that I'm trying to introduce in the gym, where in sparring, just like a skateboarder would try a trick, and if it doesn't happen, all good, you try it again. In sparring, I would like people to try tricks, the trick of a berimbolo, not that I'm taking your back to strangle you, but I can pull a trick on you. Just like I would do at the skateboard park, and I can do the dump and fold and spin the table or the. Speaker 1: You understand what I mean? 100%. And I agree with you completely. When you look at Jiu-Jitsu as an individual activity and a fight sport, what happens is you start thinking of Jiu-Jitsu as a fight. And what that means is you're afraid to make a mistake because in a fight, the last thing you want to do is make a mistake that could leave an opening that your opponent could exploit. And taking that individual fight sports mentality into your training means that you're going to become mistake avoidant. You're going to be afraid to do things wrong because you don't want to get punished. And when you're afraid to do things wrong, that means you're afraid to experiment, you're afraid to play. You lose exploration opportunities and that's going to impact your ability to learn. Speaker 2: But that's a form of stress. That's a very stress-inducing state of mind to be locked with this other person and you absolutely need to give up no inch because otherwise they take your arm and now they're going to beat you and you're you lost. They beat you up. Ah, fuck that. What if we are using each other to pull a trick? Just like I would do on the skateboard, right? And if I can pull the trick, you laugh about it. Like if my partner can pull a trick on me, I'm going to be happy about it because it's cool. Even if I'm on the receiving side of the trick, it was cool. And now I can enjoy it instead of getting angry about it. And now again, I'm surrounded by people that I enjoy being around because we're not beating each other up, we're playing. It's, you know, then of course, this thing escalates and it goes, you know, it creates other situation where, for example, if I pull a twister on a guy, I will call his friend to look at the situation. Oh, look, he's inside a twister and now we are all laughing about it, right? Speaker 1: Yep. I remember when I started Jiu-Jitsu, and I think this is a probably a very relatable thing to the new people, but I would really obsess over my performance on the mat. And particularly, I would obsess over whether I was winning or losing in training, which I think we all know is a stupid thing to do, but it's also hard to stop yourself from doing that sometimes. And I've said many times on this podcast that your best mindset is focus on competing with yourself. Don't try to be better than your training partners, try to be better than the person that you were yesterday. That's the only skill development timeline that really matters over the long term. But that's very hard for people to do sometimes, to be able to pause that competitive mindset and look at things from a playful perspective. I think language helps, like you said, if you talk to your students in the context of this is a game, that's going to bring in a different energy than if you tell them this is a deadly, a serious combat sport, you know, born in the violence of the streets of Brazil, O, lions and tigers and samurai and all of that. You know, if you throw out that stuff, then yeah, people are going to come in and they're going to take that energy from the coach and they're going to train like this is a fight. And again, like we talked about earlier, that leads to a fear of making mistakes and a fear of exploration and trying something new. Friend of the show, Scott Siveright, you probably know him, he's a well-known eco coach. Something that he once told me is that in training, mistakes are a feature, they're not a bug. And I love that saying because that's something you hear a lot in in my background in software development. People will always say, that's not a bug, that's a feature. Speaker 2: I've been a video game tester, so yeah, I know. Speaker 1: Yeah. But in the context of Jiu-Jitsu, it makes sense. We actually want to be encouraging people to make mistakes. So, if your coaching style is about mistake avoidance, if your goal as a coach is to try to make sure that your students make no mistakes at all, I mean, that might sound good on paper, but what you're actually doing is you're taking away their best opportunities to learn, right? Speaker 2: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The way I see it, you need to do mistakes to learn something. It's you are learning, making mistake, it means that you are learning. If I remove mistakes from the process, I'm not helping you at all, like zero. What I can do is try to minimize the number of mistakes that you have to do before understanding something, but I cannot reduce them to zero because then I would have the opposite effect and you would just stop learning. Easy as that. But then again, there are very few things that I will qualify as full-blown mistakes. The way I look at things, there are everything I'm trying to do when I do Jiu-Jitsu is tip in the odds in my favor. And there are choices that are going to tip the odds in my favor more than other choices. So, of course, I direct people towards more safe choices. But other things are not a mistake by themselves. Everything becomes a mistake only only in relation to how your opponent react to that. So, if we if we remove this fear of doing mistake, but we just embrace experimentation, we're going to have more relaxed people, less stressed, we're going to try to try the trick. And now they they can be happy about finally pulling this trick that eluded them for a while. Speaker 1: From a coach's standpoint, what do you do to fine-tune your gym to bring out this mindset in people? I've heard really interesting approaches from different coaches about how to do this. One of our coaches, Josh McKenney, the host of the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu Show, one of the things that he talks about is that he tells his students to take this mindset of what he calls designated winner. And the idea is to almost add an a scripted element to the roll, kind of like a pro wrestling match, where at the end of the day, you both share a common goal. And that might be to help one specific person, you know, learn how to finish an armbar properly. So, the other person is there and they're putting up realistic resistance, and they are trying. But at the end of the day, both grapplers share the same goal, which might be to help one specific person with one specific thing, or it might be to get to a part of the game where both people are getting skill development in the areas where they want. And I thought that was really interesting to take this kind of pro wrestling approach where ultimately the outcome is scripted. You're both you and your partner are on the same page about the goal, but you are still actually rolling competitively on the journey to that goal. Do you have any tricks like that or coaching suggestions for people who want to add this team-based dynamic, this playful element to their gym? Speaker 2: I actually use every now and then games that are so rigged that one of the player is going to lose the game. And that's done, of course, on purpose to help the other guy to develop some specific skill or technique or setup or whatever. But honestly, I'm using less and less this kind of games in favor of games where we are both, either we are both try to win, or one person has a condition to maintain and the other person has the task to disrupt this condition. I'm moving away from extremely rigged games. I prefer games where I can challenge myself to pull up something that surprise you, so to say. Now, I like to look at things holistically and playing games during training, of course, is not the only thing that helps to create a team atmosphere. Everything goes, there are several factors and you cannot point out one that does the trick. It's a general thing. So, there are a few good practices that every gym should have, like welcoming people who are coming, who are coming for the first time, the trials, put them in the center of the room and not in the don't let them on the border of the training area. Crack a joke with them, that's very important and so on and so on. Of course, playing the game has a role in all in all of this. But there has to be a general feeling of people working together. Now, because of course, it's a team sport, but it's not a team game because we're not it's not football where the whole team need to interact together to achieve a goal. Speaker 1: So, one thing that coaches might say is that, hey, this is all easier said than done when you're in a room full of a whole bunch of people of varying experience levels, it can be hard to get them all on the same page about this. And you brought up earlier that it's hard to really create a checklist process for how to teach someone to think of Jiu-Jitsu as a game and to think of their training partners as part of their team. It seems like that might be something that's just best done over time. And that's where things like gym culture come into play. And you brought up earlier that, you know, building and developing gym culture is not necessarily the thing that you yourself feel best at, but that you can bring other people onto your team who do that. I'd love to maybe explore that. How do you go about crafting this kind of culture and how do you make sure that people feel welcome and feel invited in these situations and that they understand that ultimately, you know, this is all a game and these other people there your teammates. Speaker 2: Again, it's not a checklist, but I can definitely make a list of things that happen in my gym and that in my opinion, help a lot in creating the team atmosphere. First of all, and I really put this very high in the list, we joke a lot. I say we bully each other all the time continuously. Even with kids actually. If I'm on the mat with kids, I will, quote unquote, bully them all enormously. But I do believe that people, kids, adults, everyone, immediately understand when you are not doing it to diminish them, but you are doing it just to have fun together. You follow me? Speaker 1: I do. It's less about what you're doing and it's more about the intent. Speaker 2: The intent is super important. Exactly, super important. I had this running joke in the gym about my anti-bully program and uh, you know, so this is something that we would do, for example. There's a new kid in and I will tell the kid, you know, we have, I will tell the kid and and in front of the parent, you know, we have a very efficient anti-bully program in the gym. And then I will call a random guy from the mat, hey, Julian, come here. Please explain the people our anti-bully program because you are a successful example of our anti-bully program. Oh, yeah, the anti-bully program works that Francesco bully you so much that everything outside of the gym is just fresh water. Speaker 1: And we laugh about it and the kid gets it. The parents get it. So, quote unquote, making fun of each other, poking at each other all the time, it helps. I think it's really important and it helps a lot in bonding people together, creating a bond in the team because if we can laugh together, then we can also push each other. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. One of uh, the friends of our show here, Aaron Hurley, she's a Cobrinha black belt and a mental performance coach. Something that she has said, she's advocated for the use of humor and laughter as a tool for learning Jiu-Jitsu. And she has said that humor is a performance enhancer. And I agree with that. There's things that humor adds to your gym that you're not going to get just from regular techniques. Humor is a very powerful icebreaker. And that matters a lot when people come into a Jiu-Jitsu gym for the first time because they're scared. I mean, I remember going into a Jiu-Jitsu gym for the first time, just working up the courage to get into the gym was super scary. And then once I got there, you know, putting on the gi for the first time and not knowing what I was doing and getting beat up by a bunch of strangers, it's a scary experience. And once you get over that hump, it gets a little bit easier. But the sooner that you realize that, hey, we're just all here to have fun and games and these people are your friends, the sooner you get to that mindset, the better your Jiu-Jitsu journey is going to be, both in terms of enjoyment and skill development. So, I love this idea of adding an element of humor to your training and doing so deliberately. I think that really matters. If you look at, you know, the various tactics that sales people use, a big part of what they're trying to do when they're trying to make a sale is connect with people at a human level. It's really hard to sell someone something if they don't like you or if they don't have any relationship with you. But if you build that relationship with the person, then everything on top of that relationship becomes way easier. And I think many coaches fail to think this through. I mean, I have trained with Jiu-Jitsu coaches where just their body language told me right off the bat that they really didn't give a shit if I was there or not. You know, my my presence was not something that they looked forward to. I was just another warm body on the mat. I was just another membership that paid every month. And that kind of culture really doesn't lend itself well to good Jiu-Jitsu training. So, I think that as a coach, but even as a student, even as a more senior student who's looking to help the team culture and help expand the gym and help meet and make new friends, even for those people, adding humor to the gym, I think is tremendously important. Speaker 2: Yes, look, because we are talking about the team, right? Eventually, a team is just a group of individuals, okay? Now, the way we talk to each other, if I look at at a group of individuals and I look at the way they talk to each other, I will get a very precise idea of how tied this group is, just from the way they talk to each other. And the more formal is the way they talk to each other, the less tied that group is. There's no friendship going on there. Because one thing that happens when we are friends is that our tone of conversation becomes less formal, and if we say something that the other person can jump on to crack a joke, the other person will not hesitate, right? Like your best friends, you will not forgive anything to your best friends that you can use to laugh, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, right? I mean, it's once you get to know someone and your barriers are down with that person, you kind of have that relationship with them where you're joking around, you're willing to kind of tease each other, but in good fun. And again, it comes down to intent. That's very different from doing so maliciously. Speaker 2: Yes, the intent changes everything. So, imagine now this guy was never been in a combat sport gym and is expecting to come in a place where people are looking at each other like dogs with a bit of saliva coming out of their mouth, ready to jump at each other's throat. And instead, while I'm welcoming him, he sees people laughing together, people cracking a joke at each other, people having, he sees inside joke, right? Look, we have a, it's not an inside joke, it's a, I would call it inside behavior in the gym. In a funny way, I call it the the culture of the slap. So, if one guy says or does something, I don't want to use the word stupid, but, you know, debatable. I will tell his friend, hey, dude, slap him behind the head. And the guy will will slap him behind the head. Not hard, not, you know, it's not going to hit him with malevolence. But at the level of body language, it's a very clear way to show that we have light dynamics in between people that allows us to tease each other, to laugh, to drop our defenses because eventually that's what we're doing. We are dropping our defenses while we are all together so that we can enjoy better each other's company without the stress of extremely formal relations. Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, and I I hear of people talking about their gym culture sometimes and I really feel bad for them because it it sounds like some people at their gyms just don't really enjoy the people there. They kind of look at them as rivals or even enemies sometimes. And when you hear these stories of just like terrible gym culture, often there's tons and tons of infighting and just people not getting along. And I think maybe part of this comes from the way that the coach has has structured or guided the culture of the team. If you're not playful with the people around you, then it's a lot harder to look at them as friends and as collaborators. So, I really think it is important to be playful in the gym, to to kind of joke around like you said, and to get people engaged in that culture so they're not just sitting on the sidelines and kind of acting like strangers. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, what defines you in the gym? Is it the fact that you beat everybody else that what define your role in the gym? Because if that's what defines you, you have a gym culture problem. It's eventually it's that easy. Right? There cannot be team if everything we're doing is trying to step on each other's head to see who's the most alpha. That's not how a team works. Maybe a tribe, but again, like we said at the very beginning, we should by now, we should have moved far from that family loyalty Creonte mentality of 20 years ago. Speaker 1: Right. Something that people will push back on here. There's a lot of people who are constantly concerned about whether Jiu-Jitsu is getting watered down and, you know, all of the hobbyists are turning it into this silly play game and it's taking it away from the the roots of fight and ultimately it's a fight sport. So, sometimes people will push back and say that like, hey, no, we want we want our students to be tough. We don't want things to be all fun and games. What are your thoughts on this? Because I know that we can push back on this. I'd love to hear how you deal with that argument. Speaker 2: I disagree extremely with this argument that Jiu-Jitsu is getting watered down. I I disagree extremely. The base is getting larger and larger, which means we are attracting more people who are perfectly happy with doing Jiu-Jitsu as a social activity. But this is not watering down of the art because at the other side of the spectrum, we are seeing athletes who with very few years of training are reaching levels of Jiu-Jitsu that were unthinkable 10 years ago. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, you would have never believed that a guy from Singapore with four years of training would get as good as Joseph Chen is. 20 years ago, you would have never believed that a guy from Australia would become an internationally competitive black belt in four or five years. So, where is the watering down exactly? What's happening is that Jiu-Jitsu is reaching more and more and more people. So, it expands in both direction. When the base expands, you will attract people who are perfectly fine with having a basic Jiu-Jitsu that is practiced more as a social activity than a combat sport. And now if you just look at this guy and your mentality is, die, you know, your mentality is, strangle them or die trying. Of course, you're going to talk about watering down, but you're completely missing the point because on the other side of this expansion, there are athletes who are reaching levels that were unthinkable just a few years ago and they're reaching them in much shorter time than when we started. So, exactly where is the watering down of the art in this? There's no watering down. Speaker 1: I agree completely. This I think, when people talk about things like, you know, the sport is is getting watered down. What I really think of is this is an example of people who come in with a mindset of exclusion. They're defining Jiu-Jitsu about how can we keep out the people we don't want here. Whereas I think that Jiu-Jitsu and most communities are at their best when you flip that around and you think of inclusion. How can we bring as many people into the community as possible? How can we bridge divides and make the pie bigger? Because if you think of things in terms of exclusion and your concept is like, we want only the purest, most effective Jiu-Jitsu. We don't want anyone training here unless they're hardcore and they're really awesome at this. What's going to wind up happening is you're going to wind up with like a room of five maladjusted weirdos and no one else is going to want to train with them. And that's basically the situation that we had back in like the 90s, right? And I think everyone would agree that Jiu-Jitsu is way more impressive now than it was back then. And part of what enabled it to get to that point is the fact that Jiu-Jitsu became a lot more inclusive. It became much more appealing to hobbyists and people who wanted to train this just for fun or for, you know, kids who maybe didn't have any competitive goals, but their parents just wanted a fun sport to put them in. And what it winds up happening is just through the law of large numbers, if you build a sport that's inclusive like that, where everyone has an opportunity to come in, Speaker 2: You have more chances to catch the champion that that otherwise would have stayed outside of the sport. Speaker 1: Exactly. Yep, statistically speaking, you're more likely to bring in the super athletes. I got fan mail many years ago, back when we first started uh, BJJ Mental Models. I got a fan letter from some uh, like 15-year-old orange belt who told me how much he loved the podcast. Flash forward to today, that kid is Joseph Chen. And, you know, I've I've gotten to watch him grow up and get frankly way better at Jiu-Jitsu and way smarter about Jiu-Jitsu than I ever could be. Speaker 2: In an incredibly short time. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the crazy thing. And it just makes me think, if you were to take this mindset of exclusivity and we only let people into Jiu-Jitsu if they're the exact type of person that we want to see, would we have ever found a person like Joseph Chen, right? I mean, there's going to be a lot of parents out there who would never put their kid into a into a sport that they think is violent and weird and crazy with a high risk of injury. But if you make this the kind of place where people want to come to, then that makes it a lot easier to find those star athletes anyway. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, definitely. Not only that, but if we expand the base, we make the sport more inclusive, then what happens? We can hope to have a situation in the gym where the hobbyist, even knowing very well that for a set of reasons cannot perform as good as the athlete does, is still interested in helping the athlete to reach to medal or to perform at at his best when it's performance day because he feels part of the team. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Right? Absolutely. Speaker 2: So, again, if why Jiu-Jitsu is a team sport? Because Jiu-Jitsu is a team sport, or at least can be a team sport because if you coach play your cards well, you don't even need to separate the hobbyist from the seasoned competitors because with the correct environment and the correct mindset on both side, hobbyist and competitor, the hobbyist can still be a very valuable help for the competitor and take pride in the result of the team member, not just because they are wearing the same t-shirt, but because scaled to his capability, he helped the competitor to reach that podium. Speaker 1: Right? This is something that not enough people discuss in this sport. Um, the importance of the hobbyists and the less experienced people in the room. Many people tell me all the time, they're worried that they're not adding value to the training room because they're not a black belt or they're not a coach or they're not good at this. And I would say that often it is those regular people who make some of the biggest impact on the gym because they're the ones who model the culture. When new people come into the gym, the way that the other regular people, the hobbyists, the casuals, the way that those people treat those new people is a big part of what's going to dictate whether people come in and they stay or whether they come in once and they bounce off. I mean, if you've never trained Jiu-Jitsu and you walk into a room and it's just 10 black belts beating each other up and they don't pay any attention to you, there's a good chance you're just not going to come back. But if you walk into a gym and there's a diverse group of people of all experience levels and you see a bunch of other regular people who are also are still learning this or maybe they're not great at it and they're all just having fun, you're more likely to want to come back the next time. So, when people worry about, hey, I I feel like I'm not contributing to the gym because I'm not good at Jiu-Jitsu. Being good at Jiu-Jitsu is one of the least important elements of actually building a good Jiu-Jitsu club, right? The culture and the people that you're going to train with often matter a lot more than how many medals the coach has won. Speaker 2: Yes. But then again, you want large numbers also to statistically increase your chances of getting a very talented person in. Speaker 1: Well, also to statistically increase your chances of making more money too, right? I mean, it's not just about competitive records. Speaker 2: Well, so if we talk business, then I did not consider at all the business aspect of it in this conversation, but so, okay, let's talk business then. Yeah, how do you get people to stick? How do you get people to be happy to come back and uh, to stick around as long as possible? You don't do that with medals. Now, I'm not saying that medals don't matter because a wall full of medal is is still a sign of quality, but the majority of your clients are not there for for those medals. The majority of those clients are there because they have to wind up, they have to relax after a day at work. The majority of your clients are there because they want to get some self-confidence and or they want to bounce back from having been for years the guy who who just sits in the corner of the disco and never goes to engage in social conversations or anything. That's the majority of your clients, not the guy who wants to be an athlete and wants to be on any podium on every possible tournament. Speaker 1: Well, Francesco, this was awesome. Is there anything else you wanted to discuss or share here on this topic before we tie this up? Speaker 2: Nothing that can just pop in mind right now just like this. I actually think we had a good conversation. It went, I was a bit worried of not having of not being able to talk about the importance of a fun and funny environment in your gym for one hour, but eventually we did it. Speaker 1: People always say that. They always say, I don't think there's enough to talk about for a whole episode on this topic and there always is. But if you just keep digging enough, there's always interesting angles that you can bring up. And maybe this is a good time to point people in your direction. If they want to learn more about your club or if they want to follow you on social media to ask you questions or to learn more about upcoming events that you might be running, how do they go about doing that? Speaker 2: Just find me on Instagram, Francesco Fonte 76. That's the the username. But if you just type Francesco Fonte, I'm pretty sure that you will find that Jiu-Jitsu guy with this name, that one Jiu-Jitsu guy with this name. Speaker 1: I'm not exactly John Smith. So, that is my favorite thing about Jiu-Jitsu, which is that the community is still so small that it's unlikely you're going to ever find two people with the same name. And it's pretty easy to figure out if you're talking to the right person because, you know, you search for a name and you see all of the people with that name and one of them is going to be wearing a gi or a rash guard and you know, that's my person. I found him. Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. Speaker 1: Feel free to search for me on on Instagram and uh, any question you might possibly have on gym culture or business-related questions or coaching questions and anything, just shoot a message. I really take time to answer to absolutely every message coming my way. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. Well, I will make it easy for people. I will put links to your social in the show notes. So, if people want to reach out to Francesco, just go to your podcast player and go to the description or show notes and there should be just a one-tap link that you can click to find him. I'll also put a link to everything we make. I'll keep it simple though, it all lives at BJJ Mental Models.com. Our podcast, one of the most popular in the world in this category, is of course free. We also do weekly mini episodes. If you don't want to listen to me talk for an hour, we get to the meat of things and just do quick five or 10-minute conversations about key concepts in Jiu-Jitsu, that's also free. And of course, our newsletter, 13,000 subscribers so far, is also completely free. So, please do check those out. And of course, I always tell people, if you haven't already done so, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. We're at about 600 subscribers now, which makes it, I think, one of the bigger services in the world. It's definitely the only one of its kind that I'm aware of. Our focus is not on technical instruction so much, but it's more on talking about ideas. I really want BJJ Mental Models to be a marketplace of ideas. And part of what we try to do is build a place where it's easy to learn some of the big picture thoughts and concepts that you need to really be able to make everything else in Jiu-Jitsu make sense. And of course, the community, talking about community and team, is an ever-growing and ever-increasing part of the offering. Many people join Premium just because of the community alone. We also run a ton of camps and stuff. And so, if you want to be a part of all of that, you got to go Premium. Again, if you want to do that, link in the show notes, but BJJ Mental Models.com is the place you go to do that. So, please do look into that if you haven't already and please do follow Francesco. Um, definitely want to give this guy a boost. I hear nothing but great things about you, man. So, thanks so much for coming by. I thought this was a really cool conversation. I know it's pretty late your time, so I will let you get to bed. But thank you for doing this, Francesco. Speaker 2: No, thank you, Steve, for the invitation. And uh, thank you to anyone who made it through one hour of podcast with me. Speaker 1: People always say that. They always say, I don't think there's enough to talk about for a whole episode on this topic and there always is. But if you just keep digging enough, there's always interesting angles that you can bring up. And maybe this is a good time to point people in your direction. If they want to learn more about your club or if they want to follow you on social media to ask you questions or to learn more about upcoming events that you might be running, how do they go about doing that? Just find me on Instagram, Francesco Fonte 76. That's the the username. But if you just type Francesco Fonte, I'm pretty sure that you will find that Jiu-Jitsu guy with this name, that one Jiu-Jitsu guy with this name. I'm not exactly John Smith. So, that is my favorite thing about Jiu-Jitsu, which is that the community is still so small that it's unlikely you're going to ever find two people with the same name. And it's pretty easy to figure out if you're talking to the right person because, you know, you search for a name and you see all of the people with that name and one of them is going to be wearing a gi or a rash guard and you know, that's my person. I found him. Yeah, definitely. Feel free to search for me on on Instagram and uh, any question you might possibly have on gym culture or business-related questions or coaching questions and anything, just shoot a message. I really take time to answer to absolutely every message coming my way. Amazing, sir. Well, I will make it easy for people. I will put links to your social in the show notes. So, if people want to reach out to Francesco, just go to your podcast player and go to the description or show notes and there should be just a one-tap link that you can click to find him. I'll also put a link to everything we make. I'll keep it simple though, it all lives at BJJ Mental Models.com. Our podcast, one of the most popular in the world in this category, is of course free. We also do weekly mini episodes. If you don't want to listen to me talk for an hour, we get to the meat of things and just do quick five or 10-minute conversations about key concepts in Jiu-Jitsu, that's also free. And of course, our newsletter, 13,000 subscribers so far, is also completely free. So, please do check those out. And of course, I always tell people, if you haven't already done so, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. We're at about 600 subscribers now, which makes it, I think, one of the bigger services in the world. It's definitely the only one of its kind that I'm aware of. Our focus is not on technical instruction so much, but it's more on talking about ideas. I really want BJJ Mental Models to be a marketplace of ideas. And part of what we try to do is build a place where it's easy to learn some of the big picture thoughts and concepts that you need to really be able to make everything else in Jiu-Jitsu make sense. And of course, the community, talking about community and team, is an ever-growing and ever-increasing part of the offering. Many people join Premium just because of the community alone. We also run a ton of camps and stuff. And so, if you want to be a part of all of that, you got to go Premium. Again, if you want to do that, link in the show notes, but BJJ Mental Models.com is the place you go to do that. So, please do look into that if you haven't already and please do follow Francesco. Um, definitely want to give this guy a boost. I hear nothing but great things about you, man. So, thanks so much for coming by. I thought this was a really cool conversation. I know it's pretty late your time, so I will let you get to bed. But thank you for doing this, Francesco. No, thank you, Steve, for the invitation. And uh, thank you to anyone who made it through one hour of podcast with me. Hey, in the Jiu-Jitsu landscape, one hour is not that long. Some people run these things for like three or four hours. I don't know how that's even possible. I would probably fall asleep trying to do a three-hour podcast marathon. So, we'll keep it to one hour here for the listeners' benefit. But thanks again, Francesco. This is great. Thank you, Steve. That's welcome. And thanks to the listeners as well. My sincere appreciation for everyone who hangs out with us and I'll talk to you next time. See you then.