Mini Ep. 95: Impostor Syndrome

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course, and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And this is going to be the mini episode where we talk about imposter syndrome, one of the hottest topics in jiu-jitsu. It affects everyone from the most casual of practitioners to the most professional of elite-level athletes. Everybody gets imposter syndrome. And one of the funny things about imposter syndrome is it's common among high performers or people who hold themselves to a high standard. We should start by defining what imposter syndrome actually is. Is the persistent feeling that you are just not good enough. Now, we can encounter imposter syndrome in all walks of life, but jiu-jitsu is a very intimate, one-on-one physical activity. And so it's especially common here because if you're getting tapped out a lot in the gym, you're going to feel that feeling of loss, and if you feel like you're coming up short, that is going to be a trigger for imposter syndrome. Now, we have talked many times about the trap of comparing yourself to others in the gym. We have said before at BJJ Mental Models that self-competition, the practice of competing primarily against yourself and not the other people in the room, that's one of the most powerful mental reframing tools you can use to accelerate your growth and enjoyment of the sport over the long term. However, that's a lot easier said than done in a one-on-one combat sport. It's especially problematic because many people who are hobbyists or train jiu-jitsu casually, maybe they were never an athlete, they got into the sport later in life, they're going to be comparing themselves to people in the room who are much younger, in their athletic prime, and much more committed to the journey of jiu-jitsu as a profession. If you are a hobbyist blue belt and you are sparring with a young person whose goal is to be a jiu-jitsu professional and they're training every day, you should not expect to defeat them in a roll every single time you practice, but it's still easy to feel inadequate when you wind up in that situation and you're getting tapped over and over again by the pros. One of the best ways to combat imposter syndrome is to best understand your own journey. My coach, the legendary multi-time world champ Emily Kwok has a saying about this. You are in your own category. Don't define yourself relative to someone else in a category of their choosing. Understand that all of us have our own life journey, our own path, and it is through that path that we should measure our progress. We are our own category and can and should only be judged by that category. When you compare yourself to someone else, you are measuring yourself against their measuring stick. And that's not a fair way to assess your value and self-worth. Your value to the gym and your team is much deeper and every good jiu-jitsu coach will agree with me on this. Here's a mental reframe that I like to suggest when people are dealing with imposter syndrome. Recognize who in the room is training professionally and treat them accordingly. Say that you were to hire a professional accountant to do your taxes. It would be unreasonable of you to be jealous of their accounting performance because they're better than you at it. Of course they are, they devoted their life to this. It is their job. Rather than being envious of them because of their skill at accounting, you would be grateful that a professional exists who can take this problem off your hands and solve it for you. We should think of the outstanding athletes in our room as professionals and have a relationship with them like we would with a professional accountant. Recognize that those outstanding committed grapplers, they are professional athletes to some extent, maybe they're not world champions, but they are treating the sport professionally like your accountant, and that means that you can use them like your professional accountant. You can work with them to gain experience from them. Don't look at them as a rival. Benefit from the fact that they have put so much more time and effort and they have so much more natural inclination into this. Benefit from all of that and use them as a learning resource to help you. Once you reframe the professionals in the room and think of them less as rivals and more as a support crew of true professionals who can help you, it makes it way easier to appreciate their value to you, and also it makes it way easier for you to understand your value to them. Back to the reframe here, if you talk to a professional accountant and ask them how they feel about their customers, odds are, they are extraordinarily grateful that there are people there who maybe aren't pros, but can fund their work. And you'll find that the pro athletes in your jiu-jitsu club take the same approach and mindset. They are extraordinarily grateful for the hobbyists in the room because it is only through the casual grapplers in the room that the pros are enabled to do what they do. That's how they have a team of support. That's how they have people they can test themselves against. That's how they get funding to do what they do. The hobbyists are in many ways the foundation of jiu-jitsu. And so if you come into the sport and you feel like, man, I'm just not a world-class pro athlete, I have no value here. Understand, you are completely wrong. Your value in many ways is greater than the pro athletes because you provide the foundation both financially and from a support and training standpoint that allows them to do their job professionally. This is just a really helpful reframe for understanding that, look, you're not an imposter. As Emily Kwok says, you are in your own category. Don't measure your worth by someone else's yardstick. I hope this is a helpful framework for combating imposter syndrome. We talk about stuff like this a lot at BJJ Mental Models. So if you want more, check out BJJmentalmodels.com. That's where you can get access to the world's most popular jiu-jitsu education podcast, full length episodes, plus mini episodes like this, all completely free, and our amazing newsletter, again, completely free. If you want to level up with us, please check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest audio library of jiu-jitsu master classes. All of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.