Ep. 377: Presence & Anticipation, feat. Margot Ciccarelli

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 episode 377. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. Back with long-time collaborator, friend of the show, sponsored athlete, one of our coaches too. I've got Margot Ciccarelli on the line. Margot, how are you doing? Speaker 2: Hi Steve, I'm great and it's really good to be back on BJJ Mental Models. I know it has been a minute, but looking forward to being more consistent and having interesting conversations with you again. Speaker 1: You're always a fun one to book, of course, because that nomadic lifestyle means that you could be all over the place at any point in time. Where does this podcast find you today? Where are you at these days? Speaker 2: I mean, you're very right in saying that. Today I'm in Hong Kong for the rest of the week. So, yes, it's been a lot of mental gymnastics trying to coordinate with my time zones. Speaker 1: Thank goodness for modern booking technology. It makes it so easy because now I can just send someone a link and it'll just automatically adjust to their time zone because man, time zones are the bane of my existence. But this is not a conversation about time zones. This is a conversation about jiu-jitsu. You had a great topic that you wanted to talk about and some great storytelling devices that'll help make it come through. You wanted to talk about presence in jiu-jitsu and being in the moment, anticipating future moments. You're always a fun one to talk about with this kind of stuff. We have a lot of great chats about timing in the backlog where you and I have gone into the psychology of managing timing in jiu-jitsu. So I want to dig into this with you. Tell me about this idea that you had. You'd proposed it and you had some personal experiences that led to you wanting to discuss this. Why don't you just open up the floor and tell the story? Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. So, as funny as it may seem, I've always lived in cities where I haven't needed to drive a car. So, I'm not exactly at the John Danaher age where, you know, I was learning how to drive in Austin. But I have recently started driving in California. I would say like I I started driving a lot six weeks ago and just to preface a little bit more on like why I had only started driving. I had a car accident early 2022 that it really put me off from driving. So there was actually a really strong phobia around driving and it had just gotten to a point I decided one day that, you know, like, okay, to actually just get over this, I have to fully immerse myself in it to completely eradicate this phobia. So, of course, I knew it was going to be hard at the beginning, but it was really impressive how quickly it went away just through exposure. Much like being a white belt, stepping onto a jiu-jitsu mat for the very first time, it can be very intimidating. Anyway, aside from that, not to detract from the actual topic, I found myself really being in a flow state despite being a very high stress environment. And what I mean by that is any thoughts that may have been on my mind before entering the car, they all disappeared. I had to be completely locked in to the task of driving, being fully present in the moment. And of course, what I identified from like my driving experiences is, number one, I don't want to die. This is pretty simple, actually, you know, like I don't want to die, I don't want to get into an accident. It's a high stakes environment. And it started making me think about like the parallels to jiu-jitsu and personally, you know, I had to reflect from my own style of jiu-jitsu, my own experiences of jiu-jitsu. But I find that, you know, I'm not the most assertive or aggressive player. Like I traditionally have always said in previous podcast episodes also that I identify as a counter player. I really like, I like being reactive. And I think at times that does allow you to learn a lot through that way. But because I'm also a teacher, a lot of people ask me these questions about how do I hesitate, like how do I stop freezing? And often I try to frame this around personal psychology and I try to provide tools that would enable students to develop their own self-confidence around their tools, which would be their techniques, like building technical proficiency. But also, what I found to be interesting for myself was trying to reframe what I learned from driving and putting it back into jiu-jitsu, which I would say is how can we in a way visualize a more high stakes environment for jiu-jitsu? Because how I see jiu-jitsu as a movement platform is the stakes aren't very high. No one's going to hit you in the face, no one's going to kick you, or at least intentionally so, right? So, we already can feel a lot safer than a lot of other martial arts, you know? Like we're just mainly exchanging positions in a very intellectual way. Everything's about submissions and we have the ability to tap. Like we can control a lot of the outcomes, right? Versus in driving, I often feel like I don't feel like I'm unsafe, but I feel like the people around me can be unsafe and they're affecting my experience greatly. So, I wanted to reframe it to people to see if it would help them in a way to visualize jiu-jitsu as being much higher stakes and that actually, you know, if you don't reach the end outcome, something bad will actually happen. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well said. And I love this metaphor too of driving as a parallel to jiu-jitsu. I'm a big fan of these kind of personal experience and storytelling vehicles. I think it helps make the lesson stick a lot better than just reciting facts. And driving is an experience that probably most people, you know, in our neck of the woods would, will encounter at some point in their life. And there are a lot of parallels because when you start driving, the first time you drive, it is terrifying. You are basically the pilot of this giant death vehicle. You know, if you run into something, it's going to be bad for it and for you. And I will never forget the terrifying experience of learning to drive and just not really feeling like I was in tune with the vehicle. You know, I would tap the gas and then suddenly this thing would lurch forward way faster than I expected. Then I'd slam the brakes and it would lurch stop. And the next thing I knew, I was about to hit a curb and I, you know, I tried to turn gently and I wound up turning the car way too much. It's a very frustrating experience. And it's because to some extent, your brain understands that, hey, this is high risk. You're driving a motor vehicle here. There's a reason you need a license for this. There is a degree of safety that needs to be taken into account. And if you're not used to it, it kind of does trigger those survival instincts that we all have because it's scary. And that is in a lot of ways a parallel to jiu-jitsu, where when people come onto the mat and train for the first time, it's really scary because most people have not been in a combat environment before. Now, folks like you and me who have been doing this for a while, it's easy for us. Calling jiu-jitsu a combat environment is honestly a little bit excessive. There's no punches, there's no strikes. I mean, yes, there are injuries that can happen, but the goal is to keep your training partner safe. I would be much more concerned about my safety if I were doing full contact football or rugby than if I'm doing jiu-jitsu. But when you're a beginner, you don't know that. You're sitting there getting squished by someone and it might be triggering claustrophobia and survival instincts, and it's a very scary experience. And that forces you to be in the present moment. And that's something that I think beginning to learn to drive has a very similar parallel. You're kind of forced to focus on the present moment because you're very aware of how dangerous the situation is for an untrained person and also you're very aware of how bad you are because all of the movements you want to do, they don't come out right. So that probably sounds very familiar to anyone who remembers their first jiu-jitsu class as well. Speaker 2: 100%. I think the more I hear you talking about it, the more like I can really reflect on the white belt mentality, you know, like you feel very much on high alert about every single little thing because you don't really know which thing actually matters to your safety in the moment. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a tricky experience too. And again, a lot of that comes down to just getting experience and the lessons you learn over time and developing a degree of comfort with it. And the environment matters a lot too. We talk so much about how to onboard people in jiu-jitsu and to think about the environment and the way that we speak to our students. I personally had a similar experience when I started driving. I remember the first driving instructor that I had was a bit of an unhinged lunatic. She was super high stress, super high strung. We would be driving and I'd be trying to learn and she'd be like freaking out and yelling at the other cars on the road and like I'd barely been doing this at all. I'm going down the highway for maybe the first time in my life. I am terrified to death. And the person who's supposed to be my coach is not exactly a calming presence in the moment. And it really put me on edge. And I remember feeling like just I'll never learn this. I'll never get good at this because I was just struggling so much. But then at some point, I switched and there was a different driving instructor who came in and he was just much more chill and relaxed. And I remember I'd be struggling and I'd be asking, oh my God, what do I do? And he'd say, look, you got this. Just relax. We're going to figure this out, right? We're in a parking lot, no one's going to get hurt. Just we'll figure it out. Do what you got to do, get some practice. Don't worry about it too much. And that calming presence made such a difference. And I think back to my parallels with jiu-jitsu instructors and I see very similar things, right? When if you're already stressed to the max, having a coach who comes in and amplifies that often does not help. Whereas being able to take the temperature of the room down when people are stressed out is such an important coaching skill that you really learn to appreciate once you see it. Speaker 2: 100%. And I think that brings me to the point of how I felt with my personal experience of just continually forcing myself to get exposed more to driving. It really reminded me of being a white belt and a big reason that I wanted to share this story is, you know, especially in adult life, it's not as easy to find ourselves in situations where we are continually exposed to being a white belt over and over. Usually, you have a couple of hobbies that you choose that you start to get good at, but you don't continually, usually, at least, pick up new hobbies. I think sometimes we lose that insight of what it is like to be a white belt. And especially, you know, I've been, been competing as a black belt for quite a number of years now. I think a lot of people forget like, oh, it's, it feels so far removed to be a white belt again. And I think I also think that a lot of stories that I was, uh, when I was reflecting about my driving experience, I was also thinking about, well, how do we also overcome the fear and become more competent in the jiu-jitsu world, also for myself using driving as the main, uh, topic here. I think knowing that I have to drive, right? Because I can't run away from it. That also forced me to become more calm and create more of this state of calm. I'm not just going to quit driving because I know that I have to build a certain level of competence, which again, when I jump back to jiu-jitsu, I think that when people don't find themselves becoming competent at a certain skill, it can go one or two ways, right? Either they continue to try and be consistent in that journey of skill development, or they get bored or frustrated and they leave it, which brings me back to the point of being a high stakes environment where, number one, if I do want to continue driving, I have to find a way to become more present, become more calm, get more exposed to it and continue working at the skill set because I'm not going to quit. And accepting that I wasn't going to quit and I have to get better at this skill, it really forced me to see like, okay, why am I so afraid of this exchange? And funnily enough, the very first day of driving, it wasn't a long drive at all. So I gave myself little goals like, okay, today I'm going to drive 20 minutes at least. And then the second day, I was like, let's try 30. A little bit like if you're familiar with fartlek training. Like I kept trying to make slightly longer goal posts so that I could see how I felt at 20 minutes. And then I could see how I felt at 30. And then slowly, slowly through that exposure, I was like, oh, that's actually not so bad. But after the first day of driving, I do remember I was so mentally exhausted. Like the cognitive load from driving just absolutely sent me. I really feel like it was being a white belt all over again. So I do vividly remember my first class as a white belt and I just felt like a floppy fish. I have no better way to describe myself. I was I've never been in a supine position in a martial art before. This feels so foreign. And I remember using all my physicality, which is isn't that much anyway. But I used most of it in my exchanges. I was absolutely slaughtered after it. It really reminded me of my first day of like proper driving. I was like, oh my God, I need to nap the rest of the day. I had to sleep early. I don't think I had used my brain so much for quite a while, you know, which actually in a way, it it started to make the gears turn. Like I realized because I was so present with the driving, I wasn't letting all the other things that I had on my mind arise in my mind. I started actually making decisions faster in every aspect of my life just because of this lesson from driving. I started realizing there's no point ruminating about it right now. Whatever topic that I was preoccupied with in my mind, whether it was jiu-jitsu, driving, business, I just started thinking, listen, it's like we're in the car. You have to decide now. You can't wait. It's going to be bad if you wait. Start now and learn on the go. And I think that is such a powerful insight, not just for jiu-jitsu, because of course, this is mainly a jiu-jitsu podcast and my main goal with the storytelling is really to help people who maybe freezing in their roles and they're unable to find this presence. They're always future tripping, oh my God, what if this happens? What if that person is tricking me? There's so much internal dialogue versus actually none of that might be happening at all, you know? Sometimes we're so susceptible to giving in to our internal dialogue and not realizing what's actually happening in front of us, whether that be in a jiu-jitsu role or something else. So often, what happens when people roll with me, especially, you know, when I'm traveling around, even I will give you Hong Kong as an example. I had someone roll with me the other day and because I was a little bit passive, as I've already shared previously, they said something to me. They said, oh my God, I feel like you're setting up a trap. But in fact, there was no trap. That was just their perception. You know, again, this is the trap of the internal dialogue because I'm not doing anything in the moment. You may interpret something differently. But in fact, if you had acted in that moment, perhaps there would have been more successful in advancing forwards in the positional exchange. This is why I wanted to continue to talk about this. I think it's something that we don't normally talk about in the classroom that it yields so much for us and can actually help us progress much more than just learning more techniques and adding to our repertoire. Just understanding critically making decisions fast and staying more present. Speaker 1: I really love how you said that. It's very eloquently explained and I definitely see this myself as well. One of the most common problems that people seem to face is hesitancy, fear of pulling the trigger. I mean, you talked about this yourself. People feel like they're just they're waiting too long to take action and when I see this, often times it seems that the problem is people are just so deep in their own head that it's slowing them down. Whereas if you look at people who can grapple more intuitively and fluidly, there's very much a flow state there, almost a joy of motion. They're not thinking or at least not overthinking about every single action to the point where they're hesitating or holding back. They're just going out and doing things and then playing the field as it arises. Whereas for people who really struggle with hesitancy and passivity, I think much of the time it is because they are overthinking and they've got all of those what ifs floating through their head while they're trying to roll. And being able to shake someone loose from that is very helpful. I've had similar experiences to what you discussed. I remember many years ago, I was dealing with a very minor knee injury, not to the point where I couldn't spar, but just to the point where I had to be careful. So what I was doing was avoiding any sort of risky guard scenario and this often meant I would just not really work super hard to try to retain my guard. I would kind of leave my leg down on the ground because I didn't want people trying to leg drag me or do something. So I remember sparring with some blue belt and I just kind of didn't really do anything with my legs. You know, I basically let him pass and it broke his brain because I think in his head he was thinking like, what is the trap? What's this guy doing? Is he going to choke me as soon as I take side control? I was like, no, dude, I just my leg doesn't work. You know, there's no hidden plan here. Like we let's just do jiu-jitsu. I think that hesitancy, that overthinking is such a problem in jiu-jitsu and finding a way to get into the present and just play the field without overthinking it is so helpful. Speaker 2: I think it is so hard to teach this lesson to others and I've been racking my brain for a while because I think as a teacher, you know, who like I've definitely accumulated a few accolades over the years. I think sometimes people find it it's hard to relate to if you're a hobbyist and I often hear things like, oh, you've done so and so things. It's hard for me to do the same. They start to compare. They start to compare like my self-confidence with their self-confidence and how can they get to that same point? And even though I try to share certain tools as I said, by spending more time in the environment, practicing with your tools, naturally you will gain proficiency over time. If we have an intentional practice, the likelihood of you increasing your proficiency in the given skill set, it should improve. And upon seeing more successful outcomes, you should also feel more mentally competent. But outside of that, I was really trying hard to think about other ways to perhaps use visualization or some type of reframe. Honestly, like it was really by chance that driving was the mental catalyst for me to think about all of these things. And I really do think I've tried to share to a few of my friends so far already. Just tried to reframe it as a more high stakes environment. Whatever that may mean to you. I think I've shared in the past that I've done some sports psychology work with Dr. Fraser Atkinson of Kaizen Mental Performance. And he does a really great job at using certain mental reframes so that you're able to navigate your problems or whatever mental narratives you might have. And I've been thinking more in the realm of, well, what other mental images can we also use perhaps that we can relate to in some other area of our life? Because sometimes I do find that people have a disconnect from their normal life and their jiu-jitsu life. They're like two slightly different personas. And I think a lot of my work as a teacher is understanding, well, for me, jiu-jitsu is a representation of who you are. So, if there is some type of disconnect, I don't believe you're fully embodied with your embodied and integrated with your practice yet. And I think our lifelong pursuit and practice in the art should eventually get us to the point that we feel as close to one to one as possible. So yeah, it's been quite interesting exploring this topic for myself and seeing how it's positively influenced my own jiu-jitsu practice. Especially, you know, I train at AOG where I've also shared in the past, we typically do three-minute rounds, which is another method of making you very present because I think if you don't try your best to really execute in this three-minute time frame, you will feel like you did no jiu-jitsu. And I think for me, it definitely positively influenced me to try to do more and not think so much, not try to create very elaborate setups, which I would say was more classically what I'd do. It really forced me to think in very different ways than what would have been the standard Margot thinking. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, you mentioned reframing. And this is a topic we've discussed here before and I actually really want to explore this much deeper in the future. Maybe even do some courses on it if I can make the stars align because it's such a powerful tool for overcoming the real problems in jiu-jitsu. You know, technical stuff, that gets sorted out in the wash if you train long enough. I mean, I don't think anyone's greatest problem in jiu-jitsu is that their bolo isn't tight enough or something like that. The real problems often are are mental. And they're not easy to solve and not talked about enough and reframing is such a great tool to do it because so many of the real problems we have in jiu-jitsu come down to the self-talk we have in our head and our perceptions of how things should be, whatever that means. Jesse Phillips from Gentle Giant Jiu-Jitsu was on the podcast recently and he's got a great saying I love, which is don't shoot on yourself. Referring to the the tendency of all of us to say, well, I should be doing this. I should be this type of grappler. I should be getting these types of results. And how much all of that gets in your head. I have a story of this. One of my very long-time friends in jiu-jitsu, she came up around the same time as me. And, you know, when I was a young man, Margot was much smaller than I am now. You know, now I'm like an old dad, so I am entitled legally to gain weight that I don't need. But when I was, when I was younger, I was not a big guy. And my friend here, you know, she was about the same size, maybe bigger than me, right? And but I could tell when rolling with her, there was some sort of mental script that she had about like, she's a woman and I'm a man and this roll is going to go a certain way. And I could really tell she was holding back when we were rolling. Like she wasn't really bringing the fight. And the end result is every time I would just slice right through her, right? Like she would barely put up a fight. And I knew she could do more than that. And I remember one time, I wrist locked her and she got so mad. She got so mad that for like the next two or three minutes, all of that mental script in her head just like vanished. And she beat the shit out of me. I mean, yeah, you wrist locked her, you deserve it. I did deserve it, but it was amazing to watch because it was like all of that mental script just evaporated and then I could see who she really was. But then after a few rolls where she just dominated me, it all kind of came back and then she went back to, you know, playing like super passive and not really giving me a full fight. And it made me really aware of the fact that like a lot of the things about how we think the world should work or does work, a lot of this is just self-fulfilling prophecies because we believe it to be so, we make it so by accident. And I think that this idea of bringing yourself into the present and reframing yourself out of those negative thought patterns is so important for performing jiu-jitsu or even if you're a casual, just for getting enjoyment out of the sport, right? Because no one likes to feel like they're bad at something. But much of that feeling is just in your own head. Speaker 2: Or so maybe the mental reframe and trigger was was the wrist lock. Speaker 1: Oh, it it absolutely was. It absolutely was. She was so mad about it that like she didn't have time to be in her own head anymore. She just wanted to beat my ass and very much succeeded in doing so. Speaker 2: I think it's it's very powerful like how you can emotionally override all your mental narratives in just a split second from something like that. It's very impressive and I've seen it many times also. It's also happened to me. Speaker 1: Well, that's one of the cool things about the human condition, right? We can do that much better than a lot of other animals can do. They're kind of governed by their instinct and their programming, but human beings have the ability to be consciously aware of those things and to override them. We can do things that might run contrary to our biology or our natural programming because consciously we understand that there's a better way. That's a superpower that we have. And becoming conscious of a lot of those those hang-ups that you've got mentally is sort of the first step to I think overcoming them. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think you've reminded me of I wouldn't say it's so much as a story, but more so a feeling I've had before when I've been sparring and I really try to recall the type of intrinsic motivation that I I felt arise in me in certain rolls with people. Like when you get to a point of frustration where the roll really feels like it's at some type of stalemate and especially when I see that there's only so much time left on the timer. This isn't the way that I want the roll to end. Like I do want something to happen. I I really find that in those moments that I can use certain types of emotions, similar to what your friend probably felt from the wrist lock. But I really feel like sometimes using your emotions in a constructive way can also really propel you to try to advance more. And just to backtrack to what you were saying before about people having certain types of mental narratives, whether that be it's a size thing, like, oh, I'm too small to be effective. Or I'm a woman and you're a man, you're much bigger than me. It's obvious that you're going to win in this roll, right? You already kind of set a certain type of outcome in your head without even trying. I think this is the most dangerous thing that we can be susceptible to. Like we cannot already have this outcome in our head and not try. You can have an idea that, okay, well, actually, there is a likelihood that I might lose here because if this person applies themselves, yes, they may be a lot stronger than me. But strategically, you have to think, well, actually, how can I put my best foot forward? How do we reframe this away from like, let's not listen to this internal dialogue right now. This is again, going back to the point of being present. I'm here trying. I'm engaging in the roll. I like what I do. I'm here in jiu-jitsu because I like this weird movement art that I do with a partner in pajamas or no pajamas now, since no pajamas is so popular in 2026. I think it's really, it's so important to think about what you have as a grappler. Like do you have speed? Are you smarter? Seriously, like IQ goes a long way because if you have mental horsepower, you should be able to create a strategy that should enable you, even if you don't win, you can get pretty far. And you can continuously refine that over time. And I think our superpower is in constantly being able to refine and try again. Going back to my point of trying to make it high stakes, you know? Like, of course, we're not going to die if we lose a roll. We're not really going to be permanently damaged, hopefully. But I think instead of giving in to our internal dialogue right from the get-go, we need to in some way, whether it's through my weird stories about driving, trying to make it more relatable to people, to really stay in the moment and look at it more from a gamer mindset, almost, you know? Like we do have the ability to continually try again if we do lose in a roll. But the beauty of being able to try again, which we don't have the luxury of in driving. Of course, you can fix the car. Those sort of things, like any damage to the car is a lot easier than if it's damage to yourself, right? But I think if we're able to like try with intention, and I know intention is like overly used in the modern jiu-jitsu landscape now. It wasn't so much so a few years ago, but I think that will really take everyone a lot further. But again, let's expand this conversation back to you about like, what do you think are some ways that we can make people more present? Like what have you found that has worked apart from wrist locking people? Speaker 1: It seems quite effective, to be honest. Well, there is something to be said about that. This is actually a strategy. It's um called a pattern interrupt. And the idea is that if you do something unexpected, you can break people out of their mental scripts. This is a tactic that I'll give you the common example. This is a tactic that sales people use, right? I mean, if you get a phone call from a salesperson, like a spam call, and they immediately start trying to sell you something, even before they start giving you the pitch, as soon as you mentally identify that, hey, this is a sales guy, you're immediately already on the defensive and you're like one step away from hanging up the phone, right? Because no one wants to be sold to. But the problem is there, that, you know, what this means if you're the salesperson, the problem is a lot of your customers have this existing mental script. If a salesperson calls, I say no and I hang up. So the question then becomes, how can I interrupt that pattern? What can I say or do that would surprise this person or pull them out of this script enough that they have to actually stop and be like, whoa, wait a minute, this is not what I expected. And so this is why so much of, you know, when you take a look at people who are trying to create email campaigns with really high click rates, they try to come up with weird, novel titles to the email that'll make you stop and go like, whoa, what, what is that? I mean, there was a, I guess a relatively famous example. It's kind of ancient history now, but I remember when back when Barack Obama was running for politics or maybe was already elected, one of his team sent out an email campaign and the title to the email was simply the word, hey, which is weird, right? To get an email from a politician and the like, all that you get is the email title is, hey. And that email campaign apparently performed extremely well because it's so unexpected, right? You see that and you're like, well, what, what's going on here? Something unusual is happening here. You can do the same thing in jiu-jitsu by jostling people out of their thought patterns. And this can work in a few ways. One is, if you're coaching someone and you see that they're in that pattern, you can do something unexpected to make them stop and be like, whoa, wait, what's going on here? This is not what's supposed to happen. Similarly, if you're trying to beat someone, right? You can also do something unexpected. If someone goes, I mean, you know me, I'm a notorious turtle fiend, right? So let me tell you, if someone, if someone's trying to pass your guard and you turtle instead, a lot of the time people don't expect that. They're like, whoa, okay, so I thought we were doing guard passing. Now we're not doing that. My whole game plan is now changed. That little thing can be enough to throw someone off sometimes. So I think pattern interrupts are a powerful way to break people out of those thought patterns. Just do something unexpected that takes them out of that mental script because then they have to stop and cognitively think about it, okay, what's going on? This is not what I thought. You see the same thing a lot in self-defense as well, where where people will encourage you in a self-defense situation to do something unusual or unpredictable because that throws off the assailant and now they don't know what's happening anymore. Speaker 2: I mean, you're so right. This is a very stupid example, but I don't know if you've seen some of these reels of women talking about trying to stay safe on the street at night and they look like absolute lunatics, flailing their limbs around and just like making zombie noises to scare people off. Like I I totally think a pattern interrupt is like a great device for us to investigate further. Speaker 1: It's a powerful tool and I mean, it's an element of strategy. I think you and I might have even talked about this a long time ago when it comes to timing and how to throw people off of their game, right? I mean, I know that you've talked about training to a metronome and shaking up the beat, the rhythm and the tempo of your training. That's an example of it as well. If you're always going fast, your opponent learns to expect that. If you're always going slow, your opponent learns to expect that. But if you switch between those two, you just inherently get harder to time. So this is another example of how you can behave like controlled unpredictability, I guess, is the way to describe it. You're being unpredictable on purpose and in an intelligent way. That can be a powerful coaching tool as well. If you see someone's in their own head, if you can say or do something that just pulls them right out of it, then suddenly they have to stop and think and a lot of those scripts that they might be living by or thinking in their head just kind of evaporate for a second. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: Or you could wrist lock them. Speaker 2: Yes. I think you've found the thing that is the most effective so far. So we definitely have to deploy this strategy. But yes, to your point, I think I usually coin that as breaking rhythm. I think something that I talk about a lot is unpredictable tempo changes. I think it was in one of our previous episodes together. We should probably reference that in our caption later. But I think that probably is the easiest way that I can think of that we can become more unpredictable in jiu-jitsu is manipulating timing. Although I think even with the idea of how we sequence our moves, although I I know nowadays with the popularization of the ecological approach and stuff, we don't go as far as always sequencing our moves ahead of time, right? It is more something that we're influencing behaviors over time. I do think for myself over the years, I have thought about what is a natural progression of moves, similar to music in a way, you know, when you have a specific type of chord progression that makes sense. There are certain moves that make sense when we progress them together and sequence them together. When we suddenly have some type of break that doesn't exactly fall into the natural pattern of what we predict normally, that definitely can throw someone off in a positive way too. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not always about doing something in a negative way. A lot of the time when you throw people off, it's with the intent of breaking them out of that script because then I mean, the problem with being a human being is that often we look for these rhythms and then once we find them, we settle into them, sometimes to our detriment. If we get back to the example of driving, when you first start driving a car, yes, it's tremendously scary to be driving a car at the beginning. But flash forward 10 years into the future when you're an experienced driver and now you might find yourself with the opposite problem, which is it becomes so routine that you kind of zone out, which is its own problem, right? I mean, that's how car accidents happen because people aren't paying attention anymore because they've just gotten into this script and this pattern. Anyone who's done a lot of driving over a long period of time has certainly had this experience where they get behind the wheel of the car, they zone out and then like an hour or two later, they're at their destination and they have no recollection of what happened in between. And that's not really great. The same thing happens in jiu-jitsu sometimes where if you train a lot without introducing any novelty or being intentional about changing things up, you can go on autopilot. I think black belts and brown belts, but especially black belts are very susceptible to this because once you find a game plan that kind of works for you and is getting results in the gym and you're sort of happy with it, it's easy to just rest on that and just do basically the same thing over and over again forever. And I don't want to say that's a bad thing because there's different ways to get enjoyment out of jiu-jitsu. Not everyone has to be like a peak athlete. But if your goal is to get better, then you have to come to terms with this notion of like, oh, I've gotten into a rhythm here. I am getting way too predictable and I'm just doing the same thing. I'm basically living the same day over and over again for years without anything changing. And that's when you can interrupt your own patterns and shake things up. I remember you had a great example of this of how you got banned from playing guard for a while. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: You could talk about that. Speaker 2: I mean, it definitely forced me outside of my comfort zone pretty quickly, much so like the driving, you know. I think that in a similar way to the the beginning in driving, it definitely was very uncomfortable, you know, because I I was forced into a position where, well, I couldn't play my A game. I had to sit with the discomfort of, okay, everything I'm doing is it's not new, but I don't necessarily feel that I have the same competency as I do in the guard position. And it definitely took me a while to repeatedly force myself to stay in the zone and not detract and not try to pull guard and give up. It reminds me about what I just said about driving. Like I know I can't quit, so I have to keep going. I have to keep repeatedly exposing myself in order to get better at the skill set. Because, you know, it it's easy in jiu-jitsu where the stakes aren't high. It's easy to just be like, you know what? This is I don't enjoy this. I'll just pull guard. I realized over time, in a way, developing new skills in jiu-jitsu, it it's delayed gratification. You need to spend some time being horrible at it. Of course, ideally, I mean, this goes more into the realm of like, how how do we build skills? But I think it's still a relevant part of the conversation. I think you really have to spend time just being a white belt. In whatever position it is, like just spend time being present there and figuring out what is it that is going wrong. How can we make it better? It sounds so simple, but we tend to overcomplicate things like in jiu-jitsu. We think, oh, the solution has to be this really fancy, shiny thing. And the more time that I spend practicing the art, especially, honestly, having spent more time doing no-gi jiu-jitsu lately, without the fancy fabric manipulations of the lapel guards and such. Like I really do find that jiu-jitsu is a lot simpler than we think. And I think as we've both said in this conversation numerous times already, it's often the mental that is disrupting the forward motion of the game. Speaker 1: As someone who has been doing a lot of no-gi recently, I'd love to get your feelings on whether there's something inherent about the gi versus no-gi that leads to these kinds of situations. Because as someone who is primarily a gi player, one of the things I love about the gi is you can very much slow the pace down if you want to. You can drag the other person into your game and just basically anchor them to the ground and take away movement. But I think that can also lead to a type of style that is somewhat slow and atrophied and not much is happening. And I mean, that's beautiful jiu-jitsu in a lot of ways. But one of the cool things about no-gi is because you don't have the same kind of death grips where you can just lock the other person in place, it becomes much more of a give and take in my opinion. And you have to always be ready to respond to whatever your opponent is doing. Do you see a difference between gi and no-gi in that capacity or do you think they're basically the same thing when it comes to this particular conversation? Speaker 2: I think no-gi is like having really bad brake pads. The reason why I say that is, of course, you know, like when you're wearing the gi, you have so many different ways to latch onto your partner. And it's not to say that we don't have a lot of different ways to do that in no-gi. We definitely do. Like there's still half guard, closed guard and such. There's so many different ways that we can create attachment to our partner in both. But of course, we we have to admit and acknowledge that in the gi, there are vastly more options. I think what no-gi has forced me to develop, and I think this does fall into my strengths quite naturally because I like to speed pass, I like to outside pass. Therefore, like I I like movements that tend to be a faster pace, like overall. Aside from the lapel guard that a lot of people know me for, which is the total opposite of that approach. It's all about movement restriction and immobilizing the person so you can always stay ahead in time. You can see the spaces faster than your opponent because you're able to restrict that speed. I think in no-gi, where it does feel it's more of a level playing field, especially because there is no lapel guard. Lapel guard is like the kryptonite of everything. But I think you have to have a greater ability to not necessarily predict, but you need to have a greater ability to move quickly through space if you don't have, like, let's say you have a Gordon Ryan style game, which I I think he is extremely talented at taking the pace of the match to where he wants to be. It's always fairly comfortable for him. It's not a high pace exchange for the most part. But I think for people who don't have those skill sets, what I do often see is it's a much faster pace exchange, which requires you to have the capacity not only to cognitively process information quicker, but you need to be able to move with that at a lot quicker pace. And because we don't have as many ways to attach onto our opponent, uh, that's robust. I I think naturally it does look like a lot more people get into scrambles or it's easier to reset. I think in a way, actually, no-gi jiu-jitsu is much more like driving. Gi jiu-jitsu is more like someone who has a disposition to continually use the brake pads a lot. So like, oh, like this is too much. I have to slow it down. I have to slow it down. That's my personal opinion. Speaker 1: Well, as someone who also is a jiu-jitsu coach, do you have any insights into how we can solve for this problem in our students? How we can increase their feeling of presence, improve their ability to overcome those mental hang-ups? Is there anything you've discovered that works really well? Speaker 2: Honestly, I think a lot of the things that I've said over the years have consistently stayed in my practice. So these are the tools that I generally will advocate for for my students. Having said that, it has been a while since I've been on this podcast. So there's definitely been some new things that I've integrated into my practice, which also definitely includes me utilizing the ecological approach more. So I think it it's a very unique approach that you really throw yourself out of memorizing technique patterns and thinking like, okay, like usually when I go into reverse de la Hiva, I do this, this, this, this, so this ends up in the back take or this ends up in the leg drag position. Versus really thinking about very simple cues, actually. Something as simple as, well, okay, I'm trying to off balance you. Let's think hands to the mat. I think like I use different terminology previously. Like I was very fond of talking about weight shifting into the far side leg, keeping the weight away from you. I would sometimes refer to hands on the mat, but just to backtrack slightly so I don't get too far off topic. I think using the ecological approach definitely helps students stay more present because they're not so stuck in their head about what do I have to do next? I don't remember what to do next. I don't know what to do from reverse de la Hiva. What is the part of the technique? I really don't remember it. I remember after I went to standards, I went to standard in summer of last year, just before the Polaris squads. That was the first time that I went to standard. I had met Greg properly in San Diego for the first time a few weeks prior to that show. And I spent a little bit of time with him. I encouraged him to treat me like a white belt. Like pretend like I I know nothing. Like I I really want to understand how to use this format and I just want to be a student here. And when I went back, I only spent about 10 days with him at first before I left for Polaris. But I really realized at Polaris how much his methods and his way impacted me because I noticed during my performance, I was doing a lot of stuff that I don't normally do. And it it felt like I was on autopilot, which I would say like I generally have a good ability to be organic and to improvise. I do pride myself on those skills, but I was really impressed. Even though we had only spent such a short amount of time together, his practices influenced my behaviors and it just naturally took over. It changed the way I was thinking. And I think that is so powerful for people who are just starting off in jiu-jitsu. I went on to teach in a couple of countries around Europe and I used my seminars as a testing ground. I would teach in my normal way and share techniques in a very standard way that I do at seminars. But I started to integrate some ecological games in the seminars because I I knew it would be room for different skill levels. I was really curious to see how much more quickly would students be able to actually do the moves rather than just repeating the moves in a choreography sort of way, which is easy without resistance, right? I wanted to make sure that when I left the room, because I'm not staying there long, right? I'm teaching three hours one day and they're not going to see me maybe for like a year or more, who knows. And I remember how brilliant the feedback was. It really, it stunned me. Like I had a handful of white and blue belts come up to me and they told me, wow, you really helped me get out of my head. I definitely will continue to use this. And I think the power of not being in your head, especially, I think it's much more relatable to most white belts because I think as we get more proficient at techniques, we're like, oh, okay, this generally works. I think the white belts and blue belts who came up to me and told me about how they were quickly successful, but when they were in class normally, they found themselves to be very frustrated or continuously in a defensive position. They didn't really feel like they were getting into positions where they were building skills. They just felt stuck. And I think this is a very common problem, right? Like if we don't, if we're not, you know, I like musical comparisons, but it's like I have my orchestra and I'm the conductor. If I'm not doing a good job at conducting, well, my musicians cannot play well. And I don't want that to happen. I want us to play good music, right? Like I want everyone in the ecosystem to improve and continue to have more enjoyment in the environment. My baseline is always about, how can I help you enjoy jiu-jitsu more? If you naturally enjoy what you do, whatever your goal may be, whether it's a competitor or you're just trying to enjoy your hobby more. I think it's good to contemplate the formats. And I think there is something with eco that I think, although I definitely was skeptical at the beginning, you know, I I didn't really like the way Greg was selling it online at first. And I told I told him this to his face. I'm like, man, you sound like a bit of a dick. Like you really could like, you could share this format with the whole world if you just sounded a bit nicer. I think he's adjusted a little bit over time. And you know, people are starting to really realize the the potential of the ecological approach. But definitely this is one key event that it didn't only impact me in a very short amount of time. I did realize how quickly it influences behaviors of other people. And therefore, you know, when you start to understand how to design some of these eco games, I do believe it's a way to force you to learn how to become more present. Speaker 1: Yeah, extremely well said. One last thing I want to ask you, Margot, you talked about this prior to us hitting recording, is the idea of anticipation. So, so far we've talked about the importance of pulling yourself into the present moment, but one of the things that you'd mentioned is by doing so, you get this odd, weird benefit that it becomes easier to properly anticipate the future, which is like what your opponent is likely to do. And that might seem counterintuitive. How is it that being present helps you better predict the future? But I thought maybe it would be good to hear you explain this since it's your thesis here. So why don't you go ahead and explain, expand on that thought. Speaker 2: I mean, I think the reason why I paired anticipation with presence, although it does directly sound counterintuitive, right? Anticipation in a way is kind of us future tripping. But I think anticipating in certain parts of our practice enables us to understand, okay, if we think about pattern recognition and what I said earlier about sequencing moves, naturally we predict that certain moves pair well together. And especially when we have continual exposure to the same environment, which most of us do. We generally train at the same gym. We're exposed to the same pool of live problems, right? We we typically know like what certain players will do in the room, what their strengths and their weaknesses are, what sort of pace they like to go to. So I I think already we have a lot of information about how the environment is going to be like. So I think anticipating a set of problems that tends to be roughly the same because people don't usually improve that fast. Not not to be mean, but all of us, you know, at a certain point, like we don't see too too many changes in our games. Like when people ask me nowadays what I'm working on, honestly, I am definitely working on stuff, but it it's very minute things. There's nothing super big, like it was before when I was a blue belt or purple belt. But yeah, the reason why I said anticipation, although I think I originally placed this word into our conversation placeholder because we were talking about driving and naturally you have to anticipate entering certain spaces with a certain timing to avoid any clashes, you know? I I think this is a parallel that I definitely think of in jiu-jitsu. Like when I look at the space around my partner, I generally am trying to anticipate, well, how long will that space be open? Am I able to enter that space, occupy the space and make sure that I get some type of attachment to my partner that enables me to stay there. I think by being present, we have to identify these spaces, but at the same time, we do have to anticipate a little bit. Not as much as like, when I say anticipate, it's not, oh, I anticipate a trap. Margot's setting up a trap. And actually, this is there's nothing there, you know, because this is just something that someone is thinking based on maybe I'm not doing anything. It's not that I'm doing something. Actually, it's because I'm doing nothing that they have this mental image, right? But I think when we continually refine our ability to anticipate and learning how to read the space, like I think the combo between your presence in the moment, looking at, you know, I also like the word body architecture, but basically I just mean body positioning. If we look at our partner's body positioning in that current window of time, if we were able to freeze that exact moment to observe the body positioning, we can observe different open spaces around the body. If not, if the spaces are all closed, we can also look at that freeze frame to see like, okay, well, what are the best options for us to navigate the space? Would it be some type of snap down? Would it be to attach to the arm and pull? Will that pulling force create some sort of reaction that will open a space? So, like, just thinking about certain movements like that. If I know someone's going to, if I pull their arm and they yank back, that's going to open a space in between their elbow and their rib cage. So I'm anticipating that next open space based on whatever type of hand fight that I might try and initiate with my partner. I think that's what I mean by anticipation. Like understanding that whatever thing that I'm doing right now is going to change the body positioning into the next freeze frame. Of course, we don't want people to freeze. I like to use this word freeze frame. So it gives us a better ability to visualize, okay, what are we looking for in terms of open spaces? Where am I trying to get to next? I think it it gives us a set of different movement goals that continually helps us progress. And I think in choosing to use this sort of terminology with the freeze frame, I I think that when I've shared this with my students, they are able to continually create forward motion. And I think that is our overall end goal. Not just to get to our final position, be that a submission or final control position, but just continually understanding that we're trying to move forward, looking for these open spaces or creating opportunities where we understand how to create this open space and move forwards versus feeling like this person is so closed. I don't know what to do here. I don't know what technique to do here. I think being present is being able to read your partner, use that information. If they're closed, like, okay, how do we make them open up more? How are we able to affect their base more? It goes back to one of our very, very early episodes. I believe it's the movement vocabulary episode, probably our first episode together, but this self-inquiry process, which again, it's a little bit counterintuitive because we have to divide the practice between in certain roles, we're not trying to think a lot because we're building our practice of being present, which is having this skill work in real time versus, I think, what I do for myself is, like, I do drill not in a static way, but I like to drill in a way that feels more like Tai Chi than jiu-jitsu. In a way, I always tell people, hey, if the normal speed is way too fast and this is affecting your ability to think, because currently you're engaged in a high stress environment. What I want you to do is to be engaged in a low stress environment where the movements are actually probably exactly the same. Like your partner is doing the same moves that they would do in the high stress environment, except at a much lower speed. It's much more manageable because you can expand, in my vision, you're expanding the window of time that you have to think that normally we don't have because we have to react much more quickly. And I think in doing so in your practice, this will help you develop your ability to anticipate so that you can eventually do it at a much faster rate. Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of interesting parallels and a through line between all of these topics we've discussed here today between presence and ecological dynamics and even anticipation. One of the real great insights about the ecological approach is the idea that we should bring our focus into what's happening in the environment, into the real world. We look externally for cues about what to do rather than focusing internally on what's going on through our head and trying to act like a computer doing jiu-jitsu where we're just processing and we make decisions all in our brain. It's really about bringing your attention out of your head and into the world. And that's extremely similar to mindfulness practices, which are really all about focusing on the world, bringing your attention to the breath, to the present moment and getting out of your own head, noticing the environment around you. All of this is about bringing your attention to the external environment and getting out of your own head. And one of the reasons beyond, I guess, what people often talk about, why this is so beneficial is because look, we are just as human beings not very good at multitasking. There's only so many things we can do at once. In fact, it's arguable that multitasking isn't even really a thing. And that we can only really focus on one thing at a time. If we're in our own heads, that means we're not in the environment. If we're focusing on our thoughts, we're not focusing on the world around us. And when you're grappling with someone, if you want to truly anticipate what they're going to do, if you want to try to read their minds and predict the future, you've got to have your attention outside of yourself and into the world around you. And you achieve that by being more present. It's very hard to really notice what your opponent is doing and react appropriately in the moment if all of your thoughts are just in your own head and you're thinking about your own hang-ups. So pulling your attention out of yourself and into the world around you instead, it kind of is a common thread that you see in presence, mindfulness, eco even, and also just being able to read the room, being able to read the intentions of your opponent and anticipate their actions accordingly. So I think multiple benefits to taking that approach. Speaker 2: 100%. And I think, uh, probably one note to end on. I think anticipation is definitely a tricky one to fully articulate, but I think sometimes anticipation in some people's minds can give some sort of connotation of like, oh, we are in some sense waiting. But I I don't want people to have this idea, oh, we're waiting. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, as we tie this up, Margot, any closing thoughts or things you wanted to get into which we didn't cover here today or was this pretty comprehensive? Speaker 2: I think this whole conversation has very much been a conversation of excavating internal dialogues, narratives, like really understanding our internal landscape. And I remember a couple years ago in 2023, I never really thought that I needed a sports psychologist. It was more something that I did out of curiosity. I I was wondering if it would help me. So I I find that I don't have too many issues with mental narratives in jiu-jitsu at least. So upon meeting, uh, Dr. Fraser Atkinson, again, the founder of Kaizen Mental Performance, I was genuinely very shocked at my first session with him and how he was able to show me that actually, in fact, I did have certain mental narratives that I couldn't have previously labeled as like, oh, that is a narrative that you have that has never happened. And I think having him as an external person to make me more aware of these things has forced me to be even more thoughtful about my process and it continually puts me back into asking myself these types of questions, including this whole podcast episode. This is something that I've been ruminating on by myself, like thinking about like, okay, like are are there are there ways that I can be more relatable that we can find more tools that will help people be more present. In the same way that Fraser has helped me, I highly recommend anyone, doesn't matter if you're a competitor or not, to try it out, especially if you find that you have trouble with your mindset or your psychology. I think it I definitely have recommended him to many of my athlete friends who are at the highest level and you can check him out on Instagram. It should be Kaizen Mental Performance. Otherwise, we'll link it in the description box below. And I definitely recommend that he he is such a valuable resource to have in the community. Speaker 1: Amazing, Margot. Well, I've actually been thinking of getting him on the show at some point. So I'd love to have you guys both on maybe to talk about sports psychology and mindset. I think these are really valuable topics to discuss. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes. Margot, if people want to find you or ask you questions or maybe book you for a seminar or see what you're up to, where can they follow you? Speaker 2: Instagram's always the easiest place. It's @MargotCiccarelli. Hard surname to spell, but if you spell the first name right, you're likely to find find me there. I'm pretty easy to access on there. Just send me a message. I always do encourage people, if you want to ask something, don't be shy. Stay present. Send it out because if you don't ask, you you'll never know. It's always better to try. Speaker 1: Agreed completely. Well, in case people don't know how to spell your name, I will put a link in the show notes to make it easy to find. So also to the previous episodes we talked about, I'll link those too. You and I did a course as well on rhythm training and using rhythm as part of your jiu-jitsu strategy. That's on BJJ Mental Models Premium if anyone wants it. If you're already a premium member, you can find it there. If not, all of our stuff is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I always suggest that people pick up the podcast, full length episodes like this, plus our mini episodes, plus our newsletter, all of which are free. And BJJ Mental Models Premium, if you want to level up with us, is the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, mindset, really cool stuff there, including work we've done with Margot as well. All of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com. But I'll link to everything in the show notes. Margot, thank you so much for doing this as always. I really appreciate you sharing your insights here. This is a cool conversation. Speaker 2: Thank you for facilitating the conversation, Steve, and I look forward to coming back on, hopefully with Fraser next time. Speaker 1: Exciting. Thanks to the listeners as well. We'll see you soon.