As 2019 comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about failure, and how fear of it has always been a kind of toxin, a self-limiting shadow that lurks in the darkness of my mind. Ever ready with negative self-talk or gut-wrenching injection of anxiety, fear of failure has stopped me from attempting to do innumerable things in my life. Things I could have been great at, or terrible, but I’ll never know.
Case in point, and the real topic of this post; BJJ competition.
I’ve been training BJJ since somewhere around 2003 or 2004, and like many people, I quit several times. The longest off period was 3 years as a 2 stripe brown belt. Eventually I did find my way back and in late 2018, received my black belt from Coach Chance Wanlass; a Rigan Machado/Chris Haueter black belt currently teaching in Singapore, where I train.
Growing up, I was enthusiastically unathletic. I was a bookish, anxious kid, and I’m an anxious adult. As a child, any kind of physical competition made me feel like I was going to throw up, violently, and I would always loose – running, relays, long-jump, rope climbing, dodge-ball and so many more. There are few kid-friendly sports I haven’t lost, thus confirming that my fears were well founded.
So, when I started Jiu-jitsu, and I saw team-mates competing, I thought that this might be my chance to exercise some of those childhood demons. I signed up for my first tournament, I knew next to nothing about BJJ, let alone sports competition, and was very, very nervous. I was matched up with another white belt, and despite getting a flower sweep and back take, was quickly submitted with a reverse arm-bar, which I’d never seen before. I discovered later that he was also a Judo black belt, and a highly competitive one at that. The fact that I had done as well as I did should have given me a massive boost in confidence.
Instead, I was emotionally crushed. I spent the next two weeks in a depressed haze. I had no idea how to contextualize loss, other than how it proved I was as much of a loser as I thought I was, that I was pathetic and fundamentally worthless. This response represented all I knew about competition. Winning was good, losing was bad.
Like everyone, I’ve heard the standard array of sports clichés. “You win or you learn” was one my coach at the time was particularly fond of. The problem was, I had no clue what that meant. What was I supposed to learn from losing? That I was a loser? That I sucked at this sport and art that I loved? I needed more explanation and detail as to how to use competition as an instrument of improvement, and the folksy wisdom of sports related proverbs weren’t going to cut it.
Moving forward, my competition experiences only became worse. The preceding two weeks before any tournament became a nightmare of anxiety and self-doubt. I’d be nauseous all day, every day. Not one moment would be free from the sensation of impending doom. I would vibrate with fear.
Then, comp day would come. I’d hardly sleep the night before, pray that I’d get hit by a bus or have a stroke on the way to the venue, come in under-weight, since I’d hardly been eating due to the nausea, have painful gastric “issues”, vomit in the toilet, compete and lose.
Relief, if it came, was short-lived, soon eclipsed by depression and self-loathing. I’d spend the next two weeks barely training, ashamed of my failure. I’d stop going out or talking to friends, carefully avoid making eye-contact with myself in mirrors, given that whenever I did, the phrase “I hate you so much, I wish you’d die” would punch through my mind like a very angry fist made of crushed childhood self-esteem.
No lie; every competition ruined my life for a month. As a consequence, I only competed a few times at each belt, and as a purple, had 5 comps to my name, with zero wins, 6 or 7 losses. After one tournament as a purple belt, I decided I’d had enough. I only lost, I was practically schizophrenic before, depressed after, and seemed to get nothing out of the experience but self-hate. I’ve always had a lot of insecurities in regards to my BJJ abilities, and competition made things worse.
However, in June of 2015, something happened that would eventually force me to reevaluate my perspective on BJJ competition; I had a son. For the first 3 years or so, kids are basically loud, slightly mobile plants. They have few real opinions of their own, and can’t really express them outside of incoherent screaming. They are also very much focused on mom as the centre of the universe, or perhaps themselves at the centre and mom as the main planetary body. Dad, and others, are of little importance.
Once they pass the milestone of 4 years though, children start to express themselves more, they gain greater verbal ability, using it with great, if comical, enthusiasm. For the past two years, my son has been stricken by what I describe as verbal diarrhea. It is a rare moment when he doesn’t have something to say about something.
Most of his stream of consciousness rants focuses on Spider-man, The Hulk, who would win in a battle; Optimus Prime or Megatron. However, every once and a while he drops something that knocks me for a loop, like “Poppa, when I grow up, I want to be as brave as you” or “Poppa, how can I be strong like you?” He’s asked me, with genuine sincerity, if I could reach up to the top of a 20 metre tall tree or jump over a multi-story apartment block. In a child’s eyes, a father is somewhere between a super-hero and God.
When he’d say these things, funny and naïve as they were, I’d get a slight twinge of guilt. Was I really doing my best to live up to the greatness he assumed of his dad? Was I striving to be the father, the man, he saw, or was I selling myself, and consequently him, short? I had always felt less than positive about my BJJ competition experiences, both how badly I’d done, and how I’d let fear and frustration, self-doubt and weakness, make me quit.
I decided that if he was going to see me in such an idealistic light, I’d better start doing my best to behave that way. I needed to face that fear, and if not overcome it, then experience it and keep moving forward. What better lesson could I hope to teach my son than perseverance? And, how could I teach such a lesson when I myself couldn’t walk the talk? I needed to start competing again, and regularly.
Now, I knew I wasn’t likely to win. Even thinking about winning filled me with the same ancient terror as it had years before, and frankly, there’s blue and purple belts with well over 100 comps, with all the experience and expertise that entails. Expertise that I lack.
So, if winning wasn’t an option in terms of intention, I needed to develop some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that I could realistically accomplish. Some set of metrics to track progress that circumvented the issues of winning, self-esteem and identity. After some consideration, I developed the following set of trackable statistics I’ve used to become, if not a very successful competitor (that’s very much still work in progress) then at least fairly prolific.
And, I’m happy to write that I have accomplish the first two. Outside of one ADCC sponsored tournament that occurred while I was in Japan with my family, I competed in every local tournament with a bracket for me. Of course, there have been other tournaments I wasn’t able to enter; ones for kids, for white, blue and purple belts only, invitationals and inter-gym competitions, team style events and so on, but if anybody hosted a local BJJ or submission grappling tournament, and let me compete, I was there.
The second goal, to optimize the chances of standing on a podium and medaling by joining every bracket I could, in each tournament, I also did. In a total of 6 tournaments this year, I have stood on a podium at least once per comp, and won a total of 10 medals. I’ve competed in both adult and masters categories at -65kg, -70kg, and -73kg, -79kg and open class, and along the way did several super-fights at various weights. Although I’ve signed up for -61kg adult and masters, I’ve yet to actually have anyone in my natural bracket, so spamming every comp was definitely the way to go for mat time and medal optimization. I can’t remember off-hand how many golds – very few to be honest, but that was never part of the equation, and I’m trying not to focus on that metric.
The first few tournaments, I did choke mid-way through several matches, and gave up early, but by mid-year, I wasn’t having that problem as much. I was certainly submitted. A lot. But, if I was physically able to fight, I kept fighting, and largely ignored points and time. In my last comp, I fought as hard as I could in each match, at each moment, and felt like I could win at any time.
In that same tournament, I lost my first match by heel hook, then lost by a Darce close to the end of the second, then lost to two more footlocks; another heel hook and an Estima lock, I got a bolt cutter from 50/50 and lost on a gold/silver match by points. My memories of the comp are of getting smashed, then smashed, then smashed some more. But, despite losing again and again, I approached each match as if I was going to win. I didn’t give up despite initial losses, and came away with two bronze medals and a silver. As compared to the first few tournaments of the year, I was able to be much more consistent across multiple matches, even after losing. For me, this was a huge win.
So at this point, if you’re interested in advice that could lead you to being a highly successful competitor, a world champion, a folk hero known far and wide for your many noble triumphs, I don’t have much to offer. I can however, make some recommendations if like me, you are a very novice, very nervous, very reluctant competitor, who has experienced nothing but losses, and is considering giving up well before achieving anything of note. This is just what worked for me in transforming myself from a terrible and infrequent competitor to a more consistent competitor who is slightly less terrible.
Use Competition as Tool:
Realize the value of competition as a tool for improvement, not for buttressing your identity or self-image. Imagine two parallel universes; with an identical version of you in each. Both versions of you train BJJ, and with the same general frequency. One you competes in 100 tournaments over the course of a year. The other doesn’t compete at all. However, the one that competes loses every single match in every single tournament. The other you never loses, because they never compete. At the end of the year, the two versions of you meet, and roll. The one who competed 100 times, and lost 100 times will, I’m quite sure, absolutely dominate the one who never competed.
Why is this? A marginally better diet, a little more research and study, making that extra class or open mat or skipping a few less work-outs, a bit more confidence and willingness to take risks. Through the course of that year, regular competition motivated tiny, incremental improvements that, although imperceptible week to week, add up to a statistically meaningful advantage, regardless of wins or loses.
Redefine Success:
Redefine success to encompass goals you can, albeit with difficulty, accomplish for sure. If you look at my four KPIs, two are quantified – they’re objective and can be counted, and two are qualified – they’re about how I feel and respond to competitive stress. The quantified metrics are easy to track and measure, and most importantly, they are things I can definitely do. I just pay my money, show up on comp day on time and on weight.
For the qualified metrics, I carefully observed and then considered my response and performance after a few competitions, and then made sure to do the same after each was done. How did I feel when I lost? Did I allow that to get inside my head and effect subsequent matches? Sometimes yes, but sometimes less so, and I made a note of that. I didn’t define success as winning matches or gold medals. I have little control over that, and given my relative inexperience, wasn’t predictably achievable.
Post-mortem:
Compete, analyze, and take note of what worked well, what you can improve, and what didn’t work but that’s outside your control. Pick a few from the first two lists and work on strengthening what worked, come up with some potential solutions to things you need to improve, and for those things that didn’t go so well, but are outside of your control – you got sick before a certain comp, or were moved up several weight categories and got smashed by a giant – something I’m pretty familiar with, perhaps you got matched up with a pro-MMA fighter who just trains, eats, sleeps and trains some more, accept them for the uncontrollable factors they are and move on.
Let Things Go:
Let go of wins and losses as soon as they occur. The faster the better. That’s why using competition as a tool and redefining success was so critical for me. I know how tempting and insidious it is to want to win, to feel amazing when you do, and to feel shattered and hopeless when you don’t. I really struggled to push that entire idea aside, but in doing so, I was able to enter each tournament and each match within each tournament as a fresh start, and ultimately part of my own personal learning process, where success was defined by showing up and leaving everything on the mat, not winning a piece of cheap metal painted to look like gold.
Focus on Greater Meaning:
Most importantly, have a greater meaning for competition. For those who want to make BJJ or submission grappling their careers, travel the world teaching seminars, run academies and build champion teams, winning medals and placing in important tournaments really is important, and might be enough to motivate through setbacks and obstacles. For those of us who are at best, serious armatures, competition usually needs to serve a greater purpose. For some, it’s just about health or personal improvement, conquering fear or becoming better human beings – there’s certainly some of that for me. Primarily though, it was about demonstrating courage and resiliency in the face of likely failure to my son, and to try and live up to his idealistic view of his dad. That one change in mindset actually made losing more positive and useful than winning.
I still feel unbelievably anxious as soon as I sign up for a competition. I fight back the urge to throw up just checking my brackets in Smoothcomp, and I still fantasize about being hit by a bus or having a medical emergency on the way to the venue – although I entertain those thoughts less than before. But, I keep telling myself; you’re doing this for your son, just keep trying. One day, when he faces failure, or the fear of failure – whether its academics, sports or any other endeavor he sets within his sights, I have direct, practical advice based on real world experience I can impart. He can do as I do, not just as I say.
Case in point, and the real topic of this post; BJJ competition.
I’ve been training BJJ since somewhere around 2003 or 2004, and like many people, I quit several times. The longest off period was 3 years as a 2 stripe brown belt. Eventually I did find my way back and in late 2018, received my black belt from Coach Chance Wanlass; a Rigan Machado/Chris Haueter black belt currently teaching in Singapore, where I train.
Growing up, I was enthusiastically unathletic. I was a bookish, anxious kid, and I’m an anxious adult. As a child, any kind of physical competition made me feel like I was going to throw up, violently, and I would always loose – running, relays, long-jump, rope climbing, dodge-ball and so many more. There are few kid-friendly sports I haven’t lost, thus confirming that my fears were well founded.
So, when I started Jiu-jitsu, and I saw team-mates competing, I thought that this might be my chance to exercise some of those childhood demons. I signed up for my first tournament, I knew next to nothing about BJJ, let alone sports competition, and was very, very nervous. I was matched up with another white belt, and despite getting a flower sweep and back take, was quickly submitted with a reverse arm-bar, which I’d never seen before. I discovered later that he was also a Judo black belt, and a highly competitive one at that. The fact that I had done as well as I did should have given me a massive boost in confidence.
Instead, I was emotionally crushed. I spent the next two weeks in a depressed haze. I had no idea how to contextualize loss, other than how it proved I was as much of a loser as I thought I was, that I was pathetic and fundamentally worthless. This response represented all I knew about competition. Winning was good, losing was bad.
Like everyone, I’ve heard the standard array of sports clichés. “You win or you learn” was one my coach at the time was particularly fond of. The problem was, I had no clue what that meant. What was I supposed to learn from losing? That I was a loser? That I sucked at this sport and art that I loved? I needed more explanation and detail as to how to use competition as an instrument of improvement, and the folksy wisdom of sports related proverbs weren’t going to cut it.
Moving forward, my competition experiences only became worse. The preceding two weeks before any tournament became a nightmare of anxiety and self-doubt. I’d be nauseous all day, every day. Not one moment would be free from the sensation of impending doom. I would vibrate with fear.
Then, comp day would come. I’d hardly sleep the night before, pray that I’d get hit by a bus or have a stroke on the way to the venue, come in under-weight, since I’d hardly been eating due to the nausea, have painful gastric “issues”, vomit in the toilet, compete and lose.
Relief, if it came, was short-lived, soon eclipsed by depression and self-loathing. I’d spend the next two weeks barely training, ashamed of my failure. I’d stop going out or talking to friends, carefully avoid making eye-contact with myself in mirrors, given that whenever I did, the phrase “I hate you so much, I wish you’d die” would punch through my mind like a very angry fist made of crushed childhood self-esteem.
No lie; every competition ruined my life for a month. As a consequence, I only competed a few times at each belt, and as a purple, had 5 comps to my name, with zero wins, 6 or 7 losses. After one tournament as a purple belt, I decided I’d had enough. I only lost, I was practically schizophrenic before, depressed after, and seemed to get nothing out of the experience but self-hate. I’ve always had a lot of insecurities in regards to my BJJ abilities, and competition made things worse.
However, in June of 2015, something happened that would eventually force me to reevaluate my perspective on BJJ competition; I had a son. For the first 3 years or so, kids are basically loud, slightly mobile plants. They have few real opinions of their own, and can’t really express them outside of incoherent screaming. They are also very much focused on mom as the centre of the universe, or perhaps themselves at the centre and mom as the main planetary body. Dad, and others, are of little importance.
Once they pass the milestone of 4 years though, children start to express themselves more, they gain greater verbal ability, using it with great, if comical, enthusiasm. For the past two years, my son has been stricken by what I describe as verbal diarrhea. It is a rare moment when he doesn’t have something to say about something.
Most of his stream of consciousness rants focuses on Spider-man, The Hulk, who would win in a battle; Optimus Prime or Megatron. However, every once and a while he drops something that knocks me for a loop, like “Poppa, when I grow up, I want to be as brave as you” or “Poppa, how can I be strong like you?” He’s asked me, with genuine sincerity, if I could reach up to the top of a 20 metre tall tree or jump over a multi-story apartment block. In a child’s eyes, a father is somewhere between a super-hero and God.
When he’d say these things, funny and naïve as they were, I’d get a slight twinge of guilt. Was I really doing my best to live up to the greatness he assumed of his dad? Was I striving to be the father, the man, he saw, or was I selling myself, and consequently him, short? I had always felt less than positive about my BJJ competition experiences, both how badly I’d done, and how I’d let fear and frustration, self-doubt and weakness, make me quit.
I decided that if he was going to see me in such an idealistic light, I’d better start doing my best to behave that way. I needed to face that fear, and if not overcome it, then experience it and keep moving forward. What better lesson could I hope to teach my son than perseverance? And, how could I teach such a lesson when I myself couldn’t walk the talk? I needed to start competing again, and regularly.
Now, I knew I wasn’t likely to win. Even thinking about winning filled me with the same ancient terror as it had years before, and frankly, there’s blue and purple belts with well over 100 comps, with all the experience and expertise that entails. Expertise that I lack.
So, if winning wasn’t an option in terms of intention, I needed to develop some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that I could realistically accomplish. Some set of metrics to track progress that circumvented the issues of winning, self-esteem and identity. After some consideration, I developed the following set of trackable statistics I’ve used to become, if not a very successful competitor (that’s very much still work in progress) then at least fairly prolific.
- I would enter every competition in Singapore that had a bracket I could join. Black belt/advanced, yes-gi or no-g, any rule-set, any weight, any age. If they’d let me compete, I’d compete.
- I would try to collect as many medals as possible, but with no consideration towards bronze, silver or gold. If I medaled, I’d consider that a bonus. That meant joining multiple brackets in every tournament, to maximize my chances of medaling, even if I lose all my matches.
- I would keep trying to win each match, at every moment, regardless of where I am in the points. Giving up when I’ve been down on points has been an issue in the past, and I knew I needed to improve this if I was to make progress.
- I will try to improve my consistency across multiple matches. Again, a problem from the past, where an initial loss would send me into a tailspin of self-doubt that undermined my performance in subsequent matches.
And, I’m happy to write that I have accomplish the first two. Outside of one ADCC sponsored tournament that occurred while I was in Japan with my family, I competed in every local tournament with a bracket for me. Of course, there have been other tournaments I wasn’t able to enter; ones for kids, for white, blue and purple belts only, invitationals and inter-gym competitions, team style events and so on, but if anybody hosted a local BJJ or submission grappling tournament, and let me compete, I was there.
The second goal, to optimize the chances of standing on a podium and medaling by joining every bracket I could, in each tournament, I also did. In a total of 6 tournaments this year, I have stood on a podium at least once per comp, and won a total of 10 medals. I’ve competed in both adult and masters categories at -65kg, -70kg, and -73kg, -79kg and open class, and along the way did several super-fights at various weights. Although I’ve signed up for -61kg adult and masters, I’ve yet to actually have anyone in my natural bracket, so spamming every comp was definitely the way to go for mat time and medal optimization. I can’t remember off-hand how many golds – very few to be honest, but that was never part of the equation, and I’m trying not to focus on that metric.
The first few tournaments, I did choke mid-way through several matches, and gave up early, but by mid-year, I wasn’t having that problem as much. I was certainly submitted. A lot. But, if I was physically able to fight, I kept fighting, and largely ignored points and time. In my last comp, I fought as hard as I could in each match, at each moment, and felt like I could win at any time.
In that same tournament, I lost my first match by heel hook, then lost by a Darce close to the end of the second, then lost to two more footlocks; another heel hook and an Estima lock, I got a bolt cutter from 50/50 and lost on a gold/silver match by points. My memories of the comp are of getting smashed, then smashed, then smashed some more. But, despite losing again and again, I approached each match as if I was going to win. I didn’t give up despite initial losses, and came away with two bronze medals and a silver. As compared to the first few tournaments of the year, I was able to be much more consistent across multiple matches, even after losing. For me, this was a huge win.
So at this point, if you’re interested in advice that could lead you to being a highly successful competitor, a world champion, a folk hero known far and wide for your many noble triumphs, I don’t have much to offer. I can however, make some recommendations if like me, you are a very novice, very nervous, very reluctant competitor, who has experienced nothing but losses, and is considering giving up well before achieving anything of note. This is just what worked for me in transforming myself from a terrible and infrequent competitor to a more consistent competitor who is slightly less terrible.
Use Competition as Tool:
Realize the value of competition as a tool for improvement, not for buttressing your identity or self-image. Imagine two parallel universes; with an identical version of you in each. Both versions of you train BJJ, and with the same general frequency. One you competes in 100 tournaments over the course of a year. The other doesn’t compete at all. However, the one that competes loses every single match in every single tournament. The other you never loses, because they never compete. At the end of the year, the two versions of you meet, and roll. The one who competed 100 times, and lost 100 times will, I’m quite sure, absolutely dominate the one who never competed.
Why is this? A marginally better diet, a little more research and study, making that extra class or open mat or skipping a few less work-outs, a bit more confidence and willingness to take risks. Through the course of that year, regular competition motivated tiny, incremental improvements that, although imperceptible week to week, add up to a statistically meaningful advantage, regardless of wins or loses.
Redefine Success:
Redefine success to encompass goals you can, albeit with difficulty, accomplish for sure. If you look at my four KPIs, two are quantified – they’re objective and can be counted, and two are qualified – they’re about how I feel and respond to competitive stress. The quantified metrics are easy to track and measure, and most importantly, they are things I can definitely do. I just pay my money, show up on comp day on time and on weight.
For the qualified metrics, I carefully observed and then considered my response and performance after a few competitions, and then made sure to do the same after each was done. How did I feel when I lost? Did I allow that to get inside my head and effect subsequent matches? Sometimes yes, but sometimes less so, and I made a note of that. I didn’t define success as winning matches or gold medals. I have little control over that, and given my relative inexperience, wasn’t predictably achievable.
Post-mortem:
Compete, analyze, and take note of what worked well, what you can improve, and what didn’t work but that’s outside your control. Pick a few from the first two lists and work on strengthening what worked, come up with some potential solutions to things you need to improve, and for those things that didn’t go so well, but are outside of your control – you got sick before a certain comp, or were moved up several weight categories and got smashed by a giant – something I’m pretty familiar with, perhaps you got matched up with a pro-MMA fighter who just trains, eats, sleeps and trains some more, accept them for the uncontrollable factors they are and move on.
Let Things Go:
Let go of wins and losses as soon as they occur. The faster the better. That’s why using competition as a tool and redefining success was so critical for me. I know how tempting and insidious it is to want to win, to feel amazing when you do, and to feel shattered and hopeless when you don’t. I really struggled to push that entire idea aside, but in doing so, I was able to enter each tournament and each match within each tournament as a fresh start, and ultimately part of my own personal learning process, where success was defined by showing up and leaving everything on the mat, not winning a piece of cheap metal painted to look like gold.
Focus on Greater Meaning:
Most importantly, have a greater meaning for competition. For those who want to make BJJ or submission grappling their careers, travel the world teaching seminars, run academies and build champion teams, winning medals and placing in important tournaments really is important, and might be enough to motivate through setbacks and obstacles. For those of us who are at best, serious armatures, competition usually needs to serve a greater purpose. For some, it’s just about health or personal improvement, conquering fear or becoming better human beings – there’s certainly some of that for me. Primarily though, it was about demonstrating courage and resiliency in the face of likely failure to my son, and to try and live up to his idealistic view of his dad. That one change in mindset actually made losing more positive and useful than winning.
I still feel unbelievably anxious as soon as I sign up for a competition. I fight back the urge to throw up just checking my brackets in Smoothcomp, and I still fantasize about being hit by a bus or having a medical emergency on the way to the venue – although I entertain those thoughts less than before. But, I keep telling myself; you’re doing this for your son, just keep trying. One day, when he faces failure, or the fear of failure – whether its academics, sports or any other endeavor he sets within his sights, I have direct, practical advice based on real world experience I can impart. He can do as I do, not just as I say.