E183 | Locus of Control in BJJ: Shifting Your Mindset for Success

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00:46 But when in terms of Jiu-Jitsu, it is the way you review, analyze, and look at problems that you're encountering. When I am asked questions, sometimes the student—well, I would say actually most of the time—the student will predicate the question based on what the opponent is doing. "Hey, this keeps happening to me. They keep, uh, collar choking me. They keep, uh, arm-barring me," whatever it might be. And again, the question's almost always relegated or centered around what the opponent is doing. I do this as well, and I think when I was coming up and I did ask questions, I think it was centered around the same philosophy or the same approach. I am having a problem, my opponent does X.

01:31 And very seldom do I get questions—and I'm trying to remember it—yeah, very seldom do I get questions where they're centered around: "I am trying X, and I'm failing at securing this, this, and that." Think back to the questions you've asked, the questions that you've asked training partners, the questions that you've asked your instructor, and try to picture how that question was formulated in your head and how you presented the question to the instructor or training partner. I will probably guess that they are all centered around that point of view: "My opponent is doing X. My opponent did this to me. My opponent won't allow me to." And I don't think there's inherently something wrong with—with asking the question that way, because I think we're looking at the scenario and what we would like to do versus what they're doing. Uh, but I think it's a little telling. I think it's telling in the sense of, how do we look at problems within Jiu-Jitsu? And how do we formulate those problems, and then how does that register mentally in our blocks?

02:18 So oftentimes the questions are frustrating us, so because they're frustrating us, they—not all the time, but sometimes—they are indicators to how we feel about ourselves and or our game. So I might be saying to myself when I ask a question, "My partner keeps hitting me with this armbar. I suck at defending armbars." So they're—they're specific to my partner versus or—and in concert with how bad I am—I am at them. Opposed to: "Hey, I'm trying to defend the armbar, and I'm not sure at what point, but I have a really hard time keeping myself from allowing my elbow to drift too far across my body."

02:44 And—and I know that sounds roughly the same or, what is the difference, or there's a—there's a nuance to it, and does the nuance matter? It's different because it's the approach in which we are looking at the problem. I'm no longer looking at the problem from pointing the finger or the result or the skill at my opponent. When I ask it that way, I'm looking at it as, I'm taking responsibility for a problem that I'm causing. I'm not understanding what the problem is, but I—I—I—I get some understanding, I would—I should say. But I'm not understanding the entire picture. So when I say, "Hey, my part—my opponent keeps arm-barring me, I don't know what to do," it's putting all the skill on my—my—my partner. It's putting all the skill in—in what occurred, and the responsibility and almost fault on my partner. "They did this." Opposed to me looking at it like a little bit more in-depth and saying, "Hey, I keep getting arm-barred from mount. I know that I should be doing this, but I'm having a really hard time solidifying it or preventing it." So now it—it allows you to look at the picture and say, "I understand it to some degree," because there's a little bit more detail and nuance in that question, "but I'm just not understanding where I'm going wrong in this specific element."

03:52 And again, I get it. It's neither here nor there in some people's eyes. It—it doesn't matter. But when you're in this sport for a really long time and you're going to make up a lot of mistakes and you're going to fuck up and you're going to fall short a lot of the times, I think that it's genuinely helpful psychologically and in that mental approach if you can take the ownership or own this from your opponent to yourself.

04:12 If I'm at work and, for an example, um, I missed a deadline. And I immediately—tell—my—my boss is unhappy, and I immediately tell them, "I missed the deadline because I had so many things going on, blah blah blah, and this person called out, that person called out, and I didn't do this because of this, this, and that." It's not the greatest of approach. It makes it seem like you're giving the responsibility to everyone else and the blame to everything else instead of taking some kind of accountability. On the flip side, what you could have done was, "Hey, I know I—I missed the—this deadline. Or better yet, hey, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be able to do XYZ because we had someone call out, I have three requests that are piling up, um, and this was more import—more more important or more pressing because it was—it was an emergency request for this, this, and this. Um, I'm not going to be able to make this—this deadline on this request of yours."

05:01 You're now presenting the case preemptively, in that sense, or even after the fact, you're pressing the case and you're saying, "This happened, these are my limitations, I made a decision based on what I knew and what I thought was right. Because of this, uh, I was unable to meet the deadline that you requested." As a supervisor, I can look at that and be like, "Okay. That's a—that's a different outcome, that's a different—the outcome is the same, but that's a different approach and a different view of what occurred." It—it gives you the impression that you were a willing participant in what was going on, that you saw what was—what was occurring, you weighed what was occurring, but you maybe just made a decision different than what I would have wanted you to. I can live with that. We can come back and be like, "Okay, cool. We missed it, we're good. Uh, moving forward, let's do this, this, and this, or, if you didn't come to me preemptively, explain that next time. Come to me beforehand, be like, 'Hey, I just got these three requests, I know you had a request for this. Um, I don't know if I can fulfill it,' and then I can help you with the—with the decision." So those are two different views of the problem.

05:51 If I'm getting arm-barred from mount, and I'm only looking at it from the view of, "My opponent is implementing all this shit and I'm not really a participant, and it just—it keeps happening," versus, "Hey, my opponent got to mount, I tried bridging to the other side, he did not—he prevented the bridge. So then when I tried to bridge the other way to create some space, my elbow pushed further along than I wanted it to, which allowed him to kind of like sneak behind me in S-mount and proceed with the armbar. How do I prevent this from happening while still trying to escape?" You are taking in more knowledge, you're looking at the bigger picture, you're looking at the details, you're understanding kind of where you went wrong, although you can argue that you went wrong before that person got to mount. There's a detail, there's a—a recognition, there's an understanding, there's a—there's a bigger picture analysis that you're providing, which is huge.

06:40 So sometimes my students, in general, will come to me and they'll have these questions, but they're—they're not developed enough for them to really fix the answer because it's way too vague. And then sometimes that same student, three, four months in, they'll start to understand the picture a little bit better, or maybe they shift the way they think about things, and you look at them and like when they ask the question, they're like, "Hey, I—I'm defending this, but then he's switching to this, and I—I don't understand how to switch between the two defenses." We can work with that, we can have that conversation, we can get deeper into that decision tree that you're trying to—to figure out. Because again, the—the second version is you understanding the game a little bit better. And I understand that when you're brand new, everything's going to be outward. Everything. Because you don't have anything to—to to to fall back on, you don't have a technique to play with, you don't have a—a solid game plan. So you're a couple days in, a couple weeks in, literally everything's going to be external, and you're just along for the ride, if you will.

07:33 Then you get in a year, two years, three years in, these things stop being about the external and now start become—becoming more about the internal, and if you can shift that mindset, you then respond to difficulties differently. You just—you respond to someone's guard passing differently, you respond to those quote-unquote plateaus that you're going to have differently. Because then it's no longer what everyone else is doing to me, and what am I not doing? Or, what am I doing? Because a lot of these answers are less about the other person and more about us. Like if I—if I—the other day I was rolling with someone, and I was fucking around, and they got deeper in this position that I ever would have ever allowed them to. But I was playing with something. And they got deep into this position, and I'm like, "Oh, I don't know if I'm getting out of this." But I—I knew exactly what I did and didn't do, I just didn't anticipate the reaction time that I did—that I ended up getting from them. But if I was on my p's and q's, I would have understood all of this and shut everything down.

08:24 So again, the more you get into the sport, and the more time you spend here, the less outward blame you're going to have, and it's literally everything's going to be about you. "I didn't get this underhook well enough because I didn't off-balance them. I set it up too obvious. I didn't get this armbar because I didn't set up a—a another threat that made them focus on that threat opposed to the armbar. When I had the back, I didn't—I didn't solidify control over the arms as well as I should have, so I wasn't able to get the—rear-naked choke. I wasn't able to get on the collar well enough for the collar choke." This is the mental shift that you're going to have at some point, which determines and changes so much of your game. So much of your game. You will stop playing every—everything else or everyone else. You stop blaming, "Oh, they're younger, they're faster, they're stronger." And then you start amplifying, "Okay, so if they have speed and strength on their end, what do I have in—in my wheelhouse that kind—can kind of negate some of that?"

09:12 There's people that I roll with who are half my age, I'm 45, strong. And I shift to a very different game than what I would probably normally play, and that shift is because I need to take responsibility for what's going to go on in this surround, and my game plan is going to have to dictate where we're going to go. I'm not playing his game plan. So now again, it's an internal review of what could go on, and that internal review is going to dictate what I'm going to end up doing. So once we can make that shift, I know it takes a little bit of time, once you can make that shift, you don't get down about your—your ailments, you don't get down about the mistakes you made, you don't beat yourself up necessarily so much. It's just a learning process. But the—the the big test is, can you shift from blaming them to understanding your part in everything that's going on? And I know that's hard to do sometimes.

10:02 And but the same thing goes to—to life. There's times when, again if I'm going to relate it to work, where we're not going to meet a certain deadline and I—I got to tell my boss. And be like, "Hey, uh, just so you know, we're not going to be making any deliveries today. I got a—I'm short-staffed, I have, uh, a two pickups at from a in-store that we got to do, and I have recycling that we have to do, we're not going to be making any deliveries today." Or, "Um, our delivery company came in late, so we will not be doing a delivery. We'll be doing it early tomorrow morning, just so you know." I'm not blaming the other person, I have assessed the situation, I've assessed what went on, and I'm forming a game plan on what I should do next. I want you guys to start thinking about it as internal instead of external. It's going to change your whole outcome, it's going to change everything about how you approach Jiu-Jitsu, what things you want to formulate, what things you want to spend time on, what things you want to kind of maybe ignore for the time being, and because all this is you. As—as rough as and that might sound to some of you, all of it is you.

10:53 Even the people, like I'll roll with someone who is not as skilled as me. And sometimes this happens with wrestlers, and I've said this about wrestlers, and some military people. They roll differently than the regular people. And I'm not saying every military—every military person or every law enforcement, but there's a certain group within that group that rolls aggressively. And when I roll with these people, they're not as skilled, but it almost feels like they don't give a fuck what I'm doing or planning to do. They're going to impose themselves. They're not worried about what I'm throwing at them necessarily. They know they need to commit to whatever they're doing and that how this round is going to go is based on them. So then it put me on my back foot, and then I'm defending because they're woefully and whole—like they're completely committed to whatever action they decide. Like if you ever roll with a really good wrestler, that's half the—the battle there.

11:51 Like while Jiu-Jitsu's kind of more gentle in some ways, we allow things to happen and we're kind of kind of casual about a lot of shit, they're going in hard. They're committed to that takedown, that pass, that that pressure, and they're—they're going forward. And because they're so committed in going forward and addressing the round for themselves, 100% committed, you then have to play the second, and then now you're concerned with what they're doing. So you're no longer imposing yourself. Those rounds are fun for me because they're a healthy reminder of this whole thing here. Because sometimes in Jiu-Jitsu we get very—very casual. And sometimes we just really need to really buckle down and just look at the whole picture and be like, "I'm going to do this, I don't care what anyone else is—is trying to do and counter me. Uh, this is what I'm going to get." Something rolls wrong? Okay, so what did I do wrong?