A true indicator of peak performance is experiencing joy even in the most challenging moments. According to Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion Emily Kwok, the moments she spends enjoying her time on the mat with her opponent are indicators of her success. This week Emily returns to the podcast to share how her definition of peak performance and athleticism has changed over the years as she experienced parenthood, COVID, and a shift in perspective. Listen in as Emily shares insights into the different stages of life as a professional athlete, how to create awareness around the different levels of performance you achieve throughout your life, and the key questions to ask yourself when determining your limits. Emily also shares the liberating feeling of showing up to the mat and knowing you deserve to be there, as well as why she takes every opponent seriously.
Emily Kwok is a multi-time-international Brazilian jiu-jitsu Federation World Champion, a mixed martial arts veteran and co-owner and co-head instructor of Princeton, Brazilian jujitsu, peak performance consultant, and freelance writer. She is widely regarded as the early pioneer of Brazilian jiu jitsu in Northern America, being one of the first females to rise to prominence as the sport extended around the globe. She has spent the better part of the last decade working closely with Josh Waitzkin, training in the field of peak performance, exploring how to manage and induce optimal states in the self.
You can learn more about Emily at www.emilykwok.com
Episode Transcript
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Professor Emily Kwok is a multiple-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF world champion in both the adult and master’s divisions. A third degree black belt, Emily is widely considered a pioneer of women’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA. She’s an athlete, teacher, performance consultant,
01:16
mother of three, and I am honored to also call her my friend, Emily. Thank you so much for being back here. Thank you so much for taking the time. You just got done winning another championship. You’ve had an incredible first season of the master and the apprentice podcast. Everybody go check that out. Deep, deep conversations with tremendous people like Sarah McMahon, for example, UFC champion, the first woman to win silver in the Olympic and wrestling. Everything that she does is quality. And.
01:46
I can’t wait to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much. Really happy to be back. Thanks so, so much, Marcus. So we had a conversation last year and you were still doing the performance coaching and still obviously doing jujitsu, but you just came off of a tremendous run as it were, can you give us an update about that? And we’ll just kind of take the conversation from there. Yeah. So I think it’s funny when you are an athlete and you are sort of in your peak years, if you will, that.
02:16
It’s maybe not a question whether it’s going to happen, but more a question of when, when you decide that you’re going to maybe redirect your focus on other things in life, inevitably the question comes up, are you retiring? You know? And I remember at the time in 2012, I was getting ready to have my first child. I was pretty burnt out from competition. And I had said, you know, I don’t know that I want to say I’m retiring, but I’m definitely going to take a little bit of time away.
02:45
It was really all that I knew. And I took six years off to have a family. So I had two daughters during that period of time. I focused on building our school up, focused on gaining weight and losing weight, because that’s a natural side effect of giving birth to humans. And in 2018, there was a big campaign that one of my students, Cynthia Fink was part of, where a number of women who were more mature in age.
03:14
I would sort of define that as being over 30, had made a big push with the IBJJF to include more masters divisions for females. And so the reason why they were doing that was because in some of the larger competitions, like the Pan Ams and the world championships, they were giving men masters divisions, but the women’s divisions were either non-existent or they were very limited, like they might’ve just offered one master’s category. But 30 and over, I mean like.
03:42
You’re talking, maybe there are people that are 60 that want to fight and they, a 30 year stretch is, is a lot for them. So there was a huge campaign at the time to introduce women’s masters divisions to the same degree that the men had. And it moved, you know, moved the needle. And so that year, I think part of it was to go support my students, but part of it was also to support this movement to go compete and show up for all the women that might not be there yet.
04:10
And so I was a master’s two then, which is 35 to 40. And I won, I trained really hard for that competition. I managed to win that title. Then I sort of surprisingly became pregnant again and I had a son. And then we had COVID those lost years. So I wasn’t active for a few years again. And I was very frustrated because at the time I had thought I really wanted to make a return to myself, a return to competing.
04:40
Obviously my life had changed in many ways and I was now working more in consulting in addition to running the school, but life had other plans for me. And so I took that pretty hard because I had just gotten to the point of getting out of diapers and getting out of doing the potty and we weren’t baby, baby stage anymore. And then we had to go right back to it. So that pulled me backwards and emerging out of COVID.
05:08
I just wanted to get myself in great shape. And now that I’m 41, I sort of said, you know, I would love to look better and feel better than I did at my peak in my mid twenties, if I can now. So that was kind of my initial goal. And when the Pan Ams came up, I thought, you know, this was the one gold medal that alluded to me. So in my younger years, I had competed and won gold at Wendy Owls, which is the GEE world championships, the Nogi.
05:37
The Pan American no ghee, but I just never clinched that gold in the ghee at pans. So I thought maybe I’ll go for it. And then of course, there was a huge conversation of, do I go to the adult divisions or do I go to the master’s divisions? And I thought, you know what? I’ve got a lot of my plate. Let me just go for a master’s at this point and let’s see what happens. I had a really good performance there coming out of nowhere. So, you know, I have so much respect for.
06:04
the momentum that you build as a performer. And I didn’t have that momentum, right? Like I’ve been out of the arena helping others. And now here I was saying, I want to go back in the arena. So I had a bad seed in the bracket. I had to fight all those super tough girls first, but we did really well. I managed to win that. I won my three matches with zero points scored against me. And that was, that was pretty awesome. And then I was like, okay, I’m going to lay low. But then.
06:33
Inevitably, I kind of got caught up and I’ll go coach at the worlds. And then every time I think about coaching, I feel a little guilty for not doing the work to enjoy myself. So then I said, you know what? I’ll just toss my hat in the ring. And so we had a repeat three win zero points scored against me performance. And, and here I am. I’m still alive. Well, you’re, you’re still alive. You’re unscathed, no injuries. Yes. And you were mentioning before that.
07:01
Because again, pushing pause on something like that, that we’ve developed so much momentum around, especially at a young age, that’s sort of your life. And then having a family, having a business, having a school coaching clients for performance, there’s a lot going on. And you mentioned before we hit record that you were talking to, to Josh about what other performance looks like for you in the future for competing. First of all, for those that don’t know, can you tell them who Josh is your relationship and then kind of what you guys were unpacking? Yeah. So.
07:30
For people that don’t know, Josh Waitskin is somebody that I work really closely with. I’ve worked with him for over 10 years now. He is best known for writing a book called The Art of Learning. And he’s been on Tim Ferriss a number of times and talks a lot about performance states and really optimizing yourself. And from a very tactical, lived in place, we’re not talking about someone who reads a lot of books and tells you.
08:00
Like what you need to do to be great, but rather someone that really embodies what it is to push himself. And if we want to say like I’ve had a front seat or like an apprenticeship and the ability to observe how he chooses to live his life and learn from that. And I would also add the word like healed from that, you know, because I think when I was in my earlier stages of competition, I didn’t have a very deep.
08:29
understanding or appreciation for who I needed to be, to be the best performer. I think I felt quite pressured to be the athlete that my teachers quote unquote wanted me to be or what other people thought I should be doing to be the best. And at any rate, I’ve spent the better part of a decade working closely with him. And he’s a big reason why I work in the peak performance consulting field. And I owe so much to him as a mentor and a friend. So that’s Josh.
08:58
for you in a nutshell. But beyond that, it’s interesting, right? Like when you face competition, not just at one stage in your life, but in multiple stages, it can mean different things for you, or if it’s not competition, achievement. And I think it’s very good to recognize that our values change as we change. At 41, I’m not who I was when I was 20, when I started. I’m not who I was when I was 33 and I had my first child.
09:27
And so I think a big, something that’s very close to my heart is trying to live my life and set a different type of example. I’m not saying it’s the best example, but I just want to set a different kind of example of what an athletically primed life can look like for a middle-aged woman who has a family and who has a career and wants to be a mom.
09:54
but also wants to do something meaningful for herself. I think that particularly in jujitsu, we are often, there’s a lot of saturation of what a peak athlete looks like. And that athlete is usually a man. It’s usually somebody who’s like 200 to 220 pounds and gets to eat, sleep and live jujitsu all day and doesn’t have.
10:20
the constraints or the responsibilities that I think the majority of practitioners do. And I think that it’s brilliant that we have examples like that. And all I’m saying is we should have more examples of people that are doing it differently, you know, because the reality is so many of us come to what we do passionately as a hobby. Very few people have the option or maybe choice, they don’t make the choice to follow their bliss, if you will. And…
10:49
do something that they deeply love as their lifestyle. Sometimes we can’t afford to financially, time-wise. There’s all sorts of reasons why we can’t. But when we find something that speaks to us and we wanna do it at a high level, I think we should be able to. I think we can certainly make room for that. And so, yes, I had a phase of my career where I was 100% focused on being the best athlete possible with less responsibilities on my shoulders.
11:16
but here I am at a different stage in life with more responsibilities and let’s look at that. You’re a perfect example of that. And again, once we follow that bliss, once we find this passion and we have the courage to go boldly forward towards it, it’s hard because well, to Josh’s life, for example, where he was in the spotlight for chess, for all these things.
11:40
In a lot of ways it taints that it soils that it may take the joy from us. If we’re not able to still maintain, because we have a certain mentality when it’s a hobby. But then when we click over and say, no, this is my profession now, we still have to be able to tap into that initial mindset, that initial passion that got us there as opposed to saying, God, I have to go to do my four hours in the gym or go to cardio or whatever it is. So how have you been able to kind of maintain that as you transition to these different areas in your life?
12:11
Yeah, I mean, like, look, I think there’s different levels to all of this. And for me, it’s been developing an awareness of what is required to do that at that level and then to not compare those levels, if you will. So I had to ask myself when I wanted to go do PAMS and when I wanted to go do masters, I’m like, well, do I do masters or do I go to like a masters three now? Should I do masters to masters one go to adult?
12:38
And for people in the audience that don’t understand what that means, it’s like every category is a different age bracket and you can always fight down, but you can’t fight up. So you can’t fight people that are older than you, but you can fight people that are younger than you. And so that probably equates to most people as is that more challenging? And sometimes the timing of your matches gets longer, right? So you’re fighting a six minute or a 10 minute match as opposed to a five minute match. So I had to look at what.
13:07
I thought I could handle not only from a physical standpoint, but a mental load, logistically, what would my life allow me to do? And then most importantly, like what would my body allow me to do? And I think a question that comes up to me a lot in so many arenas of my life right now is just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I mean, you have familiar with this too. Just because you think you can, doesn’t mean you should.
13:37
And I thought to myself, well, can I be competitive with the adults? Can I, you know, put more effort into physical training? Can I, can I, can I? Absolutely. The answer is yes. Should I? Well, I don’t know. If I do that, then I’m going to be exhausted all the time. If I do that, I have to allocate more financial resources to this. If I do that, I might not be able to be there for my kids. If I do that, I can’t work with.
14:05
the type of clients that I want, you know? So it was a matter of balancing what my values were and asking myself what I was willing to put in and saying, okay, is this enough? Is this okay? And ultimately I decided it was better for me to do masters three. And also this is new territory for me. I may have been a competitor for 22, 23 years, but I had never had the opportunity to really fight people my own age. How does that look? How do you prepare for five minute matches and not 10 minute matches?
14:35
What does your strength and conditioning look like? And so that was very new territory for me, which I have to say was a bit daunting, right, because I’m used to doing things a different way. So yeah, so it was reevaluating where my life was and knowing what was required of me to compete at an adult level, obviously in a different time. So, you know, I probably have to tune that up if I wanted to, but I think this journey has been a lot about.
15:01
building more awareness and consciously recognizing what I already know and saying, what do I not know? And how am I going to layer that in? I also think it’s important that you pointed that out because you truly had to have asked that earnest question, you know, what am I hoping to accomplish here? What is my end goal? What is the intention behind this? If it’s just the idea, like you said, to compete, well, sure, just jump in the ring, but there was very much an intention behind this. And then that gave you that sort of
15:28
capacity to attack it in a very intelligent manner. You were saying you were doing this in truly an 80 20 kind of mentality where again, to a new competitor that has the luxury of competing in the morning, you know, drills in the afternoon, competing at night, open mat. After that, you know, five or six hours each sleep, you know, jujitsu. That’s one thing, but you were saying that you were really doing a lot of these specific intentional things with jujitsu.
15:57
two or three times a week, in addition to your conditioning with, you know, Antoine, the Olympic gold medalist, Antoine Maybank’s incredible athlete. He was on my podcast and you introduced us. So you’re competing at these very high levels and you’re surrounding yourself with the right people. Yet there is that part of you that probably is a competitor that thinks more is better, but better is better, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a really good point and it’s definitely kind of been a
16:24
I don’t know if I, if I would say it’s a light switch or a spectrum, but like, yeah, I think that we, at an earlier stage in our development, I think is any sort of performer, there’s that feeling of hunger and desire to acquire more, more knowledge, you know, more timing, more strength, what, you know, more range, whatever your discipline is. And I do think that when you are in that learning stage, it’s important to do those things because that
16:52
You know, as my podcast, the master and the apprentice focuses on, it’s like, we all come to things new. We learn, we imitate from what’s been done before us. But at what point does the student or the apprentice get to say or understand, Hey, like I’ve learned and acquired about as much as I can from all of these other teachers or things. And when do I make sense of all of this for myself?
17:21
Because as much as we think growing up that we want to fit in and we want to make nice and we want to be part of, we want to be included, if you look at real optimal performers in any industry, whether you’re talking about the creative arts or entrepreneurship, you know, finance, it’s the ones that find their own. Like the ones that find their own voice in all of this. It’s not how I fit in. It’s like, what makes me different? I was listening to an old.
17:51
podcast on Tim Ferriss and he was talking to Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine guitarist and I was telling a story of when he was coming up as a guitarist and he’s like, you know, I went, I think he was at an audition or he was at a show and there were three or four other really talented guitarists there, like really good. And he looked at them and he thought about himself and he was like, what am I going to do? Be the fifth best guitarist shred like them. And he’s like, nah.
18:21
I don’t think that’s what I should do. And that’s what led him to start experimenting and figuring out how to differentiate himself from the crowd. And so I think that that’s a thing that a lot of younger, what I would call like pre-conscious athletes or performers struggle with is that moment of trying to take on what everybody else knows and then thinking, well, I just have to do these things better. But like there’s very few people that are gonna take those things and actually do them better or do them the best.
18:50
I think the real path to understanding yourself and being the best and sticking out in the crowd is to figure out what works for you. And so, you know, I think in this go around it, so much of it has been, yes, like redefining my values at this stage in life, but also asking myself, is this enough for me now? And then like, what am I doing this for? At an earlier stage in my career, it was about the gold medal. It was about being number one. And I’m not going to a competition today to lose.
19:19
but I am going to a competition for a different reason. I’m like, okay, I still have a deep love for fighting, but with the time that I have, with the balance I need in my life, can I still perform at my best with this much? Can I go in on 22 years of knowledge and not be training jiu-jitsu six days a week, two times a day, and have the depth to still perform? What does it take for me to be able to access everything that I know?
19:49
Can I get there? Can I channel my anxiety? Because people think, oh, you’ve been doing this for so long, you don’t get nervous. I’m like, of course I get nervous. Of course I get nervous. If you’re not nervous, I think there’s something wrong. I mean, that’s all it is. If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention. Yeah. Or I think in the medium that I’m in, like fighting, to some degree, I feel like then you don’t take your opponent seriously. And not for nothing, but like, you don’t know who that person is across from you. Maybe you’ve watched footage, but you’ve never felt them. Or…
20:18
You don’t know if they came out of the shadows. So out of respect for my own process, out of respect for my competitors, I always take everybody seriously. Even if I fought them before and I beat them, that’s no reason for me to be like, Oh, I’m just going to walk through them. I never do that. One of the things I’m most proud of is there was a time in my athletic career where I was mentally.
20:43
broken and decimated and I did not believe walking on the mat. I did not believe that I belonged there. I felt that I was not deserving to fight my opponents. I felt like trash about myself because I had allowed somebody to pull me into that darkness. And one of the things I’m most proud of today is I can actually say I can show up on the mat.
21:08
And I can be really happy about being there. And I can feel like I deserve to be there. And I’m excited to fight the person that is on the mat with me. It’s almost so funny that, like the last two tournaments, especially this last one, people had asked me after I thought they’re like, how do you feel? And I was like, oh, like, this is awful. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Like, why do I do this to myself? And they’re like, it looks like you’re having a great time. And I’m like, but I’m not like this is I’m like, tired and like this is.
21:36
you know, what are we doing? I just want to eat a croissant and they’d say, but you’re smiling the whole time. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Cause sometimes I blackout and I don’t know what happens initially. Right. But then I see all these photographs that start coming out and I’m legit. It looks like I’m laughing in the middle of my face. I saw him. I saw him on social. I was like, she’s just laughing at the fights. I just guess I didn’t realize like.
22:05
how happy I am to not hate who I am and to not be fighting, you know, myself. I can just enjoy fighting my opponent who wants to equally be there with me. So it’s such a tremendous feeling to be liberated from that darkness. And that is something that I chase. That’s something that makes me feel like, oh, like I wanna go compete and see if I can feel this again because this makes me a better fighter. And people that are seeing you, I mean,
22:34
Obviously you’re very worthy to be there to be against that opponent, to be on that mat. How long did it take for you to see that you were in that darkness? And then what allowed you to kind of pull yourself from that? I think when I was slowing down on my competitive career in 2012, I think I just kind of lamented the fact that I wasn’t the five time world champion, you know, like, and I, and I even say this now, I know that some people
23:03
poo poo it, but when you’re in that stable and you’re in the stable with other people who have won the world championships at the adult level, three times, four times, five times, when you’re the one that’s won it once or twice, you kind of feel inadequate, right? On some level you are inadequate because you didn’t get it two or three or four times, right? But from everybody else’s perspective, they’re just like, what are you talking about?
23:32
I don’t even know a world champion. Like that’s amazing that you did it, but it’s very easy in that ecosystem or in that context to reduce your accomplishments because you’re reaching for something up here and you don’t have it. And so at that point, when I decided to have children, I remember my teacher, Marcelo Garcia, saying to me, look, I don’t think you should compete in this next tournament. I think you should just focus on building your family. And that’s a hard conversation to stomach.
24:01
because it’s essentially somebody telling you it’s time to move on. And when you are an athlete or you are a performer and that’s the only thing that you wanna do and that’s what you love, in some ways it’s your identity, right? And you go, what else am I getting? Like, I just devoted the last 10 years of my life to this. What do you mean? Have a family, like, what am I gonna do then? And I had a school in Princeton and so I thought, okay, you know, like I can focus on my school, I can phase out.
24:31
But it is, it’s a very hard thing to separate yourself from who you think you are and to take a hard look at like who you are and what you’re doing. And so I took the next few years to have my children and I always waited to have kids until I was a little bit older because I said, I don’t wanna regret having my children. Like I don’t wanna regret being pregnant and thinking like I could have been fighting more. But I was…
24:58
You could say at the time I was satisfied with what I accomplished and of course, not having the perspective to see what else I would do in jujitsu. At the time I was like, if I never fight again and nobody ever hears from me again, like I’m okay with what I did was kind of how I felt about it. But, you know, 2012, I also switched over to working with Josh primarily, you know, before that I was working with him.
25:22
on MG in Action, which was the online Academy that Marcel Garcia has. And I did a lot of liaising and directing and promotions of that, of that website when it first launched. And in 2012, I started working with Josh directly in his consulting business as he was trying to build it up. And I remember him saying to me like, look, I don’t really know what we’re going to do together. I like, I don’t really have a job description, but you’re just asking me any questions you want and we’ll just, we’ll do this.
25:50
And so I just kind of jumped into the front seat with him for the ride, whatever ride that was going to be. And he jokes and he asks me, and I’ve promised him one day I’ll write an essay on this, but working with Josh is kind of like being a bouncy ball in a dark room. I just have to throw myself and hope to God I hit a wall somewhere. So I can paint out like what this is. And I think that that was maybe the best thing that I could have ever done.
26:20
for myself as a human. And this is not by any means like glorifying who Josh is because Josh is a person. He taught me the hard lesson as well that even your heroes are real people and they’re going to be flawed and they’re going to make mistakes. But I think that for most of my life, I had sought out not just a teacher in jujitsu, but I had sought out a sage. I had sought out somebody that had wisdom. And
26:49
I don’t think I recognized until that point that they were not the same thing all the time. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find somebody that does all of it. But a lot of times, no, a lot of times that’s not the case. And I think part of my jiu-jitsu career was always saddened because I would show up as this very like willing and open-minded student. I’d be like, please teach me your ways. And after I journey into that,
27:17
for a few years, I’d be like, I cannot unsee what I’ve seen and I’m not sure I like what I saw. There were a lot of points of deep conflict for me because principally I try to live my life in a good way and there were a lot of things that I did not enjoy about the industry that I was in. And so when I got to work with Josh, just seeing him lead his own life, watching him go through his own challenges, observing how he helped.
27:45
people that we worked with, I started to see life differently. And of course, a lot of the resources that would come my way, whether they be books or being introduced and having fascinating conversations with high level performers, it just exposed me to more than what I had and more than what I understood. And not having the pressure of having to perform and just having children and, you know, trying to lead groups of others.
28:11
It gave me some space, I think, to really embrace and absorb all of these insights. Because I think when we’re too directed at a particular goal, sometimes we have the tendency to shut other things out. And I think that for, you know, a good portion of my athletic career, I was probably not that porous because I was like, I have this goal. I want to do this thing. If you’re not in my lane, like I’m not listening to you. And here I was in a state where I was like,
28:38
I just got to receive everything. And I was also in a very nurturing state. So I was breastfeeding, I was raising kids. And so during that time, I started to recognize how twisted my mental focus was and how much I did not believe in myself. As much as people are like, oh, you’re so intimidating and you’re so confident and you’re so this. And I’m like, but I’m not. I don’t truly feel that amount of conviction.
29:05
And so when I went back to compete in 2018, I think it was not competing for six years coming from a complete standstill, you know, of having children and not being athletic at all to let me focus on competing, let me see if I can do this and being able to come back in 2018 as a much stronger performer than I ever was, was a huge kick in my ass. Because it.
29:35
to me, it kind of signaled, okay, what was broken in you was not your ability, it was your mind. And I think after that happened, it really lit me up and I just thought, you know what, what can I not do now? You know, like now, it was almost like I felt like I saw the secret, because I’d like, we talk about it all the time, mindset this and like, you have to have your head in the right place, but here was like living, breathing proof for myself.
30:04
No, Emily, like this happened. And I remember when I was at Marcelo’s years ago, I trained with, there was a guy there named Batista, who was a teacher that came from Brazil, very talented athlete and teacher, big guy. He was like six foot four, six foot five, like a bean pole. And when I would ask him to train, I remember I would joke with him and I’d say, Batista, can I wrestle with your toe this round? And he’d be like, oh, so we would train.
30:32
And this was sort of like that stage where I really, I didn’t love myself. And I said, Batista, is there any feedback that you would give me or like, what should I work on? Am I okay? And he said, Emily, he’s like, I’ve trained with all the best girls. Like I’ve trained everywhere, you know, and he did, he came from Alliance in Brazil. Like all the world champions were there. And he’s like, you’re probably one of the best people, best females that I’ve ever ruled with. But you don’t believe it.
31:01
If you would believe it, you can beat everybody. And he goes, and I’m telling you, because I’ve trained with all of them. He’s like, I feel it. And that was such a hard thing for me to stomach because I was like, what the fuck? You know, and I was like, is he blowing smoke up my ass? And I realized like, I don’t really surround myself with people that blow smoke up my ass, but that was painful because I didn’t know how to believe it.
31:28
I don’t know if it took six years or if it could have happened in less, but putting myself in a completely different state of mind, removing myself from the fire in some ways allowed me to let my guard down and do the real work. And I would even say doing the work was not doing it was receiving. And so when I went back to compete in 2018, that was the opportunity I had to do. But I was doing in a much better state of mind with better equipped, more aware.
31:58
And in that particular competition, I had been training with a wrestler about 10 days before the fight and he had taken me down. My foot didn’t move properly. He didn’t do anything wrong. It was just like, I couldn’t clear my foot. And I tore all the ligaments in my ankle. And I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t even, I had to crawl off the mats. And everybody was like, Emily is not competing at Worlds in 10 days. But I
32:28
I was like, don’t worry. I was like, I’m going to figure this out. I’m still going to fight. And I called all my people, my therapists and my doctors. And within the next 48 hours I could walk and I had somebody reinforce and tape my ankle. And then I talked to Josh and I rejiggered my game and I eliminated all the things that I couldn’t do. That was something that I felt like, thank God for all the jiu-jitsu I know. Cause I can go in like a surgeon and say like, tear this chapter out of the performance playbook right now. We’re not doing this.
32:59
And I was able to go in 10 days later and fight a perfect fight and submit my opponent and not compromise my ankle. And I won. In that performance, I was like, holy shit. I didn’t just pull it all together, but I pulled it all together on such a level that I was even fighting physically compromised, but I didn’t allow that to affect my performance. And so at that point, I don’t want to say I became addicted to the feeling, but I was like, I’m on the other side of this now.
33:27
I’m a different type of performer and this is the kind of performer I want to be. So I think when I look at competing now, it’s just, it’s taken on a whole new meaning and in some ways I just do it for myself to, because I’m in such a better state, I think even amongst the clients that I work with, I just want to not, and I don’t put that pressure on myself. Like I have to win, but it’s like, I take this responsibility on of I will go out there and I want to be the person that.
33:56
demonstrates these things to you. I don’t want to be the person that just talks about them. And so I think it’s, it’s just been a huge win all around because people see that. There’s so much in that story of personal liberation and allowing yourself to be seen and understanding your worth. I want to point this out potentially to people that are listening. Hicks law states that the more options that we have, the longer it takes for us to come to the correct conclusion.
34:23
And I almost think that because of your injury and being focused and saying, listen, this is what I have to focus on now. I don’t have all these, the luxury of all these other variations, maybe in some ways that made you even more focused, which gave you the capacity to get that submission so much faster. Yeah. And I think there’s also something there about like understanding how we learn or having some awareness of how we learn and what preconditions we need to
34:51
get the type of performance we want, right? What essentially kind of like what makes us tick. And as always, a lot of the times I learn things about myself because someone else points them out. And then I’m like, oh, I never thought about that this way. And maybe if I put some attention on it, I’ll discover something. I remember Josh saying to me once, you know, it’s interesting. You learn both broadly and deeply. And he’s like, a lot of people are just one or the other.
35:21
And in your case, you’re, you’re kind of both, which is unusual. And he said, and what’s even more unusual is that your ability and your strength in learning broadly is also based in excellence because you’ve learned to do some things at a very high level. So you understand how to get through the noise. And I think that the reason why I bring this up is to what you’re saying. I think you’re right. Like there’s so many, there’s so much, there’s so many distractions. There’s so many things going on.
35:51
But I think over the course of my life, I’ve been able to sniff out, track down, sense, whatever it may be, whatever quality or energy or purpose is most important and follow that. And I think that that has been my North star in so much of what I do because I am a risk taker and there is a part of me that’s a bit…
36:19
wild and reckless. And there’s a part of me that’s a bit broken and a part of me that doesn’t want to listen to people. So I don’t have a problem making a break for it, but I’m also super curious. So like I find myself in all these different places doing all these different things. And I think it’s because of that oscillation of like going with conviction and drive towards one thing and then getting lost in the mix. It’s oscillating between those two things that it has really allowed me to centralize what’s most important for me when it matters.
36:49
Well, that’s everything we all know, young entrepreneurs or CEOs that are incredibly successful that attack something for, you know, this duration and their 18 hour days and it’s grind, grind, grind, and hashtag no sleep and all this bullshit like that. But then there’s going to be a point of burnout. There’s going to be a point where they cannot continue where they feel lost in that mix. As you would say, having said that, I think it’s beautiful that you understood the difference between aggressive patients, which is
37:17
maintaining this forward momentum towards this goal, this North star of yours, without compromising integrity, I’ll still have in the ability to understand that it always takes more time than we think it will. It always feels like it’s more laborious. It always feels like it’s more steps where we had that one step back before we get the two steps forward or biceps before we get to 10. But the idea is understanding that this is that duration. Again, I always quote Josh from the art of learning where he says it’s, it’s a marathon and it’s a sprint.
37:47
It’s a marathon of sprints. Most people think that, listen, I’m going to get there from point a to point B and X amount of time. It’s like, no, like you can get to point a to point B, but there’s going to be all these other things that are going on simultaneously in parallel to that. And they’re going to get from point a to point B as well. So again, being married, having children, your business, creating a new business, competing, caring about the people that you’re actually working with. Again, a lot of times
38:17
It’s very easy to be isolated on this one individual thing, but understanding how it stands within the mix of everything else. And again, it’s like surfing this not so much balance as a, so much as the ability to have this dynamic capacity to adapt and shift and anticipate and see and smell and sense, and then learn all of it and then forget all that shit and just be present right now to the moment. I think another big part of that too, is.
38:44
There is never a good time and there’s never a perfect time. And it just does, that does not fucking exist. It does not exist. And whether it’s like, when should you have your first kid? When should you move? When should you decide to compete? I think as people, and I don’t know if like social media has something to do with this, or if it’s just the way that we’re built as humans, but we seem to think that this person…
39:13
has it figured out better or that person has the recipe and they’re doing it. But I think part of what I wanna do and I’m trying to like take the lid off on is like show people, no, this shit is messy. It’s messy all the time. It’s not ever right. Like, you know, like it’s not easy for me. It’s not easy for anybody. And like, I remember Josh saying this a lot in the beginning and I didn’t…
39:41
quite understand it at the time, but he used to say, I got really upset. This would always be in response to something, but when people would say, Oh, Josh, wait, skin, he’s genius or he’s brilliant, or he’s, he’s a prodigy. And he’d be like, I really, I resent that. And like, I don’t agree with that because what people don’t see is how hard I worked at doing what I did. Like I studied, like I, it wasn’t just an innate ability. Like I loved competition, but I still had to.
40:11
work hard. And when people say you’re a genius or a prodigy or you’re whatever, like it takes that away from you. And I think I didn’t understand it then because I hadn’t gotten that deep into my own process. I hadn’t taken a look at what I, maybe I didn’t have enough depth in my life. But now that I’m at a point where, okay, I can be happy and I can be proud of certain things that I’ve accomplished.
40:40
But I can also tell you everything I did to make that thing happen. And so when people don’t relate to me, like people will come and idolize what I do, or they’ll say, Oh, you’re amazing. And I look up to you. I’m like, I just want you to know that I was a 19 year old kid that was not super athletic and probably 15 pounds overweight and had never fought to do Jiu-Jitsu. Like I was that person. I didn’t know what this was. I wasn’t just born this way.
41:07
And I’ve had to make certain sacrifices and choices to do whatever it is that you think I’ve accomplished. I had to choose those things and I had to work on those things and I had to put other things on the back burner. Maybe that means I don’t go to my kids’ gymnastics practice, or maybe that means I have to work through the night, or maybe that means I have to travel to this place. But it doesn’t just happen. And so I think that the more we can do to have these kinds of conversations with people.
41:35
and to set examples of it not being easy, of what real life really looks like. Real life is not the fucking Kardashians. It’s not produced, you know, but we’re in a culture now where we value privilege, where we value luxury, where we value things that look beautiful. And I’m not saying let’s not enjoy them, but I am saying like that stuff doesn’t just happen. Like that took a lot of work.
42:03
And I think it’s so easy for us now to think or assume that it’s easier for somebody else, but I just want to say, no, like you can do it too. It’s just like, what are you willing to sacrifice? Are you all in? Are you ready to do that? And the thing too is just like you’re saying it’s naive at best, but it’s disrespectful at worst saying, Oh, well it’s easy for Josh, because he’s a prodigy. It’s like, no, he worked his ass off. The same thing with you. Oh, well she’s already been competing.
42:29
That doesn’t mean anything. Jiu-jitsu, like right now, as we speak, the game is changing. Right now, as we speak, there’s a new variation on whatever it is that we’ve never seen before right now, whether it be in Brazil, Italy, or in our own schools, so there’s all kinds of surprises. There’s all kinds of traps out there. Not in a negative capacity. I’m just saying that the game is always evolving. Thus we need to as well. And even like me, like people say, Oh, you, you still deal with adversity every day. I mean, you wrote a book on it in a Ted X. It’s like.
42:59
It doesn’t go away guys. Like nobody is the exception of the rule. When you don’t find adversity, that’s when you should be surprised. It’s like, maybe I’m not on the right path. Don’t be surprised when you run into it. And like you were saying, there’s never the right time. There’s never a perfect time. The lights will never all be green. And even if they are all green, by the time you get through the first three, the next ones are going to be changing. So the best thing to do is stop hesitating. The greater that we wait, the greater the weight of that object becomes.
43:29
the greater of that, the weight of that adversity becomes because we’ve waited so long and now it’s compounded and it’s manifested and it’s much bigger. Or again, it becomes this mental boogeyman that we can’t even wrap our head around. So we continue to wait. Yes. I think that’s where a lot of people are stuck today, right? Is like there, I noticed this with a lot of individuals that we’ve gone to a very cerebral place and that is not always a negative.
43:58
But I think just like anything in life, moderation is key. And because of the ways our lives are structured, and I would even say COVID exacerbated this, but like we went to a place where everything was on the inside, inside the computer, inside our brain. Let me take this thought that I read on this article over the weekend, because I couldn’t go out because we weren’t supposed to talk to anybody. And you start weaving these stories together that are not…
44:25
proven and they’re not tested in the real world, they’re just made up in your head. And okay, it’s one of our greatest strengths, but it’s also one of our greatest weaknesses as humans that we can storytell. So what do we do? We storytell the fuck out of some sort of weird myth that we made up in our head. Next thing you know, a very simple issue becomes a complex issue, not because the issue is complex, but because you made it complex.
44:52
And so for a ton of people, I’m always telling them like, get out of your head and get into your body, go do something. Go live in this place. Build your, I call it somatic intelligence. Go feel shit. Go feel bad. Expose yourself to stress. Empower yourself through these things. Don’t just wait for them to happen. And not enough humans do that anymore. They think that discomfort is bad.
45:19
They feel like they’ve earned the privilege to not ever have to feel cold, to not ever have to feel stressed, to not sweat. It’s hilarious to me when I meet people that are like, I’m gonna go work out, but I don’t wanna work that hard. Like, don’t take me to your gym and don’t put me through a hard workout. I don’t like to sweat. And I’m like, what are you talking about? You don’t like to sweat. And they’re like, it makes my heart rate gets it.
45:45
You know, I start feeling flustered and I’m like, that’s the whole point. What are you talking about? But that is what we’ve become. We’ve become, I feel in some ways so privileged and so soft that we cannot handle even our own body signals of stretching our limits, pushing our capacity to do things, right? I was just listening to a really good podcast. It was Andrew Huberman and it was passed on to me by my good friend and working mate, Joe.
46:14
and it was about stress and how healthy it can actually be for you. And I’ve said this to a lot of people that I’m like, if you choose to train stress, okay, whether it’s Wim Hof breathing and sitting in ice water, doing a marathon, climbing ropes, jujitsu, whatever your practice is. If you choose to train stress, you change your orientation to what you can and can’t handle in life anymore. Because that activity.
46:42
hopefully will take you to your limits, maybe push you past your limits, help you see what more you’re capable of doing, so that when you don’t get to choose the onset of stress, when someone dies, you lose your job, someone’s mean to you at work, your orientation is I’ve empowered myself to understand my states of performance and this shit cannot hurt me. But most people live it the other way around and they go,
47:10
Oh my God, I’m so stressed out. I had a terrible day. This should happen to me. People are so mean. Everyone’s so awful. And I’m like, but you’re not helpless. You are not helpless. The difference is I train stress every day. You don’t like stress because it makes you feel uncomfortable. So how the fuck do you think you’re going to feel when you don’t have a choice? And so I think that’s so much of in my eyes, like what we need to do as humans. It’s so much of how I think when I work with clients, like
47:39
We want to train that response. We want to make you prepared for anything. You know, like one of my mantras to myself when I was competing was give me anything you’ve got. I’ve got an answer for it. I’ve got the depth of technique. I have the ability to access it. I don’t care where you want to take the fight. Let’s go. That’s a totally different orientation to this is the one thing I know. This is the thing I’m going to cling to and you better play this part of my game. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’m going to do. We don’t get to do that in life. We just don’t.
48:09
No, we don’t have that luxury. It’s naive. And I, and I think for most people, they don’t even recognize that that is their orientation in life, right? And so I just kind of want to air it out. It’s the truth. I mean, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that becomes their default setting. I talk about it all the time with this. I called an adversity perception cycle. It’s like, it’s not the adversity. It’s the way you’re perceiving it. So again, if my default setting is this is uncomfortable, would it be a conversation or workout?
48:38
the heat or the cold outside, my automatic idea is just to pull away from it. Well, I’m already on my back foot. I’m already waiting. I’m already a step behind. I’m already losing. And then when it’s pressed upon me to where it’s like, you don’t get a choice. Now it’s like, Oh, I better start. You’re already behind. You’ve already lost. So if I see adversity as this thing that scares me and it disempowers me and I have this victim mentality, now I fear it. And so anytime adversity is introduced into my system,
49:06
that’s going to be the cycle and what happens. I just neurologically program that. But if I look at it and say the first is a gift, this is my opportunity, this is my chance. And like you said, stress is what causes adaptation, stress, stress on my hands from weights causes the calluses stress from being the sun causes adaptation to our skin. Like all these things, it’s a natural part of nature. But again, if we had this idea that everything should be simple, everything should be easy. Then how disempowering is that whenever we actually attempt
49:37
Like the people that walk into your school to learn to be a bad ass, they want to do something that other people can’t do, but yet they don’t understand that they are going to have to do things that other people won’t do to get to that place. If you want to be strong, you have to also embrace the adversity necessary to get to that place of strength, to get to that place of resilience, to get to that place that you want to be. It can’t just choose one or the other. If they come together, if you need Yang, they have to be together.
50:02
And something that I find really troubling is I feel like society’s gotten to a place where our default has become, I can’t like, isn’t there a service for this? Exactly. Can I, can I not just farm that out? I’m going to stroke a check for that. Is there an app? You know, and, and again, like back to, of course we want to enjoy the privileges that we have, and if we work hard, we want to, whatever the fruits of our labor, maybe whatever, you know, floats your boat, good food, stay in a nice place, buy yourself something cool.
50:32
Let’s do that. I’m not saying like let’s do away with modern conveniences, but like we have to earn those things. Like not just with our bank account, like we have to earn those things as people. And it’s just astounding to me how many people today don’t think that we have to anymore. That is the sickness in our society that we just think this should just come to us. How many kids don’t have jobs anymore? How many young adults can’t count six?
51:02
dollars and 50 cents minus two. We need all of these things. We rely on all of these things other than ourselves to get us through these sticking points, however big or small. And the biggest thing I noticed with optimal performers is we will beat you to the punch. Like we’re already thinking about how to solve the problem. We’re putting ourselves through that exercise before we’ve even had to encounter the problem because we want to know.
51:31
deeply how we will behave and respond to whatever it is that’s happening. And I think with people that want to get to that place or are trying to figure out what they need to do, it’s like, you just got to put yourself out there. You have to go stand in the cold, take your jacket off and feel the elements. Like that is enough to start with. And then you learn after you feel how bad that feels, you learn, okay, well, I can do 10 jumping jacks and then the cold doesn’t hit me the same way.
51:59
or I can prepare for this by building up some layers or whatever it may be. But we learn nothing if we don’t expose ourselves. And too many people today are afraid to expose themselves. And I think, you know, as I get older, I want to do this as a parent and I wanna do this as a person is like, well, if our lives are kind of on broadcast and if people are looking at us.
52:26
Let’s expose what that process looks like so that other people can do it too. I, I’m not special. I’m just somebody that’s chosen to do it. I think that that is, especially as a mother of young children, I need them to learn that lesson, you know, I need them to learn that lesson, if they’re going to survive, if they’re going to help this world survive, they need to do that. And being somebody who’s been a business owner, being somebody who’s been in the mix as an athlete.
52:55
I worry, I worry for the world because we don’t have enough people doing that. And what does that do? That gives your children a huge tactical advantage in the real world, whenever they grow up, because the rest of the world is not going to have this. They’re not going to have that capacity or the even desire to embrace that hardship. Again, we can look at quotes online or we can listen to, you know, podcasts, whatever, and we seem motivated, but one is up against us. And when we actually are facing that point of like,
53:24
I can’t do this or I don’t want to do this anymore. This is hard. Yeah, no shit. That’s why we’re doing it. And that’s when most people will fall off. That’s when you actually learn what are you made of? Yeah. Is this really that important to you? And once you decide, like you said, this is going to be sloppy. It is going to be messy. So what we’re already here. We’re already sweaty. Let’s figure it out. Let’s get to that next place. But if we give up every single time, we literally condition ourselves to give up when we should be fighting the hardest. And I think
53:53
As an athlete and as a business owner and a parent, there’s nobody to clean up the mess. You don’t get that choice. There’s nobody to pay your paycheck. There’s nobody to land more contracts. There’s nobody that makes the engine churn. And that is a luxury and it’s a privilege. And what’s worse is if you take it for granted, right? But like, I live a life where I have to hustle for everything I have. I have to do the work.
54:23
I have to make the decisions. I have to make sure I have to be accountable to make sure that it gets done. Sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, I have to feel bad about that. But I I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that because when I get to take a step back, when I get to indulge, when I get to appreciate what I’ve worked for, I’m like, Hey, this is not a bad feeling. This is kind of cool. Like I made this happen. Let’s go celebrate. To me, like that is the full cycle of the high and low life. Right.
54:52
My business partner was laughing at me art because I made a reel the other day for our school and it was like, it was just kind of putting together some clips of the kids program that we have. The last scene is the kids doing some live training and like one of the kids just gets like dumped on their head. And he’s like, great face plant video for, for the reel. Come bring your kid in. They’ll get face plant here.
55:18
Like the text on the page says something like building resilient kids or building resilience in your children or whatever. And I wrote back to him like, yeah, because if my kid gets dumped on their head, I sure as hell, hell that they stand up or for that matter, that they can handle getting jerked around. Yeah. I’m like, that’s just it. Like we cannot, I was talking to my neighbor about this the other day. We cannot protect ourselves. We can not protect our kids.
55:46
from whatever madness is out there, the madness is there. And it’s just like, what can you do to prepare? What can you do to help them be better decision makers? How do I become more aware so that I can maybe align them better or direct them on a better path? But like we can’t change what happens outside of us. We can only do what we can do for ourselves. And so I think that as individuals, it’s super important for us to
56:14
do that, like control ourselves, be aware of ourselves, you know, and the more we expose ourselves to the different dimensions of who we need to be and how we need to act the better decision makers we become, you know, and we save ourselves a lot of trouble that way. We do. And so that kind of comes back to that point of having that peak performance under pressure, just like you were doing when you were competing. Can you give us sort of a snapshot into what you were focusing on?
56:44
as you’re preparing to compete from this kind of vantage points that we’re talking about. And then that obviously will translate to other areas of our life, the way that we coach, the way that we take coaching, all these different things. So could you kind of give us a snapshot of how that feels? I just had a student ask me the other night about how to prepare for a competition and what they should be focusing on. And they had a little bit of a incomplete read, I would say, on technically
57:14
what they need to do. So they kind of technically explain what they thought they were going for. And I said, okay, like that’s part of it. But I think that rather than focus on the quote unquote technique and the specific thing that you wanna do to the body, I think what might be more helpful is for you to really think about the principles or the rules involved. Because it’s not this one technique that’s gonna do it for you. If you fixate on this one thing,
57:44
If that thing doesn’t happen, you’re going to freak out. So I think when it comes to, you know, specifically athletics or competition, we have to understand that what we’re really doing is playing a game. This is not about having the most beautiful jujitsu. This is about knowing the rules of the game, playing them better than anybody else and having the assets of the knowledge to do so. And so when I go in and I compete.
58:11
Okay. I’m very familiar with the IBJJF system. It’s what I’ve pretty much come up doing. So I know the rules very well. And technically I know I already have depth, like enough that I should be okay. Because most of the people that I’m competing against were white belts when I got my black belt. I got my black belt in 2008. Most of these people started around then or slightly after. So do I not know enough technique that is.
58:40
probably not a problem I have to be concerned about. What I should be concerned about is can I access what I know? What I should be concerned about is my transitions and my timing. And so I focused on a lot more of that. And so I think principally like, okay, well, what am I doing here? Like, well, how can I make up the time? What am I moving around? Where do I need to get to? Keeping that all in flow is super important for me. Learning to trust what I know.
59:10
is super important for me. Not wasting time deliberating or thinking too hard about things that logically are already invested. So do I spend hours of time going through matches and looking at points? No. Do I spend a little bit of time seeing if the rules have changed a little bit? Yes. When I train with people, am I training with people that are demolishing me all the time? No.
59:38
I want to train with people that move well with me, allow me to get what I want so that I can perfect and refine my movements, like where I want to go with things, right? Another thing that I also think is interesting that I started to observe is there’s playing the game well, there’s fighting to win, and then there’s also this idea of like not making dumb mistakes.
01:00:05
Somebody had mentioned this to me. And then I thought back and I was like, Oh, this is true. I’ve been undefeated since I came back in 2018 to compete and I had nothing scored against me. So that says, okay, so you’re not only competing smartly, but you’re also going in and you know how to avoid exposing yourself like in unnecessary ways. And so I was like, you know, Hey, like that’s something to think about, right? Like.
01:00:31
I am not making bad decisions in a state of stress that will cause me further trouble or force me to make up for those bad decisions. I’m trying to keep it very efficient and clean. I’m not getting greedy about stuff. You know, I’m pretty calculated. And so like, I think in terms of how I prepare, I think by acknowledging and accepting and celebrating what I know I have.
01:00:58
is allowing me to be that much better at identifying where I should focus my time. I don’t want to redundantly look over things that are already there. And I think I used to do that a lot. I think we do do that a lot when we’re insecure about what we know. But there’s some things that I already kind of know, like under the surface, it’s just there. So I just need to make myself feel good so that I can do it. An observation I would make also is that I think that you had this surgical
01:01:28
initiation and aggression as well. Yeah. You very much initiate the dance and now they’re responding to the take down, the grab, the collar. And now you’re already a few steps ahead of them. I think that’s something that you just see. Sometimes people think it’s all or nothing, but you have that capacity to have that forward pressure without giving up any distance unless you want to, and then you allow that space to be there.
01:01:56
So in this way, you’re cultivating NP space intentionally to create the next component of that. And I think that some people may either overlooked that or over-emphasize that without the other technical capacity that you’re discussing. I think another thing that is worth tagging onto that is whether, okay. So whether we’re talking about jujitsu or any other discipline or thing that may be happening in your life, when we decide that we want to do something. And in this example, I’ll just talk about pressure passing. So.
01:02:25
For people that don’t understand what that is, pressure passing is when you’re in a top position and your opponent is on the bottom and you are actively trying to push through their guard. So you’re trying to pass their legs using heavy frames and pressure from the top. So what’s interesting about pressure passing is I think at an earlier stage of understanding it, people think that pressure passing is literally trying to grate your partner’s cheek into their mouth using your shoulder.
01:02:53
and driving your knee into their stomach and just trying to thrash them into submission. But this again was an observation that was given to me by someone who was watching me train. I had this moment where a good friend of mine, Junio Ocasio, was observing my training and I was training with a brown ball in my school and I kept passing her guard and he said to her, do you know why she keeps passing your guard? And he’s like, you always do this. And she goes, no,
01:03:23
I don’t like I think I’m defending it well, but I don’t understand. And he said, do you realize like when Emily starts to pass your guard? I mean, she’s a good guard passer, but she’s actually turning things off and she’s holding. And what I didn’t realize of myself is that he was observing when I would go into pressure pass that I would get, let’s say 30% of the way there, but instead of driving hard from zero to a hundred the whole time.
01:03:52
there would be moments where I would actually just pause and like hold the position. So I might get 30% there and then I would kind of hold. And when I would hold, I might turn, turn my right arm off. And when I turn my right arm off and it’s not active anymore, my opponent responds differently to that arm and they might defend the wrong thing, which then gives me the space to creep up. Now I’m 40% of the way there. And then I hold, and then I turn something else off and then they stop defending that thing. And I get
01:04:21
50 or 60% of the way there. And so in observing and thinking about this, I realized like when we want something, it’s not always about driving hard at it a hundred percent of the time, right? Like sometimes we shouldn’t, again, back to like, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Sometimes we should hold, sometimes we should breathe, sometimes we should finagle. And sometimes when you hold and you pause,
01:04:50
You don’t have to do the work. Somebody else does it for you. Right? And like that makes it like more efficient. There is less friction as you drive through. And so it was just an interesting thing to have pointed out to me because I’ve been doing this for 22 years and nobody’s ever told me or seen that in the way that I move. And I thought about that. I’m like, you know, I think this is how I move in life too. Right? Like sometimes I do something but I just don’t do it all the way. Not because I get lazy.
01:05:19
because I’m like, the timing’s not right for like, let’s just wait here for a second. And so, you know, like, this is part of what I love about jiu-jitsu. This is part of what I love about people developing some sort of a physical practice, is that in many ways, I think, your behavior in that physical discipline is your behavior in life. Like we say in jiu-jitsu all the time, you are how you train. And it expresses itself.
01:05:45
very organically, like nobody’s telling you to move that way. That’s just the way your nature is. And so when we have that discipline and we can observe ourselves or we have somebody else observe for us, we can start to see things in our behavior that may be helpful or harmful, right? And like, that’s so cool to have that, you know, like when we deny ourselves that kind of access to a free and simple tool ourselves.
01:06:11
You know, and if there’s anything great that technology has now afforded us, technology allows us to record ourselves. Technology allows us to review what we’re doing or not doing. And I think that that’s kind of a tremendous tool that we can all make more use of instead of being afraid of looking at what we do. We should actually move more towards it. Yeah. Well, absolutely service. And again, I can learn more from a five minute role with somebody than I can from like hours of discussion or.
01:06:39
dinner or anything like that. Because like you said, you get to see the good, bad and the ugly. You get to see the passive aggressiveness or the overt aggressiveness or I love that what you were discussing with that surgical aggression kind of was circling back to what we were discussing before, how even when you were at 30% of that pass, there’s no way that you were quitting. You were just intentionally holding you’re there. Can you blow through it? There’s a possibility, but giving that 10% that additional
01:07:08
Now you’re at 50%. And now, like you said, the wheels are spinning in your opponent’s mind. And to them is this feeling of inevitability. And now they’re already thinking of how do I abandon that? Where’s my way out? Can I get my knee in here? And it’s like, you’ve already got that advantage from a, not only a tactical standpoint, but a mental standpoint. And then again, applying that to business, applying that to a client when we’re holding them to a standard and we can see through the bullshit, we can see that they’re trying to get themselves an easy way out.
01:07:38
And it’s like, at this point I have to decide, am I going to allow them to capitulate? Am I going to allow them to have the easy, easy offer? Am I going to say, no, I care enough about you to point out the fact that you’re bullshitting yourself and you’re lying to me. And maybe you’ll justify lying to yourself, but I will not let you lie to me. Yeah. And there is nothing better. Like when you get somebody on the mat, the mats don’t lie. And that’s the other thing, like when we talk about now, like so many people.
01:08:06
They joined Jujitsu for different reasons. And some people join it because they want clout. They want to be able to get promoted. They want to feel like they’ve accomplished something, right? It’s just like having a piece of paper on the wall. You know, you, you’ve kind of talked me through this as well. Maybe I should go back to school and get an executive coaching certificate. Maybe I should do this. I need another piece of paper on the wall. And you and everybody else in my life is like, you don’t need that. And I’m like, but why don’t I need that? Because everybody else has that and I don’t feel adequate.
01:08:34
If everybody else has that and I don’t, they’re like, but you have gold medals. I’m like, but people don’t understand gold medals. If we didn’t have rank in jujitsu, if we just did away with the belts and you had to play your way out on the map, what you got shows, because at the end of the day, the people that might’ve like attendance their way to their black belt, the people who do a lot of worksheets and read a lot of books and executive leadership school.
01:09:04
They do the work, like they show up. So like, okay, I give you that. You showed up and you did it, but can you really do it? Can you execute it? Can you make other people on the mat walk away and say that person knows their shit? Do you have clients that say that is money? Or I don’t really understand. Do you have another worksheet you can send me for that? And I, you know, like that sort of real world tangible.
01:09:33
I feel this kind of quality. That is like, that’s awesome. Right. And like when, when it comes to being on the mats, you can tell from the way somebody grabs you what kind of a role this is going to be. And our world is just full of people who want to be posers. And I’m just not about that life. Well, and back to your idea of do I need certification? The certification is the easiest part.
01:10:02
The life experience is the hardest part. Getting gold medals, all the things that led you to that. That’s the stuff that people are gonna pay for. You can’t just sign up for a course and do that, you know? That’s exactly it. And then that art of the experience with that client, the art of understanding, again, just like in martial arts, if they’re doing a dozen things wrong and you’re trying to correct every single one of them, well, now this student is overwhelmed. If you have a coaching client and it’s like, you didn’t do X, Y, and Z,
01:10:31
And we talked about this and you still didn’t do it. Now it comes down to, okay, do you understand the dynamics of what’s going on? Do you have that pragmatic empathy to feel, is there other things going on? Is there financial stress? Is there something going on with the family? Is there health, you know, whatever it is. And now, okay, so I can beat this person up. That’s probably not going to help them. What’s the one thing that I can do? What’s the 80 20? What is this one thing that we can correct to give them a little bit of a win, a little bit of momentum?
01:11:00
to feel, and now they’re going to be more likely to want to endeavor towards this next thing that they need to work towards. And maybe that is the beginning, as opposed to just, you were mentioning how, and we see this all the time. There are athletes that are incredible athletes. Muhammad Ali was an incredible boxer and he tried to coach for a little bit. A lot of people don’t know that simply because he was not a great coach. He was a great fighter. He shook up the world. That doesn’t mean he’s a great coach. Doesn’t mean he can teach it.
01:11:29
It doesn’t mean other people have the natural attributes that he had. And so to understand what that is, and again, that dynamic that comes back to not only self knowledge of view and how you teach and how you observe, but the knowledge of that person that they don’t see those observations externally outside of the ring, off, off the mats, outside the cage, that’s where that perspective will serve them in a thousand different arenas. And I think that we do a poor job. Articulating and sharing.
01:11:59
all these different dimensions to what it is that we do as coaches, as athletes, as people, and sharing that with others and helping them understand that like we’re thinking about the same things that they are, you know, like we don’t have everything figured out and the more transparency we have overseeing that this all is a lot of work for everybody, we’re all navigating through it, then I think that that’s what truly matters when it comes to the human connection. It’s not a bunch of worksheets.
01:12:28
It’s not a formula path. It’s not a course that you just take that helps you figure it out. And I’m still, I’m trying to figure out what this way is. But what I can say is that this feels right to me because, you know, it’s what I know, it’s what I do. It’s what I struggled with. And that’s a struggle that I can articulate and share with other people. And I think that that is something that is valuable, right? And I’m not just saying.
01:12:57
I’m just talking about any person that has been out there and done these things for themselves. That is what is valuable. How many people bond and resonate when they learn of someone else’s challenges because they go, I felt that way too in some way, maybe not the exact same way, but I can respect that. And so many of us are so alone, right? Like when I was in my darkest days, I thought I was the only person that felt that crappy about myself. So
01:13:25
There’s so much more that we can do as humans, I think, in terms of sharing and sort of showing what goes on behind the curtain. I did a recent interview with Steve Kwan from BJJ Mental Models and it was on competing over 40 and I got so many people writing into me afterwards saying, oh, like, this was amazing. Like I’ve been deliberating if I have enough or if I should go compete. And after listening to this, I think I will. And I’m like, yeah, because what you have is enough. What you have is enough.
01:13:55
You just have to believe it and you just got to go out there and do it. And you’ll feel it when you, when you get out there, you’ll know what more or less you need to do next time, but you’re never going to know if you don’t put yourself out there. You know, and I think that that’s, that’s a powerful effect we can have on each other is when we talk about you’re so inspirational or you inspire me. Yeah. It doesn’t take that much to inspire other people by just sharing your own journey, sharing your own experience.
01:14:24
Right. And as coaches, I think a lot of the reason why we work with people is people come with that. I want to learn from your depth and range of experiences. I want you to help me see. I tell people all the time, I work with people that are way smarter than me, way smarter than me. But the difference is that maybe I see a different thing that they don’t see or I’m wearing a different set of sunglasses, you know, and everybody can benefit from perspective.
01:14:54
I just happen to be somebody that’s chosen to make myself sit in a lot of seats. And I think that’s what helps other people being from that arena, going through different hardships. It helps us lend light to those situations for them. So again, you have a CEO that’s like, listen, I have a one year burn rate of what I can do right now for payroll and overhead and everything I’m doing. How should I conduct this? And then like you said, you can feel, you can palpate it.
01:15:22
in the air that this is just eating them alive. And of course you’re going to go through and create these, okay, we’re going to attack it one month at a time, one quarter at a time, et cetera. But the underlying issue is that this person needs to be able to put a pin in that thing and say, listen, if this is going to inhibit your capacity to make the right decision, to hire the right people, to let go of other people, to cut pay, whatever it is, then you’re going to have a hard time for the next 12 months. It’ll be the longest 12 months of your life.
01:15:50
But if you can understand this, like, listen, we’re going to do this. We’re going to understand that this is just hardship. This is just adversity. And if we can understand that and not make it bigger than what it is, now it’s much more digestible. We can break it down in these small bite sized parts and just say, listen, today, this is what I’m attacking. These are my priorities. I got those done. I got a little check mark that I won the day. Let’s try it tomorrow. And again, it’s not pretty. It is messy. We all fail.
01:16:17
Anybody that you look up to or buy products from right now has failed multiple times as a black belt. You have failed more times on an arm bar than I’ve ever done them successfully. So you just have done it much more than somebody else has and you failed, but nobody sees the failure. They just see, Oh, look, world champion, multiple world champion. Oh, all these different divisions. There’s a long path to that. And people have to understand that. Yeah. It’s easy to attach yourself to the big shiny object. And it’s easy to think that.
01:16:46
This person just got lucky, but no, it’s that person just did a lot of work. They got a lot of work and they got really good at dusting themselves off and going back again. And I think it’s also kind of like the more effort you put into the work that you do, you become better at learning. You become better at failing. And then maybe what you see is the essentialized learning process. And you learn, you see somebody who’s not making as many mistakes because they know ahead of time. Like.
01:17:15
trying to learn how to surf, trying to do other things. I feel like I’ve become a much better student as a result of training so long in jujitsu, I don’t show up and do the same dumb things that I would have done in jujitsu, like when the instructor tells me to do something, I just do it. I don’t question it. Right. Or like, I know how to source out a good instructor now because I’m like, oh, this is how I learn. I’d like to have a teacher that teaches me kind of like this, you know? And it’s, so it might look like you’ve kind of.
01:17:44
concentrated or refined some magic way, but it’s the same work that you have to do. You’re just seeing it later down the line. And I have found that the best coaches and leaders have the heart of a student, but the soul of a teacher, they want that, they want that ideal. And everything that we’re talking about people, it comes down to this self knowledge, this radical self knowledge. And the only way that we learn is by doing
01:18:11
shit that’s hard falling down, understanding what we’re capable of, understanding that some days are better than others. Even if we do everything exactly the same, there’s all kinds of different dynamics. And I think that comes back to that Bruce Lee idea of absorbing what is useful, discarding what is useless and adding what is specifically your own. You and I were talking earlier about how I don’t hate it, but I just think that they oversimplify things like these are the 12 steps of this. This is the five steps of this. This is
01:18:37
three steps to this and it’s like everybody wants this stuff, but they don’t understand who the hell they are in the first place. Yeah. So I could give you every step necessary, but until you have that foundation of who the hell you are and what you’re going to do under pressure, it doesn’t matter what I tell you because you’re not going to be able to execute against it. Yeah. And I think that also add to that. You don’t have to like it. Somebody said to me the other day, they’re like, do you like competing? Like you love this. I’m like, I don’t know.
01:19:04
I was like, that’s a very complex question. I was like, I don’t think I actually like competing. And they’re like, but you’re so good at it. I’m like, but that doesn’t mean I like it. It’s like, you know, like it’s hard. It’s hard. Doesn’t matter if I’m competing in Mundial’s or I’m doing master’s three, it’s hard. And so, you know, maybe that’s also sort of like a big takeaway is that like, we don’t have to like the things that make us better, but we have to respect the process of it.
01:19:32
We have to appreciate that what it gives us, right? And like, it’s okay if you feel like vomiting all the time. It’s okay if you have an aversion to it. It’s okay if you say, I really don’t wanna do this. But it’s like that moment where you strap yourself in for that roller coaster and they pull you out of the bank and you know that it’s gonna take off and you kind of pee your pants a little bit and you’re like, fuck, it’s gonna be crazy. But then after you signed up, you can’t get out and you do it.
01:20:02
and you survive and when you get out, you go, oh my God, I was so far away, I’m gonna do it again. That’s it. That’s kind of it, you know? Like I don’t like a lot of it, but I do know that it makes me feel a lot better about who I am after I push myself through those experiences. And so that’s something that I hope I don’t lose the ability or the desire to do, which is to put myself in those types of circumstances.
01:20:29
Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. You’re going to be good. Listen, I could talk to you forever and we do speak often, but I want to be respectful of your time. How can people learn more about you? Tell us about the podcast, tell us about the website and everything you’ve got going on because you’re, you’re all over the world teaching jujitsu right now as we speak, but yet there’s so many other things going on.
01:20:53
If people want to connect, they can find me on my website, which is Emily quok.com. That’s with a K W okay. Phonetically, a lot of people see a Q or hear a Q, but it’s K W. Okay. I’m also on Instagram at Emily clock BJJ. You can find, you know, my various happenings there. The podcast I put out this year called the master and the apprentice was sort of a closed series of 10 episodes. And part of my impetus in doing that was.
01:21:20
I wanted to have conversations with great people that I know, people who are performers, who had a lot of experience doing whatever it is that they’re doing. And talking to them about that stage of when they came into their own. I have some really brilliant guests on there. The one that kicked off the whole series, Lupe Fiasco is a Grammy award-winning artist. Yeah, that’s great. Really fascinating person. Like it’s funny, I just went and saw him in Central Park and people were like, I didn’t know you were such a fan of.
01:21:49
rap music or a fan of looping. And I was like, you know, I love his music. Like I think his music’s great. And I was like, as backwards as it sounds, I’m a huge fan of the person first. I mean, I guess, I guess that’s what we all want, right? Like when we encounter somebody like that, we’d like to be able to know the person, but we had a weird period during COVID where I was on this app with him called Clubhouse. We got into a bunch of fascinating conversations and I got to get to know him a little bit as a person. I was like, this guy’s kind of cool.
01:22:16
He did me the honor of doing my first episode, which is fascinating. But I have other guests on there, like this young woman named Annie Rykert, who is an incredible standup paddle surfer, foiler, kite surfer. I mean, she’s just wild. I have artists, Sarah McMahon, as you mentioned before, someone else that I love, Dave Camarillo, but just a really impressive roster of individuals. And I just explore the stage in which they really came into their own. And please have a listen. If you’re into.
01:22:46
storytelling and deep conversations. I may or may not do another season, but we’re kind of toying around with, with that right now. Yeah. And then that’s the best way to keep up with me. And I really appreciate our friendship, Marcus. And I appreciate the, the space that we always have to have these. Awesome conversations. They’re super fun. And it’s nice to have somebody to verbally spar with a little. It feels like we’ve known each other for a lot longer, but I agree. I have nothing but the most.
01:23:15
love, respect and admiration for you and everything that you’re doing. And I’m so glad that we’re connected and I can’t wait for the next conversation. I can’t wait to have a conversation in person. Yes, that will happen soon. Give me a big old hug. That’s going to be. Well, thank you so much. I look forward to future discussions. Keep training hard. Thank you.
