Another way life mirrors jiu-jitsu

There are some people you roll with who are focused on getting it right; they’re the technical guys and girls who’ll push you, but you always feel like you’re getting something out of it. If you’re training, they’ll be good training partners and if you’re competing they’ll fight hard but cleanly.

And then there are those who are more interested in winning every roll at all costs. When you train with them, there’ll be thumbs in eyes, flailing elbows, fingers bent backwards. Any time they feel vaguely threatened, they’ll go mental and do their best to drop you on your head. They’re not usually terribly effective – at least, not against anyone good (although they’ll be the first to tell you about who they’ve tapped in training) because they never put their ego to one side long enough to actually learn anything. But even when you win, you come away with bruises and niggly injuries, feeling like you’ve just wasted 5 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.

Dealing with people in general seems much the same; attitudes towards personal and professional relationships seem to fall into the same two categories. Life is much better when you pick your sparring partners carefully.

3 thoughts on “Another way life mirrors jiu-jitsu

  1. I love the last line ” Life is much better when you pick your sparring partners carefully”. That’s so true. I guess I was lucky.

  2. Definitely. I can’t remember who said it (probably lots of people), but personality often seems to affect somebody’s rolling style. E.g., I am quite passive, cautious and try to be technical.

    100% agreed on picking training partners carefully too: I am super picky and always consider the risk/reward ratio. So, huge white belts tend not to feature (risk: get injured and be off the mats for extended periods, reward: possibly sharpen up defence a bit).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s