3 life lessons through BJJ.

Coming back onto the mats after 1.5 years off has been an incredible eye opening experience.

Anyone that knows me will know how deeply passionate I am about Jiujitsu, and how much of my life has been shaped by this beautiful art.

Without Jiujitsu I wouldn't of kicked my old habits and lost 30+kg's of weight. I wouldn't have met my co-founder Nick La (you should see how we settle business decisions). I wouldn't have met some of my best friends and I wouldn't have a place where my fiance and I can roll out our frustrations :P

For me, I constantly link the learnings from Jiujitsu to life, and coming back here are my top 3 learnings/reminders:

1. Whether you lose or you win, have fun doing it. For those that don't know, in the picture posted my opponent has me in a very bad position. From here he has 3 main aggressors that he can progress to, all resulting in submissions. Him being a 4th Degree Black Belt, I have about 0.01% chance of surviving even though I'm a brown belt. But even though I'm getting smashed and seconds away from tapping before my arm breaks, you can see I've got a smile on my face. The past year has been tough. There’s been massive ups and massive downs. There was a lot that I couldn’t control, but one thing that I could is my mentality. I wasn’t always on point, but the days that I was able to remind my self to have fun, where the days we moved forward.

2. Respect is earnt, not given. As a brown belt, it'd be easy for me to walk back into the gym and pull rank. But there's a famous saying in Jiujitsu which is your belt is only there to hold up your pants. I've made a conscious effort coming back to start back at the bottom and go through all the levels back up to brown. More than anything, this is for me. This attitude has been ingrained in me through Jiujitsu. It’s why when we started a new business (TalentTap) in the middle of COVID, I was happy to get back on the phones and make the 100+ outreaches per week even though we had a sales team. I’ll never ask my team to do something that I wouldn’t be ready to do.

3. Fight. I’ve seen countless matches where the person is loosing, there’s only a few seconds left on the clock but the person is able turn it around and submit the opponent. This only happens if the person doesn’t give up the fight. Rolling with white belts again I often get asked questions after rolls which go something like this, "I was doing the technique but how come you were able to shut it down?" And the answer is simple, just because you do the technique doesn't guarantee you to win. Especially when you're doing it to someone that knows what is going on. You need to fight for your technique to win. Building a business feels a lot like this. It can feel like you’re getting smashed around, and sometimes fighting back feels almost hopeless. But, so long as you can still move, so long as there still is time, then you can still fight.

Oss.