Big fish and small ponds

Rosi s Blog Blog Aboutme MMA Sportstherapy Readinglist Links Some Luispictures Big fish and smallponds Published April BJJ MMA Thoughts OK I ll admit it. I can be a teeny bit competitive at times. I hate losing. I hate not being the best at something. I hate tapping even in training. So shoot me That s been giving me some headaches recently because a lot of my training partners are damn good. Even leaving aside the ones with a sizeable weight advantage a lot of the time I find myself struggling. Maybe I m the only person to feel like this and you re all wondering what I m talking about but I suspect not. I know there are some enlightened folk who seem serenely unbothered by about such ultimately unimportant things as making a mistake and getting choked in sparring and I salute them. At the same time I don t think competitiveness is necessarily a bad thing. As with certain other things in life it s what you do with it that counts . A trap I see a lot of people fall into is th! e big fish in a small pond syndrome . I may even be guilty of it myself now and then until I catch myself doing it. It s nice to be the biggest fish around and an easy way of doing this is to shrink the size of your pond. The easiest way to do this is to surround yourself by people you know you can beat. If I m being given a hard time by one of my training partners I could massage my ego by torturing a few white belts. I can decide to only ever play my A game and stay away from areas I m less good at. To ensure that the other fish in the pond don t get too big I might try to keep all my secrets to myself. I could keep things back from someone I m coaching. little tricks that might give me an edge. Then with a bit of smoke and a few mirrors I can convince myself that I m even bigger than I am and that my little neighbourhood of pondweed is representative of the whole world. The thing about big fish in small ponds though is that they tend to get eaten pretty quickly if someon! e takes them and drops them in a larger pond where there s some real competition. The only way to get really good is to surround yourself by other big fish. That element of healthy competition drives a competitor to develop and improve in a way that being able to casually annihilate everyone s he trains with never would. Homo Sapiens evolved in a hostile environment amongst a bunch of other species who wanted to eat us and may have seemed to have all the obvious advantages. size speed strength and really big teeth. It s not all about competition though. it s about collaboration too. What you want is a whole group of big fish together in the same place all sharing their ideas and growing together. The bigger the other fish get the more I can learn from them. While it might be hard work keeping up and tough on the ol ego at times it s also the perfect environment for getting seriously good. Now I m off to bed before I mix any more metaphors. Responses to Big fish and smallponds Feed for this Entry Trackback Address No Comments Leave a Reply Logg! ed in as . Logout Name Mail will not be published Website XHTML You can use these tags Some Luispictures Search Theme k by k team . Blog at WordPress.com

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