"I did it my way"

I have done almost two months’ worth of solid focus on the half guard, and I finally feel like I’m almost at the place that I should have been about two years ago. I didn’t have a marker or specific number of hours to tell me that I’ve arrived — I just know.

This journey into improving my half guard was filled with many surprises along the way. I feel like what was the most unexpected was the enormous change in attitude that I had towards learning.

Specifically, I started to accept failure as more of a reason to continue, not to stop. The drills that I were doing had me starting in a disadvantageous position where the chance of failure was high. For half guard, it was working to stay on my side when I wasn’t allowed to use the knee shield at all — while my opponent was trying to flatten me with a crossface and an underhook.

I got flattened every 5-10 seconds on average on those first few days of floundering around.

After a week, I was discouraged, not because I felt like that I couldn’t get to a better level of skill, but because it was taking so (painfully) long to get there. I was tired of experiencing failure at a much higher volume than if I had trained without these constraints. The disappointment that came with such failure wasn’t fun to deal with at all.

Yet as I persisted, I started to see why such failure was necessary, and why it was so important to happen to me over a prolonged period of trying. Each time I failed, I was able to flex another important skill — reflection — to come up with possible theories of what to do differently the next time. When something went wrong or was simply unplanned, I started to see how repeatedly asking myself “why” was sharpening my analytical skills in jiu jitsu.

I also eventually developed a little bit of an emotional immunity to failure — at least when it came to causing negative emotions. Failure didn’t seem so scary or painful the 50th or 500th try around. Sure, the first few times might be awful, but somehow, I got more used to it. Failure became nothing special.

When you fail a lot, you tend to look for resources to rescue you. In my case, I wanted the instructionals to give me the answers because I didn’t want to find them for myself. In the beginning, I didn’t believe that I possessed the ability to find those answers. I felt as if my experiences of getting squashed was teaching me nothing except how much I hated the half guard exercise.

Yet half guard — especially without the knee shield — is a hellishly tricky position to play well. Imagine if you were to be in a really tight space and if you make the wrong move spikes come out and poke you. That’s what it is like being in half guard and trying to get the underhook or to stay on your side.

Eventually though, what I realized is that it was necessary for me to be in that uncomfortable space, again and again, to learn all of the traps that were before me. I could not explore the position as an abstract concept, or as a theory. I had to literally get into this hot, claustrophobic space of my own volition, survive long enough, and then somehow claw my way back onto the surface.

Instructionals were helpful to a certain degree to guide me in my options, but the execution in the moment was entirely up to me. I had to find the angles in which I could off balance my opponent, discover which places were dire straits versus a mere inconvenience, and deal with making decisions in an ever-shifting maelstrom of attacks. Those were not things that I could learn from listening to someone else talk about it. I had to experience them to understand.

I feel that the greatest transformation is in my confidence that I can eventually improve on any technique or position that I set my mind to. I now have a reasonable expectation that improvements will take time and often not at the pace that I want them to happen. It somehow makes me feel even prouder of these changes because I had to persist through challenges, instead of having the problem solved in a day or two. For the first time, I feel like I’ve earned the fruits of my labor.

Going into this process, I knew that I didn’t want a repeat of the past. Specifically, I didn’t want to berate myself or attribute my lack of progress to laziness or lack of talent. After many days of asking myself what I really wanted out of this process, I came to the conclusion that no matter where I landed, I would be able to sincerely state that I did it my way — that I allowed myself to use all of my strengths in creative thinking, critical inquiry, and fierce tenacity (without the meatheadness) to come up with the best way for me to learn. I’m so happy that what started out as a “sentence” to a hard position has now become a period of time that I can look back on and say these words:

I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way