Evelyn has been my friend and training partner since Amherst College. She has actually done jiu jitsu longer than me — I started because she enjoyed it so much! Evelyn is an Enneagram 5, the Intellectual. She’s a thought leader both in and outside of jiu jitsu. Her episode with me is still, by far, one of the most popular episodes on The Mental Arts.
In listening to this excerpt, what beliefs about failure resonate with you? And if they don’t serve you, how may you begin to change your beliefs around them?
The Mental Arts:
So something I've noticed is that software engineers are really annoyingly good at picking up stuff in jiu jitsu. And I can't figure out why. And I think maybe the starting point for my hypothesis is that you're just used to troubleshooting so much more than the general population.
Evelyn:
Right. I mean, we debug constantly. So, I think we are used to those small failures. It is a part of our everyday life.
The Mental Arts:
Is it frustrating or are you just like, ah, I've accepted it at this point?
Evelyn:
It's so normalized. That's another thing that I thought was really interesting in terms of talking about failure. When you normalize failure as part of the process of learning jiu jitsu, it becomes a lot easier to deal with. It's not talked about in jiu jitsu as much as it could be. In software engineering, when you cause a bug in the system, that's just normal and expected and something, everyone goes through.
I mean, people introduce five bugs every single day, and then they catch them when they write tests for the code. Yeah....It's considered just a part of the job. I think failure should be considered just a part of the job for jiu jitsu, but it's hard when you're expected to win every single competition, and when your record is so public.
There's a very different culture surrounding jiu jitsu, winning, and failure than surrounding software engineering and failure.
The Mental Arts:
How would you start to change the narrative?
Evelyn:
It's been really powerful actually, to talk to you about your own failure. When you see people, you really respect and people who are maybe even better than you at jiu jitsu, and they talk about how they failed, then you realize that your own failure is so similar to their failure. When I realized how normal my failure was... I mean, we talk sometimes about not always winning against people who are lower belt or not always winning against people who are less experienced than us. And you could say the same thing about people who are smaller than you. You don't always win against people who are smaller than you.
To hear other people who are even better than me at jiu jitsu talk about these things helped me. It is a part of the process. To get better, you have to spar with multiple people and inevitably, you're just going to lose a lot of those sparring matches. And everyone goes through that.
The Mental Arts:
I actually been helped as much talking with you as well. 'Cause I think one thing that you do really well is after that wave of emotion, I'm able to look at it more logically and just figure out what I need to do better the next time. I think when I lose, I can...well, somebody said, "Oh, you cry when you lose...and you cry when you win..." And I was like, that's pretty much accurate. I think it's just that next step of: Okay, it doesn't just stop there with the end result... It's what can I do more.
Evelyn:
Yeah. When you lose pretty big competitions, you feel very, very upset, especially when you've worked so hard. That's like an even different level of failure, I think, than regular sparring failure.
The Mental Arts:
Do you think your ego is playing a role in that?
Evelyn:
Mhm. I mean, I think that you want to see yourself as a winner, but also it feels like you've wasted all your energy on something that it didn't even matter that you wasted all that energy for.
The Mental Arts:
Real talk: You walk outside, and the rest of the world does not know...
Evelyn:
Again, it's a little different for me because I don't have as big of a reward, I think, for winning. And I don't have as big of a loss from losing, but I still have it. What I struggle with personally is also how others love me and how others respect me. And I've always struggled with people, liking me and respecting me. And I think in jiu jitsu, I feel like that is tied to how well I do in jiu jitsu. And so then that becomes a compounding factor on top of it.
The Mental Arts:
That was a very powerful conversation we had [about a recent in-house tournament]. I don't know if like how much you're comfortable talking about it on this interview. I don't want to put you on the spot...
Evelyn:
Basically I think that people tend to gravitate toward people who are successful, and I've been in so many elite spaces with the best of the best where they celebrate you as a member of the best of the best. There's a lot of hero worship. There's a lot of admiration. There's a lot of respect that comes with being the best. And if you are normal, you don't get that. But then if you're like worse than normal, if you're like below average, then I think that's what I fear. I fear being below average because I think that people will have the opposite reaction to me where they don't respect me or they don't want to train with me. That's a compounding factor when I lose. And that's what I'm a little bit afraid of.
The Mental Arts:
Not a lot of people can mention their greatest fear. After you mentioned Enneagram 3 [as my type], I was like, Okay, what is it? It was like the basic need to feel loved and accepted by a team. And I was like, “Okay, this is accurate. She pegged me with 100% accuracy.”
Normalizing Failure