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Help, I’m not Improving!
“Josh, I’m not improving.”
“Josh, I don’t feel like I’m making any progress at all.”
“Josh, you don’t understand what it’s like to not be very good. You beat everyone, so what would you know about losing?”
“Josh, I feel like I’m not catching up to the best practitioners in the gym.”
These are all things, word for word, that have been said to me by my students. They’re also only some of the things that have been said to me over the years by students that feel like they’re not improving. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with these feelings or expressing them to your coach or close confidants. Preferably, you have a coach that you can express these feelings to. If you have a good coach, they will understand the frustrations and will make time for you to explore the feelings with you.
The bottom line is this: Learning is hard.
Learning a skill as expansive and comprehensive as BJJ is incredibly hard. Learning a skill such as BJJ when you are an individual in a room of individuals that are also all learning and developing at their own rate, some faster and some slower, is astronomically difficult. This difficulty is compounded when the only tangible method for measuring progress is how “easily” you can “beat” those individuals. If you mix in ego, physicality, fitness, flexibility, mentality, external stressors, the physical discomfort you will experience and so on, you start to understand the undertaking you have set yourself on.
The glib answer I have been given before when I was going through the same process was “train more.” Whilst yes, that is good advice, it’s also not that helpful. “Trust the process” was the usual follow up. I always felt like this was a cop out and not satisfactory as an answer. Of course if you do more training, you will get better and in some ways trusting that is very useful. The feelings I’m talking about are mostly encountered by blue and purple belts. You usually need to train for years to achieve those ranks. Every single person that experiences these feelings recognises that they are improving on some level. However, that doesn’t really help when these emotions arise.
In my experience, the feelings involved are more about recognition of the scope of BJJ. In other words, you’ll have a realisation of how much there still is to go in terms of improving skill levels. Then you’ll have another, and then another. Let me be clear, you are still improving at the same rate you always have. It’s just you aren’t improving at the same perceived percentage as you always have. What I mean by that is when you start BJJ, you think that to get “good”, you only need 100 parts to the puzzle. Every day you get another part. By the time you get to purple belt, you realise there’s 100,000 parts to the puzzle. Every day you still only get another piece. By black, you realise there’s 1,000,000 parts to the puzzle. Every day you still only get one piece. When you first begin, you improve at 1% every day. At black belt you improve at 0.0000001% every day, despite still improving at the same rate each day.
When encountering this realisation for the first time, it can be overwhelming and easy to mistake for not improving at all.
In comes the glib bit of advice. Keep training. Trust the process. Trust that you are improving. Trust that you will get there.
Written by Professor Joshua Cooksley @ greywolfbjj.com.au