Self-Defense vs Self-Confidence
I never got involved with wrestling or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu out of an interest in self-defense. I was always more interested in the athletic and competitive nature of combat sports and figured anything I learned beyond that would be a bonus. A Muay Thai coach told me once,
“most guys go about their lives thinking they inherently know how to do a few things, like pick up women, work on their truck, or win a fight. But those are learned skills; if you don’t train, you don’t know how to do any of those things.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but the very first encounter I had with wrestling was exactly when I should have started. I was the skinny, emo kid in my 7th grade class, when Lakeside Middle School’s wrestling coach, who was also my math teacher, approached me in the hallway to pitch me on joining the team. He told me I looked “strong.” I couldn’t have rolled my eyes any harder at the idea. I totally wrote him off and didn’t even give the moment another thought for four years. In my first ever wrestling practice I cursed at myself between gasps of air underneath the one kid on the team who was smaller than even I was.
There’s no way I could have known just how much I needed wrestling in my life before that moment. I don’t have (or at least I don’t think I have) any significantly traumatic bullying stories, but I did quietly suffer from a strong insecurity about being a small kid, which didn’t really change much in adulthood. I’m certainly grateful that I wasn’t picked on worse, but I still felt a little bit helpless in some ways. The first big lesson of many in grappling was that the little guy can become the scariest person in the room if he sticks around long enough. In between my final days of high school wrestling and finding Jiu Jitsu, I would occasionally get to dust off my very limited grappling skills during some training events in the Air Force, but it just felt like a teaser. I wanted to be on a team again, I wanted to get better, and I wanted to continue to build my confidence.
In my first few months of being stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, I finally decided that I had enough waiting around for a team to find me, and I started shopping around for a gym that might have some kind of wrestling club. My flight chief at the time had asked me how the search was going, a fellow former wrestler himself. He told me, as many others had, “You need to try Jiu Jitsu.”
“I don’t know how to be on my back,” I told him. The years of wrestling had beaten out of me any belief that being on one’s back was acceptable in a fight.
“No shit. Neither does anyone else who starts Jiu Jitsu.”
Fair enough.
There is a significant learning curve that occurs in grappling sports where everything feels overwhelming and confusing in the beginning, like learning how to swim. People who are smaller, younger, older, or less fit than you can and will tie you up into a tiny pretzel and make you feel like a baby trying to swim through a rip tide. The time it takes to reach the top of the curve is different for everyone, but most people learn how to survive within their first year. Yes, that means for an entire year (if you stick it out), you pretty much do nothing but get beaten in class and unsuccessfully try to implement the techniques you are learning. However, something interesting happens after you start to learn to defend yourself against trained practitioners of the sport. Sure, you might not be winning yet, but you start to survive.
There are several trains of thought here regarding self-defense. Most credible academies hold students to a particular standard of skill in Jiu Jitsu before moving from white belt to blue belt, that standard being that the student should be able to maintain dominant control over an untrained person, and the ability to do this with someone larger than they are. Many people feel that this is relatively sufficient for self-defense. On the other hand, some people believe that there might not be any amount of Jiu Jitsu that would be sufficient to protect oneself in a street fight. They argue that the untrained lunatic willing to fight you (or stab you) in public is chaotic and probably won’t respond to you applying breaking pressure on their arm, assuming you are even able to get into that position in the first place. Even beyond reaching a black belt level of skill in Jiu Jitsu, it may not be enough for self-defense. I tend to lean towards the latter argument, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a middle ground. I tell people who ask me about starting Jiu Jitsu that it is the single best thing I have ever done for my self-confidence.
But if self-defense was never the goal, why does it lift confidence as much as it does? I’m not even particularly good at competing, so I guess it’s not that either. Psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, while having his own goofy ideas at times, does have one particularly accurate thing to say about this:
“If you’re competent at fighting, that actually decreases the probability that you’re going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you, you’ll be able to respond with confidence.”
Just having an increased understanding of how you can handle yourself in an encounter is enough to build confidence, and that confidence is what inspires us not to use it. That is the entire point of most traditional martial arts. Over an almost 8 year career in Jiu Jitsu so far, I have only ever been in one street fight and had to use Jiu Jitsu outside the padded walls of the academy. And I was a white belt at the time!
There needs to be a counterbalance to the confidence gained in a comfortable, almost academic setting in martial arts. There is no martial art out there that can give you full protection from having a gun pointed at your face, or an attacker with a knife, or multiple attackers (I’m looking at you, Krav Maga. I said what I said). In a street fight, the ground is hard and unforgiving, and there are no padded walls, gloves, or mouth guards. Having a higher competency in a martial art like Jiu Jitsu or boxing should come with this understanding. While you can build your confidence, no one should ever feel as if there is any guarantee that they will walk away from a physical confrontation unscathed. To reiterate this point, I impart on you one of the many quotes I remember from the Phoenix Raven Qualification Course:
“The first rule of knife fighting is that you are going to get cut.”
In general, competing in controlled environments is a great way for people to develop their confidence, whether that be respectfully with your teammates in the gym or against other gyms in formal competition. Most importantly, the journey is a consistent competition with yourself. In competition victory, there’s not much to say – you feel like the king or queen of the universe and it’s clear that your hard work has paid off. In defeat, it sucks, and it can even be humiliating, but over time you begin to realize that anyone can get better at this with patience. Everyone starts out as the nail, and we develop ourselves into a hammer. Even still, there’s always a smaller nail, and there’s always a bigger hammer.