It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical.

Although some people are of the opinion that we are basically machines, I have found this to be far from the truth. We are complex creatures with sub- personalities. We have inner critics and inner protectors inside of each of us. For most people the inner critic is a dominating presence, continually looking for anything to find fault with. It takes small feelings , insecurities or failures and magnifies them into actual issues, punishes you for your shortcomings, ignores context and rarely credits you for your efforts and progress.

Just like in everyday conflicts we need to stand up for ourselves. We need to acknowledge our weaknesses or misdeeds, put them into perspective, search for any valuable lessons, encourage ourselves to keep getting back up when we’ve been knocked down and, most of all, to sometimes tell that inner critic to just shut up. That inner protector can help you see your faults without dragging you into a pit of despair.  The only useful purposes of guilt, shame, or remorse are learning and growth – not punishment. Anything past the point of learning is just masochism. Excessive guilt and negativity actually gets in the way of your contributing anything to society by undermining your energy, mood, confidence and self worth.

I know, easier said than done. Constantly questioning ones self feeds insecurity, which often manifests in our relationships with others. Its ok to be self-critical but when that criticism spills over to your public life and you start being that way with others, it can destroy relationships just as easily as anything. It’s ok to push yourself. It’s ok to strive for greatness. It’s also ok to forgive yourself. Life is supposed to be a struggle, a lesson, and an adventure. We are supposed to fall flat on our faces, we are supposed to raise our hands in triumph and we are supposed to grow. So pick your self up, shake yourself off and get back in the game.

Ben Sandoval

I would like to begin this week by congratulating all of our athletes that competed this past weekend. Undisputed Fitness was represented in the Southwest Grappling Championships Jiu Jitsu Tournament, Rumble in the Rio Cops vs. Firefighters Boxing Card, Jackson’s MMA Series VI and Boxtoberfest CrossFit competition. All of these events marked the first time that several of our athletes ever competed. The entire staff is very proud of everyone. Great job folks!

With competition fresh in every athlete’s mind that competed this past weekend I know that there are lots of thoughts rushing through everyone’s minds. After competitions I often see an abundance of people beating themselves up over not winning some sort of award or not placing high enough. While competitors all train to try to be the best and receiving awards can be extremely gratifying, we should all keep in mind that winning is not everything.

I’ve been wrestling competitively since I was three years old. Over the years I have had my share of great success and my share of what can be viewed by many as great failure. I, myself, have even have viewed many of my performances as failures but I have learned, with the passage of time, that the only way I could have ever failed would be if I would had given up. And believe me, there have been times I’ve wanted nothing more than to just give up.

I still have my moments I just want to give up. I don’t know how to give up though.

When I was eight years old my parents took me to the United States Junior Open Championships wrestling tournament in Oklahoma City. The event is held in a huge livestock arena and hosts upwards of probably two thousand athletes. Opening ceremonies allow all the kids to come out with other competitors from their home state and wave their state flag. The event staff does their best to make the kids feel like they are competing in the Olympics. This was one of the most prestigious wrestling tournaments for junior wrestlers at the time and was always one of the focal points of my year because we would go every year. This particular time though had a profound impact on me for the rest of my life.

This particular year things were kind of tight financially for my family and my parents were not even initially sure we would be able to go to the tournament. In the end, my parents made it work and decided that we would drive out to Oklahoma City after my dad got out of work on Thursday night so we could be on time for weigh-ins Friday morning. So when my dad got home we packed up and were off on our eight hour drive to Oklahoma City.

We pulled into Oklahoma City right at 6 o’clock in the morning right on time for weigh-ins. I made weight and we went to eat. The tournament started at 9 o’clock and I was the first match on my mat. I went out, shook hands with my opponent, got taken down, got a half nelson put on me, got rolled to my back and got pinned. When I got up I looked straight at my dad and he was just shaking his head in disappointment. As I walked off the mat my dad told me, “Okay you are going to have to try harder this next match. Just going out there and laying down will not cut it. If you don’t, we are going to have to go home.”

Forty minutes later, with my dad’s words fresh in my mind, I was warming up getting ready to wrestle again. I’m going to try harder, I don’t want to go home and most of all I don’t want to let my dad down. It was never an issue in my mind at this point of letting my mom down because win or lose she was always be supportive of me and always told me I did good. I was ready to go out there and destroy my opponent but scared as hell to let down my dad and scared as hell of having to go home.

They called my name when I was up. I had to wrestle a kid from Tuttle, Oklahoma who wasn’t particularly bigger or even meaner looking than me so it gave me some confidence. I went out and shook his hand, got taken down, got a half nelson put on me, got rolled to my back, and got pinned. I was already terrified to turn and look at my dad before I got up. I looked at him and he was shaking his head even more frantically and looked really mad. As I walked up to him he just said, “Go get your stuff. We are going home. You didn’t even try!” Oh did I cry. I didn’t want to go home and seeing the disappointment in my dad’s eyes hurt me. I just wanted him to be proud of me.

He walked up to the stands with me all the while telling me how I didn’t try and that we were never going to do this again. I was done wrestling. We got to where my mom was sitting and I thought for sure I would receive some sort of reprieve from my mom. Guess what she said…”You didn’t try. You just lied there like a beached whale. Get your stuff, we are going home.” Wow! Not what I expected from my mom. Now I really felt like I was worthless. I let down the two people in the world I wanted only to make proud. Obviously since I let my parents down, I let everyone else around me down and was just a disappointment to the entire world. That broke my heart. No medal, disappointed everyone, and now I had to go home. That was it! In my mind I decided I would never ever let anyone down again. I would try as absolutely hard as I could in everything I do and never give up no matter what the circumstance. I would never allow myself to feel like this again. I would be the best. Did I become the best over night? Nope. In fact I lost several times after that. But I never gave up.

My story might be a bit harsh, but it illustrates my point well. If I had banked everything on winning and only winning, I would not be the man I am today. I very easily could have decided that facing things like the possibility of letting people down was too great and decided to just quit. That experience was traumatic in many ways for me but it also drove me to new heights I would have otherwise not known possible for myself.

Do I have lots of awards? Yes. Does it feel good to receive awards? Yes. They just don’t define us. In the end it is not the awards that we receive that should be valued but the experiences that those awards represent. The experiences are what we learn from and what makes up our lives, not the awards. I have more awards than I could display in any one room of any place I’ve ever lived and the majority of them are sitting in boxes in the shed at my parents’ house collecting dust.

Winning isn’t everything. The losses may hurt, but it is each of those sad painful losses that get us to each happy and proud winning moment as we learn and improve. Do not be discouraged by losing. Embrace it and learn from it. Use it as a tool for building rather than a tool of destruction. Be proud that you have the guts to step out from the stands and be on the court. Most people spend their lives living in the stands. The stands are a safe place to view and criticize but always remember that no game has ever been won from the stands.

Henry Martinez

Tait has a great saying that goes “anything in life worth doing is gonna take a little skin off”. In order to improve, we must go through some pain (no pain, no gain, as it were). Sometimes that pain or discomfort is physical, sometimes it’s not. Walking into an mma or CrossFit gym for the first time is a very uncomfortable thing to do (if it wasn’t for you, consider me impressed because I was nervous as all hell the first time I walked into Undisputed and I didn’t even have any intention to workout or train at the time!). And why wouldn’t it be? It’s a place where people go to throw around heavy weights and learn how to fight people. (Fight people!) Clearly this is not a place filled with friendly people. But you walk in anyway, despite that discomfort, because you need to get in shape or because you want to learn a martial art for self defense and  watched Eddie Bravo beat Royler Gracie on youtube and decided that you want to learn jiu jitsu. So you try a class and find out that, hey, these people are actually really cool and nice and not anything that you had pictured. Awesome!

You sign up and start coming to class regularly.

Damn, this s**t is hard! You never knew it was going to be this physically demanding. You make it through the first couple rounds of rolling at the end of class alright but by the third, you are running out of breath and your muscles are getting increasingly tired (ALL of em. Even ones you didn’t know you had.). By the time the fourth comes around, you can barely move. But you push through because you know that the more time you spend rolling, the quicker you’re going to improve. And then there’s a fifth. Wait, what? A fifth? But the rounds are 5 minutes long and there’s only 4 minutes left of class! Ok, you can barely move but you still push through that last round. Then class ends and it’s time to line up. It’s all you can do to pick yourself up off the mat; you have never felt this kind of muscular and respiratory fatigue before. But you’ve also got a huge smile on your face as you go through and hug each one of your teammates and coaches. Interesting.

You’re a few months into training. You’re totally addicted at this point; you look at the clock at work all day, waiting to get off so you can go roll. You’ve also noticed a dramatic change in your everyday life, outside the gym. Normally, you dread the 10 flights of stairs you have to walk up every day at work that take away your breath and give you armpit stains (first thing in the morning? That’s not cool.) but recently, you’ve been jogging up those steps without so much as breathing hard. Your friend called and asked for your help moving all of his furniture to his new house. Again. (This particular friend moves a lot.) Ugh, this is always a huge annoyance; you spend your whole weekend in pain, moving heavy stuff around. But this time, you do it in the half the time and all his furniture feels way lighter. Wow, that actually wasn’t too bad.

You find out that in a month, there’s going to be a tournament. Eeee, you don’t know about that. I mean, it’s one thing to train and roll with your friends in the gym; you know everybody there and know that if you mess up or don’t know how to do something, they’re going to help you. You’re comfortable there. But a tournament? In front of hundreds of people? For points and medals and things actually on the line? Against people you’ve never met before? What if you lose? In front of all those people. That would be embarrassing. That would be a hell of an uncomfortable moment. But you sign up anyway because your teammates and coaches encourage you to and promise that it’s fun and the experience will make you better. Ok, you want to get better but you’re not entirely sure they’re not lying to you about the “fun” part. Unless their idea of fun is loads of anxiety.

You train extra hard, lose the 6 pounds to make it into the lighter weight class and before you know it, it’s competition day. As soon as you walk into the competition area, you heart rate jumps to that of a humming bird. After hanging out for a while, you hear your division called over the loud speaker. You’re quite confident that your heart is going to explode at any moment. You follow your division to your respective mats. You’re up. You walk on the mats and look around to see all the people in the stands and around the sides watching you. Oh god, this is really happening, isn’t it? The ref has you shake hands with your opponent. All of a sudden, your heart rate calms. You don’t see anyone but your opponent or hear anyone but your coach. All the spectators don’t even exist right now. You remember all the techniques you’ve drilled over the past several months. You know what to do. You finish your opponent with a rear naked choke. You stand as the ref raises your hand and declares you the winner. The spectators are back now. You look around and see everyone cheering for you. You did it. Your heart rate jumps back up but not from anxiety this time. No, now it’s from the adrenaline rush. Holy s**t, this feels good. You end up taking home a 4th place medal. Not bad considering you were certain you weren’t going to win even one match. And your teammates were right; this WAS fun.

The following Monday at work, you can’t wait to describe the entire experience (in detail) to everyone who will listen. On Tuesday, you have to stand up and give a presentation in front of all of your bosses and colleagues. Normally, this would make you a nervous wreck but not today; today you just think, “If I can fight (and beat) other guys in front of big crowds, how hard is it going to be to talk in front of my peers? Psh, I got this.” And with that, you nail your presentation, show your bosses a side of you they’ve never seen before (the confident side), and get the giant raise you’ve been waiting for. Which then leads to a nicer car, which then leads to a super model girlfriend, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story? We can never hope to improve without putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations. It’s how we get stronger; in every facet of life. I can’t ever get physically stronger without putting more weight on the bar. I can’t ever get confident without putting myself in situations that require confidence. I can’t ever hope to have a healthy relationship with somebody without occasionally having a really uncomfortable talk about some s**t with that person. If I want to play it safe and stay inside my comfort zone, that’s cool; nothing bad might ever happen to me in there. But I have to know that I will never reach greatness in there.

Nobody has ever won a race by turning on the cruise control.

Nate Harris

That’s what an old teammate told me when I asked him about an upcoming grappling tournament. Even though he was (and most likely still is) crazy, I have to admit; he was right.

It was February 2009 and I had been training Jiu-Jitsu for a little over 3 months and the Undisputed Jiu-Jitsu Team was planning to compete in The Tournament of Champions II in Colorado. I remember my teammates talking about it and inviting me to join them. I told them that I didn’t feel I was ready. I was afraid and I immediately started to think of all the reasons I couldn’t do it. Experience, work, and money were the most prominent reasons that came to mind but I was uncomfortably curious to know what this “feeling” was like. So I convinced myself to sign up.

After signing up I couldn’t stop thinking about the tournament. My heart started pounding every time I imagined myself on the mat. I told my friend Weezy Wee (who was also a noob at the time) how I felt but he was no help with easing my nervousness. He told me he was so nervous, he was losing sleep at night. Way to make things worse, Weezy.

The team got organized, rented a van and we all drove up together. That drive to Colorado was quite an experience. I just remember closing my eyes and going to my happy place as our over caffeinated driver weaved through traffic, text messaging while steadily keeping the vans speedometer at its 100 mph top speed. Tait Fletcher’s School of Driving, if you’re interested.

We arrived in Denver Colorado and went straight to weigh-ins at Dave & Busters. I made the 140-159 lb class at my natural weight no problem, had dinner and headed to the place we would be spending the night at. Sleeping that night was pretty much impossible. It was a combination of nervous thoughts and sleeping with 7 fart-filled snoring guys in one room.

Morning came too soon and we all rushed to get out the door, have breakfast and head to the tournament. We arrived and the place was packed with athletes and spectators. I felt a little overwhelmed. We found our names on the wall where they posted our divisions and found our mats. Isaac Vallie-Flag helped me warmup and told me I would be up soon. He told me to get my heart going by doing some jumping squats (as if my heart wasn’t already racing from being nervous.) Tait came over and said “you’re up next.” They called my name and I step on the mat along with my opponent. With my heart racing I look him in the eyes, shake his hand and we start to grapple. I ended up submitting him with an armbar and I was immediately hooked to the  satisfaction of having my arm raised as the winner.

I won twice and lost twice that day and I felt great. I finally understood what “feeling” my old teammate was referring to. It was a combination of putting all of my doubts to rest, pushing myself to another level and knowing that I was part of a brotherhood all mixed into one satisfying, smile inducing feeling. So to all of you new guys/gals. Don’t be afraid. Get out there and compete. Be courageous.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain

Ruben Rivera

Jiu Jitsu is like life; we start off raw and malleable, all the possibility and optimism of a child. Of course, along with that comes the initial fear of the unknown. Will I just get smashed? Even if I don’t get smashed how do I win if I don’t know anything? How will I react to having someone laying on me or trying to submit me? Will I hurt someone? Will I do the wrong thing in class and get yelled at? Will my classmates be cool? Will they help me?  Am I too old/young? Am I strong enough?

Most of those fears are confronted the first day we step on the mats.  For those that persevere through the growing pains and insecurities of those initial days on the mats, the reward of these answers is tantamount to winning the lottery. The confidence, the character built by perseverance, the development of mental and physical toughness and the sense of accomplishment the first time you accomplish anything at all on the mats are the unadvertised benefits of a life devoted to Jiu Jitsu.

For me, Jiu Jitsu was initially just a hobby, something to learn after work and keep myself busy because I wasn’t getting any younger (shocking). Then a funny thing happened; my nephew who was 5 at the time saw me coming home sweaty and tired but with this completely satisfied grin on my face every day after class. He could tell I was much happier and seemed infatuated with whatever I was doing and he asked me about it. Then he asked if he could try it. After assuaging my sister’s fears and telling her I would go with him to his class so he wouldn’t be scared, we got him enrolled.

The first day he went to class it was a big one , or at least that’s what I remember. The instructor, Grant, had everything under control. He was calm, confident, and had an ease around the kids that was unshakeable, but the thing I remember most was his energy and kindness. As the class progressed through the warm up and games to the first technique of the day I was summoned out of the crowd. It’s a lot easier showing technique to 5 year olds if it’s shown on an adult by an adult rather than by an adult on a 5 year old. After a couple classes of this pattern repeating itself I was asked to bring my gi to the kids class and dress out. I was not even remotely interested in teaching little kids something I was still barely beginning to grasp myself. My nephew was ecstatic that I was there and my thinking was that I’d do just about anything for that kid. So I just kept showing up with my gi and tried my best to assimilate those skills that seemed to work so well for Grant. I was there to learn a new skill set, get in shape, get stronger and tougher and have fun but life had a different plan.

After assisting for about a year and getting my blue belt I was asked to meet Grant for lunch one day. I showed up just expecting lunch with my friend. He informed me that after he graduated he was going to move to California and he thought I could take over his class. I was horrified. I was also honored, challenged and intrigued. The rest is history. Just like that first day on the mats I dreaded all of the potential disasters but nonetheless charged headlong into the breach.

My nephew doesn’t do Jiu Jitsu anymore. He became enamored and pretty damn good at football and baseball. I became a Jiu Jitsu instructor. I found that those gifts I had received from my own study could be multiplied exponentially and that I could teach confidence, perseverance, character and respectfulness for ones self and others.

Along the way there were many bumps and detours. Some of my students have gone on to accomplish much more than me in the world of competitive Jiu Jitsu and wrestling. The rest are on their way. I never intended to become a Jiu Jitsu instructor. The lessons I learned on the mats had given me the confidence and skills to walk confidently down that path. Most of all I learned that we could all make a difference. If Jiu Jitsu could have such a profound impact on my life at 25, imagine what I could do for a bunch of kids. If I was brave in the face of my doubts and fears I could have a legacy far beyond my years. My son is one of my students now, his little brother is chomping at the bit to get out there as well. I only hope they find the joy and fulfillment that I have found.

Ben Sandoval