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As I tie on my newly-earned blue belt, I can't help but reflect on the myriad of ways jiu-jitsu parallels the boardroom battlegrounds. Today, we weave together the fibers of discipline and resilience from the mats to the office, illustrating through personal anecdotes and expert insights why the art of grappling is more than just a sport. It's a masterclass in navigating life's challenges, be it in talent acquisition or strategic business maneuvers. The energy on the mats at our local academy crackles with the same vibrancy we channel into our professional pursuits, and I'm thrilled to share how this cross-training enriches our lives beyond measure.
Gratitude is the Gi we don today as we express heartfelt thanks to our esteemed guest, whose stories and BJJ expertise add depth to our conversation. Whether you're a seasoned black belt in business or just starting your journey in jiu-jitsu, our chat promises to fuel your passion for growth and resilience.
Let's connect: caffeinatedjiujitsu@gmail.com
Let's Chat!! Send us a Text Message
As I tie on my newly-earned blue belt, I can't help but reflect on the myriad of ways jiu-jitsu parallels the boardroom battlegrounds. Today, we weave together the fibers of discipline and resilience from the mats to the office, illustrating through personal anecdotes and expert insights why the art of grappling is more than just a sport. It's a masterclass in navigating life's challenges, be it in talent acquisition or strategic business maneuvers. The energy on the mats at our local academy crackles with the same vibrancy we channel into our professional pursuits, and I'm thrilled to share how this cross-training enriches our lives beyond measure.
Gratitude is the Gi we don today as we express heartfelt thanks to our esteemed guest, whose stories and BJJ expertise add depth to our conversation. Whether you're a seasoned black belt in business or just starting your journey in jiu-jitsu, our chat promises to fuel your passion for growth and resilience.
Let's connect: caffeinatedjiujitsu@gmail.com
Welcome to Kaffeinated Jiu Jitsu the blend of white belt enthusiasm, black belt wisdom and a dash of caffeine for that extra kick. Dive deep into the world of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as we explore the journey, techniques, challenges and the sheer joy of the sport from a white belt's perspective, from intriguing interviews with renowned coaches and professors to playful fun episodes that'll have you chuckling mid-roll. We've got it all brewed and ready. Now step into the mass and into your ears. Here's your host, joe Motez.
Speaker 2:And welcome back to Kaffeinated Jiu Jitsu. We have been or I should I say have been on a bit of a hiatus. It's been a couple months since our last, or since our last, posted or uploaded, whatever you want to call it. So we've turned a new year since the last episode and you know not too much to cover. At the end of last year I think I have shared that I did get my blue belt, so I'm going to have to probably update the intro to the podcast so that we'll probably have a new intro at some point.
Speaker 2:This year Got an amazing, amazing schedule ahead of episodes that I want to do with guests. I want to bring on in series and insights. It's going to be a great year for the podcast and I want to thank all of you who are taking time and listening. You can look forward to probably about two to three posts a month moving forward, just because life has gotten busy and between work and family, we always have to in training, we always have to make sure that we are prioritizing appropriately. So, yeah, you know, buckle in. It's going to. We're going to have some great stuff to come and I hope you enjoy it. But thank you so much for all of those who were listening consistently and have been patient for our next episodes to start coming back out this year. And, yeah, just thank you for your support. I've gotten a lot of great feedback from those of you who have been listening. I've gotten a lot of good ideas about content you would like to hear on the podcast, about guests you think I should invite. Probably won't have any of the Jiu Jitsu celebrities that some of you have asked me to have on.
Speaker 2:Very seriously, doubt John Danahur is going to grace the mic here at caffeinated Jiu Jitsu. It doesn't mean we can't talk about the things and principles he teaches or the techniques and just some of that. What do we have coming up? So here in Atlanta we have the Atlanta Open, the IB JJF Atlanta Open. I've decided not to compete in that once. I think now that I'm a blue belt, I have some nerves going into competition. I think I need to spend a few more months training before I go compete at blue belt level, but I'm excited to. I think it's May that I'm looking at the spring open here in Atlanta. I've kind of committed to just competing here in the Atlanta area. I really have the schedule and time to travel. Maybe one day I'll go down to Charleston or something like that. So, those of you who have started competing this year, I've actually gotten some messages and emails to the caffeinated Jiu Jitsu email talking about your outcomes and how your nerves, how you overcame your nerves, and I just thank you so much for sharing that. It's always the inspiration I think it's an inspiration to hear, for anyone who's competed a lot loves competing. So, yeah, just continue to share, reach out to me if you have any thing you want to share, like competition results, or if you have any questions.
Speaker 2:Again, I always like to try to make it clear that I am still somewhat novice in my jujitsu career. You know, been at it the better part of a year and a half. So you have to take any advice or thoughts or insights that I give with a grain of salt and understand where they're coming from. But that's life in general, right? So what's first out of the gate? So a lot of the ideas that pull me back up. I am a business professional. I work, as many of you may recall, in talent acquisition and recruiting. I have an executive MBA from Kennesaw State University, goals, and I am just as passionate about business as I am about jujitsu and you know, since training jujitsu I've noticed a positive correlation, not only in my personal life we all see that pretty early in our journey but I've seen a direct correlation in the impact it's had on my professional life. So there were things like that that I started noticing in some of the conversations I started to have and the people I started to meet.
Speaker 2:My jujitsu journey, where it's training at other places or just, you know, training at Alliance Roswell and the new oh, and that's another thing, really quick the Academy at Alliance Roswell. Our school has, I mean it has exploded in membership. I mean gosh, I think you know in just the past few weeks we've added anywhere from like 12 to 15 new members signed up, and not only signed up. I would say three quarters of them are training either every day or at least three times a week and it has just been amazing. And even better, they're coming to the morning class, where morning class used to just be me and the professor, maybe two other people, now I mean morning classes are like six to nine people and it's just amazing. Anyway, getting off track, coming back, started meeting a lot of business professionals like myself who trained jujitsu. I'm pretty highly engaged on the social media platform, LinkedIn, joined a group there called BJJ executives If you're only then look up the group group owners, a guy by the name of Roger Ma, and you know it has about 3,500 group members who are business professionals and trained jujitsu.
Speaker 2:So what I've decided to do is launch a series, and I don't know how many episodes it's going to have. I have a few guests that I want to bring on. I know already, but I want to talk about and maybe put together some content around the correlations of jujitsu and business, the positive impacts and the advantage it gives you. You know being a practitioner and just really how it carries over into your professional life. And today I'm going to spend just a little bit of time going over some of my initial thoughts and insights and things that that I've seen. And then, you know, over the next few weeks it's probably going to be, at least you know, the next three episodes we're going to have some some guests on who are business owners, our business professionals, our CEOs who practice jujitsu and how it impacts their day to day as well. So, without further ado, we're going to talk through some of these insights that I wrote. I've written down and topics and then we're going to call it episodes, not going to be too too long of an episode today.
Speaker 2:Just really wanted to get some some content back out there, give everybody an update with what's going on, what's to come and, yeah, just thank everybody for your continued listening of caffeinated jujitsu. Yes, I do have my favorite, my new favorite coffee, and that is and this is for all my veterans listening it's a black rifle coffee. It's from the black rifle coffee company. Basically a veteran who transitioned out, started this company maybe a group of companies but this exploded. It's the first time. A few weeks ago I tried a cup for the first time. They've been out for several years and it's amazing. So it's going in my Keurig tree as a fan favorite.
Speaker 1:So all right well, basics.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the basics and BJJ and business. That's good. Let's give our conversation today that topic. So, both in the world of resilience you get to and the competitive arena of business, the foundations that you build upon determined your path really to overall success. It's about it's about mastering the basics. Everything is about the basics and the foundations and how well you grasp those and understanding the core principles that drive progress and consistently applying them to to achieve your goals. So let's let's break this down a little bit more and see how these two worlds, at least in my opinion, kind of intersect and what they can teach us about overall professional success.
Speaker 2:First off, let's talk about the importance of mastering the basics and BJJ. This means focusing on fundamental positions, are escapes and submissions. So many of us I can remember, at least early on, I would have a submission or thought is a submission in and I would just be squeezing and squeezing. And if it was a joke, why is it not working? Why is it not working when it could be something as simple as my hand placement was wrong or maybe I was on the wrong side of my opponent? So it's about, like, mastering those fundamental techniques and these, these are really the building blocks of all advanced type or techniques that go into the advanced stage. Right, you're building block system, and similarly it's the same in business.
Speaker 2:It's crucial to understand the fundamentals of your unique and specific industry, whether it's marketing, finance operations, even even customer service, right, answering phones in a phone call in a phone center, or retail recruiting, which is what I'm in. They've seen direct correlations. But mastering these basics provides the groundwork for any type of innovative strategy and, I would say, sustained, sustained growth. But how do we stress now, how, why do we stress so much on the basics? Because, really, they prepare you for adaptability and that you know. That's what it's all about. Right, it's all about adaptability. You can go into your roles or training or competition and have this great plan and all of a sudden, you find yourself having to adapt to a situation. Adaptability is key, both on the mat and in the marketplace.
Speaker 1:If.
Speaker 2:Amazon fails, for the next three to five years, to adapt to the changing market, even though they're the largest employer in the world and they have some of the highest generating revenue, they're going to struggle. They're going to eventually, by not adapting and continuing to adapt, they're going to fail as a business. And, jiu Jitsu, your ability to adapt to an opponent's strategy can make or break the outcome or the match and business, just like the example I gave, the ability to pivot in response to market changes can be the difference of surviving and thriving, or thriving and surviving. And this is where the basics come in. They give you a solid I Was a solid versatile foundation to adjust your strategies Effectively. And and we all we talk about strategy, we use that word a lot in business and we use that a lot in Jiu Jitsu.
Speaker 2:But the sister component of strategy is execution, and Maybe we'll do some time or we'll take some time and have an episode around strategy and execution what that looks like in Jiu Jitsu and and in business. Because if we don't have Specific, you know, thought out, written out, whatever flows of how we're going to execute our strategy, it doesn't matter how long you spent whiteboard in a strategy out or game planning in your notebook. Everyone knows I keep Notebooks and journals. Doesn't matter all the mind maps you do, it doesn't any of that. If you can't execute it, it's just words and drawings and things like that on paper and really you're wasted time. So I digress. But let's talk a little bit about strategy. In Jiu Jitsu, planning your moves ahead, conserving your energy, energy and anticipating your opponent's actions are really essential to those strategies and Just like kind of what I was talking about in my example of execution. These principles are directly applicable to business, where the planning, resource allocation, competitive analysis play critical roles and understanding the basic, understanding those basics allows you to craft that Really craft strategies that that are both effective and efficient. You know, efficient effectiveness is obviously the the positive outcome and you reach the goal you wanted to reach. But Efficiency is something I think that both in Jiu Jitsu and business, we sometimes forget about or we don't pay attention to, and your efficiency is how you use your resources or your moves, your setups, your sweeps, your staff, your delegation powers. That's efficiency right, and I Think that that's why Jiu Jitsu is so effective as a martial art, where the little guy can be the big guy is not so much you know they're super strong or they're stronger than the big guy, or you know their strength has made a difference in the match or the effectiveness of it. It's the efficiency of the types of moves that they've used, setting up things, being patient, and it's the same way in business.
Speaker 2:So, which really brings me kind of to the next point I wanted to, or have written down here, is around discipline and consistency. I, when we get a new trial class member who signs up, I always love to kind of sit back and talk to him, professor myself. I Don't know if he likes that or if he doesn't. Think sometimes he thinks my motivation and Excite being excited as I get I won't get a new member makes people off. But one of the things that I tell them and it was one of the things that was told to me when I started is you get better at Jiu Jitsu through consistency, showing up, training daily if you can, setting a goal, and my goal was at least five hours a week. If I miss one day, then that means I did a double day. You know now that I'm getting Older and then also now I'm More in the refining stage of a lot of some of my stuff. I Said a new, consistently consistency schedule. But you show up, you, you will get better.
Speaker 2:And it's the same in business. And they're not just. You know, discipline and consistency aren't just but buzzwords, they're. They're the core or essence of progress. Four ways I believe we improve in well in jiu jitsu and business and even in our personal life Discipline and consistency, but also pain and failure.
Speaker 2:So I'm not going to go way off the tracks here and talk about those, but just these are teaching things, not buzz words, not catchphrases. I'm just going to say this because this is what everybody says in all the business books. They're core principles that you need to hang on to. Discipline. I talked a little bit about consistency, but discipline is simply getting out of the bed in the morning and getting to class or making sure you block off your calendar to go to that lunch class when you're tired at the end of the day at work. But you know, you know evening class is there and that's your scheduled time. Pound some water, pound some Gatorade, drink a cup of black coffee and then push through that.
Speaker 2:And it's the same with the business world. That demands, especially these days, demands a high, high volume of consistency and discipline, right To get through, to work through complex problems, to get through obstacles. So yeah, discipline and consistency. And let's not forget the mental aspect of all of this Mental toughness and resilience to get back up after being taken down is invaluable. And jujitsu, you're going to tap out and you're going to lose way more times than you succeed. But each time you learn something. And the business, failures and setbacks are not the end, but rather stepping stones to really greater success. And it's about learning from those mistakes, it's not letting them define you right. Okay, so we have this guy, we have this white belt, four striped white belt in our academy. A young guy, our younger, I think.
Speaker 2:He's in his late 20s and this guy is a I don't want to say a brute in a negative way, but it's painful rolling with this guy. He's fast, he's agile, he's flexible, he's strong and you know for someone my age and my level. And long story short, here I am newly promoted blue belt. He comes in to a morning class. He always goes to the evening class. He comes in one morning he shreds through all of his, gets to me, submits me and like this is like my second roll after getting second or third roll, after getting my blue belt. And here's this four striped white belt coming in, submits me.
Speaker 2:Alright, so yeah, I felt a little bit like a failure. However, comma, it does not define me and make you know me. I shouldn't view myself as someone who always sucks at jujitsu. Oh no, you got to take a lot of things into account and you have to learn. Okay, well, you tapped you this way because you didn't. You know, frame over here. It has really not as much to do with his athleticism as it is my failure at the technique. Right, and it's the same in business.
Speaker 2:If you have a project that you've worked months on and you launch it and it does great, coming out of the gate and you get all excited and then, over the next few months, it starts to climb and your goals and your milestones aren't reached and it ends up being, all things considered, a failure. Right, that's where that mental toughness comes in, and you have to look at things in a full perspective, right? Just like I had to go back and evaluate hey, the reason you lost and you got submitted and it was so hard is because you know you weren't doing this, you weren't doing that. But then you also have to look at the things you did, right. So, if you've launched this project and it did really really well for a while, well then, there were some things that you did really, really right, right, and so you have to focus on those. You have to learn from the things that you did that didn't work out and may have caused your project to fail or for you to lose the round or the competition or what have you. What you can't do is, you know, get on this poor, poor, pitiful me.
Speaker 2:And let me tell you, I've been there. I've had business projects that failed, that recruitment strategies that didn't have the desired outcome, and then I remember, probably about four months ago, definitely before this uptick in the academy, you know, I sat down with our professor and I was like I wasn't having a lot of mental toughness. I was down and out. I was like why am I still getting just dominated and killed by, like some of these people that in my mind I shouldn't be, because I'm looking at the optics of it all and not all and I wasn't looking at the whole picture. And you know, the professor being the great professor that he is, he, you know, kind of said, hey, you got to keep these things in perspective. You know, long story short he was talking about. You know these differences, the speed, and also you know just how long some of these people have been practicing jiu-jitsu. So just keep things in perspective, keep your mental toughness in check and you will learn way more by being resilient than you will by getting into any kind of a victim mindset or anything like that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, to wrap up, whether you're grappling on the mat or navigating the complexities of, say, the business world, basics are your friend. Okay, they're the foundation on which success is built. It's not about fancy techniques or the latest buzzwords, it's about how well you understand the basics of your job, of your industry, of your level in jiu-jitsu of your foundational jiu-jitsu movements, of general knowledge, common knowledge. Every industry, every job field, every one of them has a set of common knowledge that you have to do here in recruiting. It's understanding what a workflow is, understanding what an applicant tracking system is and what it does. It's understanding the components of the recruiting cycle sourcing, recruiting, resume review, phone calls, contact, interview, stuff like that right Intake forms. You know just, these are some of the basics, right, and anybody who's been recruiting for more than six months has kind of that core understanding. So know those about your industry, know those about what you do, and the same with your jiu-jitsu.
Speaker 2:If you're at a school that tests, it's a great way to formalize the basics because you know, typically schools at tests have a curriculum that they're going off of for each belt level. Once we have white belt curriculum, blue belt curriculum and so on and so forth. So when you go through that test for whatever belt level, like for instance the white belt level test, I was already a two-stripe white belt when I went to Alliance so I didn't technically have to test. However, I did and wanted to go through the test so I could experience and I knew that that white belt test would ensure that I had my fundamentals and my kind of part of my language, kind of my shit together. Right, because I didn't want to go right to a, you know, spend all this time training, go right to a blue belt test and not know how to do something like a proper scissor sweep or a flower sweep or something like that, right?
Speaker 2:So you know fundamentals, basics, but I do want to leave you with this thought both in Jiu Jitsu and in business, the journey is always ongoing. Right, it is to self mastery, to professional mastery. I don't think we're ever going to be at the end of it. We're definitely not going to be at the end of it in Jiu Jitsu, and I can't think to any retired professional either, and have a lot of those in my network, in my family, multi-millionaires, and you know I asked them, you know when did you? There was a couple of times in a few of my vests when did you feel like? You know, I'm just bored because I'm not learning anymore and I have never found anyone that says, yeah, I was, you know, 15 years, in 22 years in it was, you know, winter of 1989. And I've never heard that. I've always heard things around, joe, I'm still learning. I'm, you know, still researching and keeping my ear to the ground and my industry, and we all know that's kind of the. That's what we hear in Jiu Jitsu. Black belts will tell you. Now the journey begins once you get your black belt and all these. You know cliches and sayings and you know if almost 100% of the people are saying it. You know it must be true. So there's always something new to learn and another layer of depth to those basics. Right, just stepping stones, all right. So embrace that journey and keep refining your foundation and success is going to success is going to follow. So that's it. That's the start of the series.
Speaker 2:Hope some of the things that I shared or discussed in this episode are helpful for those of you who are. You know in a grants that there are correlations between Jiu Jitsu and your professional life. I'd love to hear you send emails to caffeinatedjiujitsu at gmailcom. Someone asked me the other day if we were going to get a external caffeinated Jiu Jitsu website outside of Bus Brouts. Answers no, not at this time. It's just a little too much to manage right now. And so just continue to use that gmail email to send your questions and look, stay caffeinated, stay grounded and let's roll through this journey together and we will see you at the next episode.
Speaker 1:And that's the final tap on today's episode of caffeinated Jiu Jitsu. A big thanks to all of our listeners, especially today's insightful guest, for sharing their BJJ knowledge and tales. If you felt that adrenaline rush and are hungry for more, hit, subscribe, drop a review and post. Reach out to the email provided in the podcast description and, to join our grappling community, head over to Instagram. Get those geese. Crisp their coffee strong and always be prepared for the next roll.