The Skill Of Being Coachable On A Frustrating Day

Some days on the mats, a simple correction lands like a punch to the ego. You’re tired, your timing is off, you keep getting stuck, and suddenly the exact feedback you need is the hardest thing to hear. I’m talking about that specific BJJ problem almost everyone feels but few people say out loud: staying coachable when you’re frustrated. 

In this episode I walk through why Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu feedback changes meaning on rough training days and how emotion quietly rewrites your “filter.” When frustration narrows attention, a coach’s adjustment can sound like criticism, and you can start treating advice as evidence that you’re behind. I also dig into what’s usually underneath “not coachable” behavior: vulnerable ego, embarrassment, fatigue, and emotional overload, especially once you care about looking competent in sparring. 

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Transcript

Why Bad Days Test Coachability

How Frustration Warps Feedback

Ego Fatigue And Emotional Overload

A Four-Step Coachability Framework

Coachability As A Recovery Skill

Inventory Your Classes And Closing

Joe Motes (Host) 0:55

Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Caffeinated Jiu-Jitsu. Super excited to have you back here for another BJJ chat. And I'm super excited about the topic of discussion today. We're going to be talking about being coachable, even on our bad or super hard training days. But before that, just want to give a shout out to all of the IBJF uh Pans winners. I meant to do that last episode. Pans is wrapped up for 2026. For those of you new to jujitsu, uh the IBJF Pans is one of the big uh four or five events or BJJ competitions. And those that compete in it, uh, you know, they they challenge themselves, they train hard uh for that type of competition. And big shout out to my friend and old training partner at Alliance Randall, who actually won his division. I believe it was Master uh six, can't remember the the weight class, but congratulations there, uh Papa Graybeard. So let's jump into today's episode. And like I said, we're going to be talking about being coachable. And you know, to start things off, there's there's there's this version of us that's very easy to coach. It is the version that shows up fresh and calm and mentally open. It's the version that can hear a correction, make an adjustment, and move on without turning it into something bigger than it really is. And then there's this other version. And this version shows is the version that shows up, or when this version shows up, you're already a little tired, you're already a little off, you're a little irritated. The version that gets stuck in bad positions misses things that normally feel available and can feel frustration building halfway through class, and that version of you does not hear feedback the same way. Advice can feel sharper, corrections can feel heavier, and useful coaching can start sounding personal, like a personal attack. And I think that is something a lot of us experience, but not many of us talk directly about, at least each other on the mats. Because on a frustrating day, the problem is usually not just that training feels hard. The problem is that the exact feedback you need becomes harder to hear when you need it the most. And that's what I want to talk about in this episode about the skill of being coachable on a frustrating day, and not when you're you're flowing, not when your confidence is high, not when everything is clicking. I mean, the days when your ego is loud, your body feels heavy, your timing is off, and your frustration is trying to take over the whole class. Because I I do not think coachability is just a personality trait. I do think uh that it is a skill, a type of skill, and like most skills in jujitsu, it matters most when things stop feeling comfortable. So one of the hardest things to notice at the moment is that frustration changes our attention. And when you get frustrated, your mind tends to narrow. It stops taking in the full picture and starts locking on to whatever feels wrong. You know, the the bad round, the failed technique, the training partner you could not solve, the feeling that you should be doing better than this, and your mind gets tighter and tighter and more focused on the problem. And when your attention narrows like that, feedback stops coming or becoming more clean and clear, right? A coach may be saying, Here is a useful adjustment, but what you hear is you are still messing something up. A coach or professor may be saying, try slowing this part down, but what you hear is you should be past this by now. They might be offering a small correction, but because you are already frustrated, it lands a lot like criticism instead of help. And that is one of the reasons frustrating days can be so deceptive. The coaching itself may not be any different or worse or better than usual, but the difference is that is that emotion has changed your filter. And once emotion changes our filter, even good feedback can feel hard to receive. And that matters because it means the issue is not always whether someone gave you useful guidance, sometimes the issue is whether you were in the in a state that you could actually hear it, and I think that's important because a lot of people think they are coachable simply because they are coachable on their good days, and that's not really where our skill in this gets tested. I think most people are easier to coach when things are going well, not just in jiu-jitsu, but probably in other sports. When we are moving well, when the rounds feel productive, when our confidence is intact, feedback feels extremely useful. It feels additive, right? Like we're adding value to our jujitsu skills. And it feels like something we can take and apply right away. But on those hard days and frustrating days, it changes the emotional meaning of feedback. And now whatever correction we get does not just feel like information, it can feel like evidence, and evidence that we're doing something wrong, that we're behind, that we're off, that we are not where we want to be. And that is when people faintly stop sort of being coachable. And you know, not always out loud or in obvious ways. Sometimes it's internal. You kind of nod, uh, but inside you are resisting, you may you hear the correction audibly, but internally you are arguing with it, you explain why it happened, why the round was weird, why the advice does not completely fit, why the problem uh is actually something else. And maybe some of that is true, but on tough days, the internal defensiveness can become this wall between you and the exact thing that could help us or help you. And that is why I think the real or I think real coachability is not measured on our best days, it is truly measured on uh the days where we're having trouble and where things are difficult, because that is when staying teachable becomes a real skill instead of a uh pleasant personality trait. And once you start looking at it that way, I think it becomes easier to understand why coachability can break down. Usually it is not random. There is almost always something underneath it. I think when people talk about someone not being coachable, they usually imagine a know-it-all or someone with a lot of arrogance, somebody who thinks they know everything, somebody who does not want to be corrected. But that is only one version of it. And a lot of time the deeper issue is not arrogance, it's it is ego in in a more vulnerable form. It is the part of you that hates feeling behind, the part of you that does not want to struggle in a way that feels visible, the part of you that thought you should be doing something or be doing better than this by now. That's something I felt. Uh, that kind of ego that um the kind of ego does not always sound confident, but sometimes it sounds sometimes it sounds disappointed, it sounds embarrassed, it can sound like frustration, this kind of ego, and then you add to it fatigue, right? And fatigue lowers your patience and your processing speed. It can also lower your emotional margin. A correction that would feel simple at the beginning of class can now feel irritating at the end of class because your system has less room to handle it and to process it. And then there is this emotional part, right? The emotions itself themselves, it's frustration, irritation, embarrassment, maybe disappointment, and those things do not stay politely in the background. They actually compete directly with learning, they take up attention and make flexibility a lot harder. They make it harder to hear something clearly and to test it, you know, in an honest or uh honest in an honest situation, role training uh or what have you. So when you're having a hard day, it is not just that the class is difficult, it is that all those things, ego, fatigue, and emotion, are all pulling your uh uh attention at this at the same time. And when that happens, I think learning becomes a lot more uh challenging. I think sometimes it's not that you're you're not hard to coach because you're stubborn, sometimes you're just overloaded. But even if that is true, it is still our job to learn how to notice it and to come back to learning anyway and getting the most out of our training session in class and our coach's uh you know advice and feedback. And this brings up something that I think matters a lot, and you know, staying coachable does not mean you have to feel good. I think some people unconsciously assume that being coachable means being emotionally smooth and relaxed and just vibing all the time. Like if you are really mature, then you should always become receptive, positive, and easygoing, no matter how the class is going. And I just I don't think that's realistic. I don't think that's how we we just are made as humans. Being coachable does not mean you feel great. It means you still receive something useful even when you do not feel great. You know, that is the important difference. You can be annoyed and still listen, you can be embarrassed and still make adjustments, you can be tired and still stay open, you can be frustrated and remain teachable. That to me is or should be the real um standard, if you will, not emotional perfection and not pretending that we are above frustration, just being open enough to let useful information in, even when part of us does not want to hear it. And I think that's that's much more power of I think that is a much more powerful skill than just being easy to coach, especially just when everything's going our way, because hard days are not separate from training, hard days are part of training, they are part of what reveals how we relate to feedback, to ego, to discomfort, and to growth, right? I mean, we have to have hard days, days that push us and days that we just you know embrace the suck fest, if you will. So if staying coachable is really about remaining open enough to learn when frustration arises, I think the next question becomes well, how do we actually or how do you actually do that, you know, remain open in in real time? And as I thought about this topic, I was thinking about, you know, my experiences with this and you know, days that I probably wasn't very coachable, and and I've kind of thought through this framework that I want to share with you. And I think there are a few things in this framework that can help, especially in the middle of a hard class. The first is to name what is happening without turning it into some type of story. There is a big difference between saying I am frustrated right now and saying I am terrible. I always do this, nothing is working, I'm getting worse. One right is an observation, the other is a form of identity labeling. And sometimes the most useful thing you can do is simply notice the state you are in without giving it extra meaning. I am frustrated right now, I am tired right now, my ego is loud right now. That kind of honesty creates a little bit of space, and I think that space matters a lot. And the second thing is to make your lesson smaller. You see, frustration makes everything I think feel huge, and too many corrections, too many problems, too many things to fix. So instead of trying to take the and instead of trying to take in the entire class, shrink the feedback down to one thing, right? Maybe one posture correction, one, I don't know, timing cue, or one grip detail, something very simple. A decision that you want to make better. The third thing is, or the third thing is to notice the urge to defend yourself internally. And I uh I think uh a lot of people think defensiveness only counts if it is spoken out loud. Uh, but a lot of defensiveness is silent, it is the internal explanation, the internal excuse, the internal argument and battle. Why was the round different? Why does the advice not fully apply? Why is the problem actually somewhere else? And again, maybe, you know, I mentioned this above, uh, you know, earlier, some of that's true. But if if your first instinct is always to protect yourself from correction, you are going to miss the value inside of it. And the better question is simply what if this feedback, or what it, yeah, what if this feedback is useful, even if it's not the entire story? I think the fourth thing that I wrote down is to test, not judge. And this one matters a lot. On frustrating days, feedback can quickly become personal. You start hearing every correction as a verdict on how you're doing, but feedback works better when it becomes something to test instead of something to be wounded by. Not what does uh this say about me, but can I try this in my next exchange? Can I honestly, you know, give this uh some focus time and energy? And that shift keeps you in the learning mode. That keeps the moment practical instead of emotional. And I think that last part is huge because once a hard class becomes a judgment about who you are, it gets much harder to stay open, which is why so much of being coachable comes down to what you are trying to protect. There are moments in training where your main goal quietly shifts. You stop trying to learn and you start trying to, you know, protect your image of yourself. I think this probably happens, you know, more to those of us who have made it out of the white belt phase. Um, I'm thinking particularly the blue belt phase, um, because I've felt like this plenty of times. You know, you want to look competent, you want to avoid uh, you know, another bad role, you want to stop feeling exposed, you want to hold on to the version of yourself that feels capable and in control of your skills development in jujitsu. And the problem is that once self-protection becomes the priority, feedback and coaching starts to feel threatening because feedback always points to something that is uh unfinished, if you will, something unclear, something that is still developing. And if your identity is too wrapped up in how you are performing that day, then every correction feels personal. And that is why humility matters in a deeper way than people usually talk about. Humility is not just about being modest, it's it's being willing to let the moment tell you. The truth about where you are without I don't know making the truth unbearable. And that is hard to do on a frustrating day in training. It's hard to hear that something is off when part of you desperately wants to feel solid in a technique. But that is exactly why coachability is such a meaningful skill. And that's also there's onus on you know coaches and professors to be able to recognize maybe when you're having a frustrating off day and and tailor some of their uh coaching to that. It's it's not just about you know listening better for the practitioner on the mat or the the member, um, but there there's some onus on the the leadership as well. But it is about loosening your grip on the version of yourself you are trying to defend long enough to actually take in that coaching and improve your jujitsu skills. And I think once you understand that, we understand this, I think coachability starts looking a lot less like a fixed personality trait and a lot more like a like a recovery skill. And I really believe this. I do. I, you know, most people are going to get frustrated sometimes. Most people are going to have rounds where our emotions strikes, ego flares up, and learning gets harder. And that's normal. Again, this isn't, I don't think a lot of things I'm sharing in this episode or anything that are specific and unique to jujitsu. This could be spread out, you know, to apply to many, many different sports. So, you know, the question is not whether frustration will happen. The question is, how quickly can we can you recover your openness once it does? And how quickly can you notice that you are kind of spinning and come back to the room and return to learning? And that might mean taking one breath before the next round or sitting out a round and just kind of maybe moving off to the side of the mat and just recomposing yourself. And it might mean asking yourself, what is the one thing I need to keep right now? Right? Making making things smaller. It may mean deciding that for the next few minutes that my only job is to apply one correction and nothing else. Like during this role, I'm only going to apply the correction that was made at the beginning of class when maybe I missed a grip on a sweep when we were drilling technique or something like that. Coachability is not never getting emotional, it's not never being disappointed, it's not never having an ego, it's the ability once those things show up to come back from them. Um and you know, come back from those states without letting them on and ruin your entire training class. I mean, some of us only are able to train a couple times a week or one time a week. And you want to always make sure you maximize that time on the mat. So when these things come in, you want to have that framework that you can bounce back from or that you can use the implement to help you through it. If you if you can recover your openness on a hard day, you stop wasting ultimately that class and that time. And that is really what it comes down to. You know, some of the most valuable days in training are not the smooth ones. They are the ones that show you how you respond when things are not going your way. I mentioned this before at the beginning of the episode. Some of the best learning in jujitsu happens on days that we would probably want to forget. The days where our time is off, the days where our body feels heavy, the days where, you know, our ego gets loud, the days where your corrections are hard to hear. And those days are not just text testing our technique, they're testing our relationship to feedback. They are showing us whether frustration makes us shut down or simple or or uh or simplify, right? Whether emotion makes us resist or listen, whether fatigue makes us more scattered or more focused and honest in what we're doing. And I think that is why the skill of being coachable on frustrating days matters uh a lot as well. Anyone, you know, can be open when training's easy. The harder skill is staying teachable when our pride's brewed or bruised and frustration's rising, and you know whether the cli whether the class goes well or not, you know, ask I think ask whether we stayed available to feedback if we have had one of those classes lately. Do an inventory of like say your past, I don't know, four or five classes and and see if you can find where that type of frustration showed up and where, you know, your coach or professor provided feedback that you just kind of internalized and maybe got a little upset by or uh offended by, and think about well, what was really going on? How how did the class end versus how it began, or how did it end from the time you got the feedback, and just kind of do a personal inventory and then watch out for those things because it's a skill, it's something that you're going to that we are going to have to continuously develop, and it's a skill worth focusing on and worth paying attention to. So I hope that this episode hit home. This is one of the episodes a lot of times I I do these solo episodes. It's about topics on things that I myself have dealt with or am dealing with. It's kind of how I've come up with what I want to uh talk about. I wish I had the forethought to plan, you know, a year's worth of content in advance, but I don't. Um maybe it's my novice of where I'm at in my podcast journey. But if this episode hits home for you, take it with you and to your next class. And when that frustration shows up, you know, don't let it decide that you're done with learning. Don't let it ruin your mat time. Name it, shrink the lessons, stay open to one, maybe two useful corrections and focus on those. And if you, you know, know someone in your training partner circle who gets in their own head, I guarantee you you know someone. After a rough training session, send this episode to them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. And also don't forget to leave a review. And if you want to discuss or further discuss this topic, be sure to join the caffeinated jujitsu Instagram community at caffeinated underscore jujitsu. Another update or an update is I am posting episodes now on Thursdays instead of Mondays. And honestly, it's just a posting podcast stat strategy, uh paying attention to when listeners have the chance to listen and download. And you know, I haven't given, I think this year a proper shout out to all of the continuous listeners that we have here on Caffeinated Jiu-Jitsu. I, you know, I've said this before when I launched the podcast, I had no clue uh if it would be successful or have any downloads. And honestly, it wasn't my focus. I just wanted to get on and talk about jujitsu because I love jujitsu. Um, but it it has received a lot of attention. I get a lot of emails, there's a lot of downloads. I it's just been an amazing journey to meet and connect with new new and exciting guests. And we've got more guests coming up this month and next month. So excited about that. Uh, just thank you so much for listening to this episode and all of the other episodes on Caffeinated Jiu-Jitsu. And remember, until next time, always keep your passion brewing.