Over the last few months we’ve covered quite a bit about goal-setting and about the journey of Jiu-Jitsu. From challenging our fears and insecurities, to setting our own personal goals and practice schedules, to maximizing exposure to long-time black belts. Today I want to put one more piece of the puzzle in place. It’s about the black belt mindset. I would also like to throw out a personal disclaimer: as a fellow student, I am sharing my journey and thoughts. I have no true answers–only thoughts. As a reader, feel free to take them or leave them. It has been, at the least, helpful to my journey to put my thoughts to paper; at best, perhaps helpful to one of you too.
As we hear often, having a black belt mindset is really about having a white belt mindset: always willing to learn, always striving for more, always remaining humble, and simply never giving up. After all, “A black belt is a white belt that never quit,” right? I fully believe in this mantra, but I also think it is important to reflect on this just a bit more deeply, or take it one step further. This next step is something that lifelong practitioners may take for granted or come to realize along the way, but students can sometimes lose sight of. As a society, we are so focused on accomplishment and reward that it can become its own hurdle. Focusing too intently on a specific accomplishment can limit our ability to reach new levels of success that perhaps were unknown or unseen when we first plotted the path.
Ultimately, the idea is that a belt is just a belt, and the journey is the true reward. That is a fact. In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu especially, the level of commitment needed to obtain a black belt guarantees quite a humbling and arduous journey. Students of all levels should feel honored that, so far, the BJJ black belt has been resistant to the commercial watering-down that has plagued some arts. Receiving a black belt is quite an accomplishment. However, I try very hard to think of it as a milestone and not the accomplishment.
Wholeness is an Aspiration; Not a Destination
The reason is simple. There is no finality in BJJ. To keep our art honest, we need only to look at the long-time black belts in and outside of our networks that inspire us. You know what they don’t do? They don’t earn a black belt and move on to a new journey. Yet we see this throughout the martial arts world. A student works their butt off to earn their black belt. Feeling accomplished the new black belt takes a break, and then just kind of disappears. I stumbled upon a very interesting article regarding this feeling here.
It is understandable. The journey to black belt can take, on average, between 8-10 years of fairly serious study. In those 8-10 years, there are ups and downs, growth and plateaus, set-backs and maybe injuries; let’s face it, even while getting into the best shape of our lives, it can simultaneously put our bodies through the wringer. Furthermore, we have other goals in life, and after reaching an accomplishment that took so much time, energy, and focus, it is also easy to say to ourselves, “Great job! What’s next?”
Well, if we ask any of the long-time black belts, they’ll tell you: “More training. More Jiu-Jitsu.” That is “what’s next.” This is what I call the “black belt that never quit” mentality. To the black belt that never quits, earning the black belt was simply the milestone of being accepted into a top school. The 8-10 years leading up to it was grade school and high school. It simply sets us up with the right knowledge base to begin the true study into mastery. This is when true learning can begin.
To put this in perspective: this is why there are 10 degrees of the black belt. Few people have the time to get through the first five. It takes decades (plural)! I hope that for all of us, one day, deep into our mastery studies, we look back at the time it took to get to the black belt level as the warm-up and the smaller percentage of time we have put into our craft. Safe travels and remember to embrace the grind!
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