Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort (and other lessons)

I've trained at a Mixed Martial Arts gym for six years or so, and as many practitioners will tell you, the journey for me has been as much about mental growth as physical skill building, with applications beyond the dojo.  This is a post about teams and team health, in business & beyond.

Note: In training, I have a personal focus on ground fighting (as opposed to striking - getting punched in the head is bad for you), so my examples will be from that viewpoint.

Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort

The first day at an MMA gym goes something like this: You don your workout attire and attend a trial class, not quite sure what to expect.  The first half of class, you might learn a Jiu Jitsu (submission wrestling) technique and drill the technique with a partner.  The second half of class might be live "rolling" (wrestling).  You choose a partner, wrestle for a 3 - 5 minute round until the bell rings, choose a new partner during a 1 minute break, and repeat for 30 minutes or so.

Immediately, you feel like a fish out of water.  Ground fighting is highly technical and often counterintuitive.  No-one is comfortable on their first day.  

At least some of the time, you will have someone on top of you, with no skills to get them off.  And, if they are inexperienced (or a jerk), they might be making you suffer their weight.  It's a very uncomfortable place to be.  You may even catch yourself going into flight, fight, or freeze mode.

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Training at a fight gym is exactly that - training for a fight. And, a real fight is the most primitive form of disagreement, each person trying to impose their will on the other by brute force.  It engages you at a deeply emotional level, way down in the lizard brain.  For that reason, training can be excellent therapy.  Call it "being present, enforced by the fact that someone is trying to choke you".  It makes you deal with raw emotions (fear, anger, panic, exhaustion, etc.) and at the same time, engage your higher brain because of the technical complexity of some of the movements involved.

Speaking of those technical movements, after you've trained for a few weeks, you will start building a skill set.  At first, this will be just enough to fend off a few submissions.  You might still be stuck on the bottom, but you know enough to avoid being choked.  This is where growth starts to happen.  You are still uncomfortable, but you are safe.  Think about that juxtaposition for a minute.  Your brain has to reconcile discomfort with simultaneous safety.  Here you slowly start to become comfortable with discomfort.

In my opinion, learning this is an essential personal skill in any team where honest feedback is given.  Note: This is not an excuse for dog-eat-dog cultures.  Keep reading...

Notice that the person on bottom is blocking the hip & head of their opponent.  Uncomfortable but safe.

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Trust as a Baseline

If this was where things ended, training would be a pretty miserable experience.  But, what makes a healthy dojo a profound place is the people.  What you'll find is that when the bell rings to end the round, the person who was trying to choke you 30 seconds ago is giving you tips on how to defend against that attack in the future.  It is iron sharpening iron. The end game isn't winning a round; it is growing your skillset in the long term, which means helping one another along the journey.  At the end of the class, the group will be sitting around swapping jokes & shooting the breeze.  These are friendships formed in (practicing) conflict.

That last sentence is important.  MMA training involves practicing techniques that if taken to their full extent can kill or maim a person.  So, the safety of your training partners is paramount.  People who do not take that seriously are quickly rooted out.  The result is a group of people who train hard, but place their training partner's safety above winning a round.

A healthy team provides a place where feedback (even critical feedback) comes from a place of mutual trust, even friendship.  Otherwise, it will be seen as an attack.  Any team will inevitably have conflict, and if your team doesn't have that trust, you've already lost.

 

Humility

When you step into any MMA gym worth its salt, there are some really talented people to be found. Some with a degree of natural talent, but all with countless hours of blood, sweat, & tears to build their skillset. Until you've tried it for yourself, it is hard to express the ability gap between a new person and a regular.

Let's put it this way, as a newbie wrestling with my coach - a professional fighter - I could be giving it 100%, everything I had, and he could tap me while carrying on a full conversation with someone on the bench! It took a couple years before I gave him enough of a challenge that he even had to pay attention.  I may never tap him, but if I can frustrate his attempts to tap me, I call it a good day.  Even as an accomplished fighter, he is low key and humble, and in that, sets the tone for the dojo.  Humility is central.  Stack your team with highly talented, humble people and practice it yourself.

 

Developing an Immune System

Regulars at an MMA gym tend to be a protective bunch.  In my dojo, newbies are treated with a lot of respect. No-one is allowed to attempt submissions on them until they build some basic skills.  Similarly, experienced people & coaches are looking out for smaller or less experienced people to ensure they are not bullied.  I wouldn't train anywhere this were not the case.

Occasionally, someone comes to a class who doesn't respect these boundaries.  We have had the guy for whom our dojo is just a formality on the way to his inevitable stardom in the UFC (he just needs a few fights to get ready), the guy who brags that he has had X number of street fights, etc.  For example, we had a guy come in one day who had wrestled in high school.  When it came time to roll, he found out quickly that he was not in high school wrestling anymore, and by the end of the first round, he was so frustrated he pounded his fists on the floor.

In subsequent rounds, he chose female partners that were smaller than he was and threw his weight around.  He was taken aside by the coach, but it persisted.  Nothing more needed to be said.  Some of the regulars exchanged glances and went out of their way to partner with him over the next several rounds.  He ended up having a bad day.  Note: If that seems harsh, remember that people's physical safety is at stake. Oh, and not to worry - nothing was injured but his ego.  Even in that situation, respect was shown.

I call this an immune system, and your team needs one.  And, it shouldn't be left to management or HR.  Every team member should be willing to defend & support anyone targeted unfairly.  Be an ally.

Let me qualify this.  It must be said that, when someone is difficult to work with, of course they should be given empathy & the benefit of the doubt. It may just be that they are in the middle of a stressful life event or some other issue which can be worked through. Letting someone go should be a last resort; this is someone's livelihood after all.  

That said, there are some people who will always be a source of chaos in the team.  I have seen teams let that person fester for years.  Keeping someone who should be let go is a sin on par with letting someone go who should have been kept.  Keeping a toxic person will destroy the team.  If they stay, others will soon leave - probably people you don't want to lose.

Toxic people are often very difficult to spot until the damage is done, sometimes years later.  I highly recommend Dr. Ramani's channel on narcissism and the book 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life for tips on spotting other personality disorders.

Conclusion

Those are a few of the things I have learned at the dojo so far.  I hope there will be many more lessons in the future, and that these speak to you also.  Cheers.