Choose a Martial Art Don’t fight who you are; Reveal it!

Unless you are a parent choosing a martial art for a young child, in which case I would recommend Judo (because it is based on balance and has traditional elements of respect and discipline, greatly needed in new generations), when choosing a martial art to practice, I would suggest first assessing your personality type. The same goes when choosing a job or career path.

Firstly, I would like to make a distinction I personally draw between martial arts and fighting sports: martial arts are composed of a more traditional set of moves that prioritize the right move execution, whereas fighting sports pick up elements from martial arts but open them up to interpretation, aimed at defeating your opponent by inflicting harm on him. A comparable example would be the difference between classical ballet and break dance or hip hop.

BJJ would be exactly in the middle of these two spectrums. It is a martial art with traditional moves that are thousands of years old, but also a fighting sport/system adopted by US navy seals and marines as the main base for their hand-to-hand combat training.

The key to your success with BJJ depends on how your martial art matches your personality. For example, if you are a technically oriented kind of person you will probably enjoy a traditional martial art like Karate. If you are a very charismatic and strong-willed person, you might choose a fighting sport like boxing or MMA. In the first case, it is only your technical knowhow that will get you score points, especially if you are doing Katas (when a Karate practitioner performs a series of punches and kicks in the air). In the second case, your “aura” might intimidate your opponent more than your technique, and you might win more because of your ability to look scary. This is by no means diminishing one approach or the other, as both require dedication and knowhow. I am just trying to push the limits to uncover the differences at the extremes.

Another great advantage of BJJ is that, because it does not involve strikes, you can always go against an opposing partner giving his one hundred per cent effort to beat you.

This requires a very high level of confidence and a very healthy ego, given the first year or so you are always tapping out, thus losing against everyone. If your ego is not in the right place, it is humiliating. Most people quit in the first months or years because of this. If you want to improve you have to go against people who will crush you. You will have to tap on time or get injured or choked unconscious.

On the other hand, as I often say, my best friends are people that try to break my limbs and choke me unconscious. You are literally placing your well-being and your life in the hands of your opponent. This is why if I ever had to go to war, I know I can count on my BJJ friends, not so much because of their fighting skills but because we have basically trusted each other with our lives. I wish we could have that level of partnership within organisations. ?

Practical application:?

I believe that my career and industry choices very much reflect my character at the moment of such choices. I would say the same about the choices I have made about martial arts. My life, and consequently my life choices, have been eclectic. I started with Judo, then went to Kung Fu, influenced by Bruce Lee’s movies, then started with fighting sports like Full-contact, Kickboxing and finally a professional four-year career in Muay Thai.

As a kid, I was active and impulsive with a strong personality. This is why I chose those sports where you have to endure hard training, painful blows, and intimidate your opponent with your dominant character. We are talking about the first years of my life from six to twenty-years-old. These sports disciplined and channeled who I was, and am, but mainly they revealed what was already there.

My initial career with Swedish Match was also like those martial art choices. I quickly changed roles, countries, divisions and very soon, at twenty-six years of age, got my first managing director role running a country of which I knew nothing about: Mexico, a hard, difficult, corrupt country, and an operation that was in trouble with losses and low sales. I did not land the managing director role because of my vast experience but because of my strong personality, fearless approach, leadership command and my openness towards people.

As I progressed in life, and particularly after moving to Russia, I became more experienced and calmer. I found more interest in reading and educating myself, and understood that there is always much more to any particular situation than we initially see. I became more sophisticated and so did the roles I took on, demanding that I acquire more technical knowledge as I had done within the real estate and industrial automation business. My martial art choices followed this path too and led me to BJJ, which requires not only personality but more technical skills blended with a good understanding of your areas of strength and weakness.

I do understand my life is not the most typical and average life, yet if you are reading this book there is a good chance that your life is more similar to mine than the lives of most people.

How do you choose your career path? What kind of personality do you manifest today? What would you like to change in your life and how could your career choice help you achieve that change? How comfortable would you be choosing something that does not reflect who you are today but can drive you towards who you want to be? Or do you prefer to choose a job that fits your personality today if you do not see the need to change it?