{"id":4857,"date":"2020-02-23T16:49:04","date_gmt":"2020-02-23T22:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4857"},"modified":"2020-02-23T16:49:16","modified_gmt":"2020-02-23T22:49:16","slug":"thoughts-on-losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4857","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts On Losing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I competed in a jiu jitsu tournament in San Diego. I was coming off a loss at No-Gi Worlds a few months ago. My body and mind have been in a weird funk since then, I&#8217;m not sure due to what exactly. I had a flu for about 2 weeks which messed up my training a bit. I entered my first match with extreme nerves and lack of confidence. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/meditating-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-4858\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a pic of me trying to calm my adrenaline down before the match. I do an abbreviated version of a Kundalini breath meditation I learned a few years ago from my friend Myla. <\/p>\n<p>So I went into the match believing I was going to lose. This is pretty common for me in all the matches I&#8217;ve experienced so far except for maybe two times. It takes me about 30 seconds of feeling out the opponent before I start believing in myself. In this particular match it took me about this long to get some confidence. In contrast to this I was the first to score points and I was winning the match until the last 30 seconds when he shot a desperate takedown that landed us in the crowd and chairs. In the moment he shot, I had a lapse in self belief and I didn&#8217;t properly defend the takedown. It&#8217;s almost as if I felt too much pressure to secure the win, and the thought of losing was a relief. Or maybe that I got so close to winning a really grueling match, and I began to lose confidence that I could hold on to my lead. <\/p>\n<p>After the loss I laid down for about 7 or 8 minutes from pure exhaustion. My eyes were on fire and felt like they were popping out like in Total Recall. I didn&#8217;t want to fight anymore. I was so depressed about dropping the ball in the last 30 seconds that I wanted to go home, but my buddy Arun convinced me I had to keep going. I had a second match which was even more depressing. Within the first minute of the match, I put my opponent exactly where I wanted to be, which is called a &#8220;leg entanglement&#8221;. Basically that means I was in my favorite position to potentially break his ankle or knee (unless he taps of course). Against people of my experience I feel extremely confident in this position. However in this match I was so exhausted and fighting off insecurities from my loss that I was not completely present and I allowed myself to be vulnerable. He caught my heel and I tapped out. <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CX4L9H6l7e8\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Sorry it&#8217;s sideways. I don&#8217;t know how to change that. <\/p>\n<p>ANYWAY so I wanted to talk about losing under high pressure, and why I have this voice in my head that doesn&#8217;t believe in me. I&#8217;m not sure what this voice is, or where exactly it comes from. I think it&#8217;s possible that in the case of jiu jitsu, I don&#8217;t really see myself as a fighter. I see myself as an artist who moonlights in the world of submission grappling. That could be part of it. However, the guy I was beating for 4 1\/2 minutes ended up winning the tournament. So that tells me I am actually pretty good and that the evidence runs contrary to my lack of faith. <\/p>\n<p>On the drive home, my buddy told me that this shadow voice in me was a demon of sorts and that I needed to acknowledge it out loud so that I could identify it and eventually push it out of my life like an exorcism.  I guess that&#8217;s partially why I&#8217;m writing this post. I don&#8217;t know if y&#8217;all will find it interesting or not, but I think it&#8217;s helpful for me to write about it. I think I will give this demon a name. If you have a suggestion for a name please let me know since I&#8217;m bad at naming. My friend told me to tell the demon that they are having their time right now, but their time is limited and will be over soon. <\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, another reason why I compete is to redefine losing. Worse comes to worse, I will keep competing and losing more than I win. I view this as almost like a healthy punishment. I don&#8217;t like losing, but I can learn to lose a lot while still thinking highly of myself. This is a mental practice that has a multitude of applications. One direct correlation is the way I feel about my experience with television executives. I have the same tendency to expect that they won&#8217;t understand or like my ideas, which stems back probably to my relationships with teachers in middle and high school. I believe this affects the way I behave in pitch rooms and has maybe cost me some projects from getting green lit. Who knows for sure, but I can at least recognize my own energy as being self defeating when it comes to dealing with gate keepers and people in positions of authority. This is the reason why I&#8217;ve often preferred working on my own self contained projects. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I competed in a jiu jitsu tournament in San Diego. I was coming off a loss at No-Gi Worlds a few months ago. My body and mind have been in a weird funk since then, I&#8217;m not sure due to what exactly. I had a flu for about 2 weeks which messed up my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4861,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}