Don't Catastrophize Your Life

Oh No, It's Going to Pop

About 2 weeks ago, I had maybe my worst scare on the BJJ mat.

I was attacking from side control. My partner timed my pressure, swept me to my back, and somewhere in the scramble my foot got caught in a bad position. My ankle rolled underneath me. I felt it going and my brain lit up.

"Oh no. It's going to pop."

I shouted in pain and rolled to my side.

My partner, to his credit, was off me immediately. He checked on me. He asked if I needed ice. He is a nice guy, I like rolling with him.

I got a few breaths in and told him yes, thank you, ice would be good.

The instructor made sure I was okay. Then the class did one more round of rolling while I lay on the mat with an ice pack wrapped around my left ankle, hoping it was not injured badly enough that I could not ride my motorcycle home.

I joked to myself, at least I can drive surface streets in first gear if I have to, but I would prefer not to.

Class ended. I had been resting there for maybe ten minutes. The ice was helping. The throbbing had calmed down.

My partner still looked worried, so I did what I always do when someone feels bad about something that happened during a roll.

I showed him my zipper scar.

I pulled up my rash guard and pointed at the scar that runs down the middle of my belly, where they opened me up and took my spleen out back in 1992.

I was sparring. I left my elbows out. I caught a well-timed hit to the floating ribs. The ribs did what ribs do and the spleen did not survive the encounter.

"You learn to keep your elbows in," I joked with him.

He laughed. We hugged. He went back to work. I told him I would see him next week.
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Today, as this newsletter goes out, I'm still nursing the ankle but it's doing much better, I've done a couple open mats and will start attending classes this week.

The Spleen and the Return

Here is the rest of that story.

I almost died on an operating table in 1992. The surgeons took my spleen out and I spent 2 days in the ICU recovering and a week total in the hospital.

To make matters worse, we were going through a recession in '92, when I got back to work, I was soon after laid off.

By the time I healed up, found another job and got my life back in order, I went back to the hapkido dojang to continue training.

People looked at me like I was crazy.

"You almost died," they would say.

"Yeah," I would reply. "But I didn't."

If I had let the spleen injury be the end, here is what I would have missed.

I would have missed teaching kids classes, where I learned more about myself and human nature than any book ever taught me.

I would have missed teaching adult classes, where I learned about communication and fear and resolve.

I would have missed the friendships I built over decades of training toward and achieving black belt ranks.

I would have missed being there at the end, in 2007, when my master and friend Bong Soo Han passed away.

All of that was on the other side of a ruptured spleen. All of it would have been lost if I had decided that one bad moment on the mat meant I should never step on the mat again.

The ankle tweak the other day is nothing compared to that. It is sore. It is stiff. It will heal.

And while it heals, I will still show up. I will observe class. I will learn. Because you can always learn even if you cannot get on the mat.

The Wiring You Inherited

There is a reason your brain goes straight to the worst case scenario.

It is not a design flaw.

It is a design feature.

The Stoics had a term for it: premeditatio malorum.

The premeditation of evils.

The practice of imagining the worst so you can prepare for it.

The people who worried about the bad things that could happen, who anticipated the famine and the raid and the winter that would not end, were the ones who stockpiled food and reinforced the walls and lived long enough to pass their genes along.

The people who sat around thinking everything would be fine, who assumed the universe would take care of them, who never imagined the worst because the worst was unpleasant to imagine, were the ones who got caught unprepared. They ended up dead. Or enslaved. Or an afterthought in the annals of history.

You are descended from the worriers AND the warriors.

Your brain is a machine that was built by millennia of ancestors who survived because they took threats seriously.

When your ankle rolls and something pops, your brain does not say "this is probably a minor sprain that will heal in a few days."

Your brain says "YOU MAY NEVER WALK AGAIN."

That is the wiring. It kept your ancestors alive. It is useful. But you can take it too far.

When the Signal Becomes the Problem

Here is the cascade.

I have watched it happen in my own head a thousand times.

The ankle tweaks. The brain fires.

And suddenly I am not thinking about the ankle. I am thinking about not being able to train tomorrow.

And if I cannot train tomorrow, maybe I cannot train next week.

And if I cannot train next week, maybe I lose all the progress I have made.

And if I lose all the progress, what was the point of the last 32 months.

And if I am going to keep getting injured, maybe I am too old for this.

And maybe it is time to quit.

The ankle tweak happened. The rest of that is fiction.

A story my brain told itself in the span of three seconds, based on wiring that was designed for a world where a twisted ankle could mean you could not hunt, could not gather, could not keep up with the tribe, and would probably die alone on the savannah.

We do not live in the jungle with tigers lurking, ready to pounce.

I can ride my motorcycle home in first gear.

I can ice my ankle and elevate it and take a day or two off.

I am not going to die of starvation because I missed a week of BJJ.

But the wiring does not know that. The wiring is ancient.

And if you let it, the wiring will take a minor setback and transform it into a reason to quit.

The obstacle is rarely as big as the story you tell yourself about the obstacle.

The Morning After

This morning I sat at my computer with my foot elevated.

It was sore and stiff when I got out of bed. After walking a bit, after a shower, after stretching it gently, it felt decent.

Not great. Decent.

But I am going to class. I am going to sit on the side and watch and learn.

I am going to see the techniques and hear the instruction and absorb what I can without putting weight on the ankle.

Because training is not just about what your body does. Training is about what your mind absorbs.

This is the difference between a setback and a stop sign.

A setback says: adjust.

A stop sign says: give up.

Most people cannot tell the difference.

When the ankle tweaked and my brain screamed "oh no, it's going to pop," that was the wiring doing its job.

The wiring warned me. The wiring got me to roll over and protect the joint.

The wiring did exactly what it was supposed to do.

What happened next was up to me.

The wiring wanted to spiral. The wiring wanted to catastrophize. The wiring wanted to run through every worst-case scenario between a sore ankle and never training again.

I let the wiring talk. Then I looked at the facts.

The ankle is sore. The ankle is not broken.

The ankle will heal. And when it heals, I will be back on the mat.

What Most People Do

Here is why so few people ever get a black belt.

Here is why so few people build successful businesses or write the book or learn the skill or do any of the things they say they want to do.

They hit a setback and they treat it like a verdict.

• The white belt gets smashed for six months and decides jiu jitsu is not for them
• The entrepreneur sends fifty cold emails and nobody responds and decides the business model does not work
• The student struggles with a technique and decides they are not athletic enough, not coordinated enough, not talented enough

They take a single data point and turn it into a conclusion about their entire capability.

The ankle tweak becomes "I am too old for this."

The spleen rupture becomes "training is too dangerous."

The setback becomes the story, and the story becomes the reason to stop.

The setback is information. What you do with it is character.

The ankle tweak told me something.

I had my near leg and knee pushing against his hip instead of kick-standing it out.

My base was narrow when it should have been wide.

That is a technical error. It is fixable.

The next time I am in side control against a partner who likes to time my pressure and sweep, I will have a wider base.

The ankle tweak was not a sign that I should quit jiu jitsu.

It was a lesson about base and balance and keeping my options open.

The spleen rupture in 1992 told me something too. Keep your elbows in. Protect your floating ribs.

Do not give a kick a clear path to the organs that keep you alive. That lesson cost me a spleen. It was an expensive lesson.

But it was a lesson, not a reason to walk away.

The Obstacle Is the Way

I have a belief that has carried me through a lot of hard moments.

The obstacles are not there to stop you.

The obstacles are there to show you how capable you are of overcoming them.

A life without obstacles would be a life without growth.

If nothing ever pushed back, you would never know what you were made of.

You would never develop the calluses, the resilience, the quiet confidence that comes from having been through something hard and come out the other side.

The ankle is an obstacle. It is not a large obstacle. It is a small one.

But the way you handle small obstacles is the way you handle large ones.

If you let a tweaked ankle convince you to quit, what happens when something genuinely difficult shows up?

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your training.

And the training is how you respond when things go wrong.

• Do you quit or do you adjust?
• Do you spiral or do you assess?
• Do you treat the setback as a wall or as information?

I have been training in martial arts since the mid-1980s.

I have been injured.

I have been frustrated.

I have been the worst person in the room more times than I can count.

I have had moments where I wondered if I should keep going.

Every single time, the obstacle turned out to be a lesson.

The hard part was not the obstacle. The hard part was staying calm enough to learn the lesson.

The Gremlins of Fear

I have a name for the voice that wants me to catastrophize.

The gremlins.

The gremlins are not evil.

They are not trying to sabotage me.

They are ancient wiring trying to keep me safe in a world where safety is rarely the actual issue.

The gremlins do not understand that a sore ankle is not a death sentence.

The gremlins do not understand that a failed cold email is not a verdict on my entire business.

The gremlins just know that something went wrong, and when something goes wrong, the protocol is to sound the alarm.

I have learned to listen to the gremlins without obeying them. They get a hearing. They get to make their case. And then I get to decide.

When I injured my ankle, the gremlins said: "Your ankle is ruined. You will never train again. You are too old for this. What were you thinking?"

The next morning, I looked at the ankle. I walked on it. I stretched it. I decided: no rolling today. Observe class. Learn. Come back when it is ready.

The gremlins were wrong.

They usually are.

But they will be back the next time something goes wrong, and I will listen to them again, and I will decide again.

That is the practice. Not silencing the fear. Moving forward in spite of it.

I am going to class today. I am not going to roll. I am going to sit on the side with my foot up and watch and learn.

When the ankle feels solid again, I will be back on the mat.

The setback is not a wall.

It is not a raging river you cannot cross.

It is a lesson about where to put your foot and how wide to make your base.

Learn the lesson. Adjust the position. Keep going.

The only way to lose is to let the gremlins win.

To let a tweaked ankle become a reason to quit. To let a ruptured spleen become the end of the story.

My story did not end in 1992 on an operating table.

It continued through decades of training and teaching and friendship and loss and growth. All of that was on the other side of the obstacle.

All of it was waiting for me to decide that the setback was not the end.

The ankle will heal. I will train again.

And when I do, I will keep my base wider and my elbows in.

The obstacles are there to show you how capable you are. Not to convince you otherwise.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Reset Drill

If today has gone badly:

Stop.
Take three breaths.
Start again.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman​

Why?

Because it's was one of my first and to this day, one of my favorite books, to learn about entrepreneurship, business and how to work on and with yourself and others.
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(But get the paperback version, not the audio or digital, you will thank me later.)

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck