Face The Fear
I was a bully when I was younger, mainly due to fear and insecurity.
I’ve done and said some things that embarrass and disgust me to this day—kids will be kids, right? But I don’t want to discuss bullying here, although if I mistreated you in the past, know that I am sorry.
I want to focus on fear and insecurity. Two crippling feelings that we all have dealt with at some point in our lives.
I feared confrontation, and I was insecure about my ability to handle myself in an altercation. I was also picked on when I was younger, so I began to develop an insensitive exterior. This combination led to me overcompensating and treating others poorly when I thought I could get away with it.
But over time, I realized that my actions and thinking were making me feel worse. Putting people down and laughing at the expense of others turned me into a shitty person. And my fear and insecurity only grew worse.
Because I wasn’t diagnosing the problem, I was just redirecting my energy elsewhere.
Time went on, and my behavior grew worse until finally, one day, I found myself standing in the lobby of the Gracie New Jersey Jiu Jitsu Academy, signing papers to learn Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. I was there to overcome my fear of confrontation and my insecurity. I was there to learn how to fight.
Months of training, drilling, sweating, and bleeding began to mold me. I started signing up for BJJ tournaments. I won a few matches. I lost some too.
But my problem still lingered.
One day I got a crazy idea. I was going to be an MMA fighter. I was going to fight another man in a cage for little money.
I trained my ass off, getting prepared to fight until I finally signed my first contract with an amateur MMA promotion, New Breed Fighters out of Atlantic City, NJ. I sold a bunch of tickets to friends and family. This was going to be my big breakthrough moment. This was going to fix my problems.
I’ll save you the details, but can you guess how the fight went?
I lost. Not terribly, but I lost. I was crushed.
But not enough to not sign up for another one. So that’s what I did - I reached back out to the promoter a few weeks later and asked for another opportunity. That opportunity presented itself a couple of months after my initial fight, and this time I was offered an opponent with more experience and at a much lighter weight class. I’d have to cut 17 pounds in 3 weeks for the fight.
No problem, I’ll take it!
Fast forward—I got my ass kicked. And in front of more friends and family. How bad did that suck? Pretty bad. That’s when my hopes of becoming a fighter ended.
It’s not all bad, though, as those experiences taught me some invaluable lessons about life.
I’ve learned that there’s no better way to deal with fear than to face it head-on. You can’t dance around fear; it will always be there. You have to grab ahold of it and make best friends with fear. I might not have won my fights, but by forcing myself to jump into the deep end and fight in a cage, I was able to quiet down some of my fear of confrontation. The many nights of training and preparing increased my competence and helped quell my insecurity. The outcomes of the fights weren’t so important as the sting of the losses began to subside. What was more important was that I put myself in the most uncomfortable situation that I could at the time, and I showed up. I faced the fear and I survived.
I also learned that overcoming fear and insecurity requires ongoing maintenance. What I mean is that sometimes those feelings persist, despite your desire or actions to conquer them. Just because you addressed your fear and insecurity one time doesn’t mean that your work is finished, and you can check a box. It will come back, and you will find yourself where you were. So it’s a good idea to subject yourself to your fears often to build the strongest foundation that you can. That way, when something frightful comes your way, you are better prepared to handle it.
Face the fear.
