Recognising patterns, and perhaps more importantly, inconsistencies, can change your life both on and off the mats. Allow me to elaborate:

Do you notice the patterns in your BJJ? Are you constantly getting armbarred, choked or swept in the same manner or from the same position on the mat? If you look at your game, you will inherently find that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts…. so what are your “effective 20%” techniques and what 20% of techniques are you susceptible to? This 80:20 rule is called the Pareto rule so if you are a nerd like me, go look it up.

Now we can also look at these ‘patterns’ from a non-physical point of view in students’ attitudes on and off the mats. The only students who have ever disappointed me were those who had inflated egos and didn’t notice the negative patterns and cycles that they were playing out in their own lives. Constantly allowing their over inflated ego’s to alienate their fellow training brothers and sisters is of course the most common example.

Now for the fun stuff: Inconsistencies. If you have done the basic mental math of monitoring patterns in your BJJ or elsewhere in your life, you can then begin to notice outliers. From a life aspect, I have applied this to exercise, business, investments, coaching, parenting, diet and more. Every business owner knows that 80% of their problems come from 20% of their customers or a number even more extreme than that! Inconsistencies are the 20% of your techniques that tend to account for 80% of your outcomes.

The grand trick, however, is to then perform your “effective 20%” techniques 100% of the time! Now, this is not some life coaching advice nonsense, this is a basic rule applied to nearly everything in this Universe and is almost impossible to apply to our whole lives. However, we can start in our own BJJ games. Work your “effective 20” techniques offensively and seek to add to that 20 whilst noticing which techniques are working for you! Then just run with it……….. have fun.