I used to put pressure on myself to be the best in the room when I was teaching.

I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I was never the best. But it mattered to me because I felt like if I was going to teach students, I should be able to back it up when it came time to spar.

I’m glad I let go of that before life did it for me.

I got lucky.

At the time, I was teaching at one school and training at another. That helped. It gave me a clear separation between teacher mode and student mode. If I had only been teaching and training at one school, I think it would’ve been different.

My student mode days were full of training. The room was full of higher belts. I got humbled a lot. I got humbled often enough that I stopped needing to feel like the best one when I was in teacher mode somewhere else.

That was good for me.

Because life is going to change things. You can see some of it coming, but not all of it.

You get older. You get hurt. It takes longer to recover. Life gets different. Maybe it’s marriage. Maybe kids. Maybe a career change. Maybe you’re teaching more, sleeping less, carrying more stress. Even if you care just as much as before, it gets harder to put the same time and energy into your own training.

That’s just part of staying with it long enough.

Being a good teacher and being the best guy in the room are not the same thing.

Of course, it helps when a teacher can really do jiu-jitsu. That matters. But over time, you see that teaching is its own skill. You get better at noticing what matters. You get better at explaining things simply. You start to understand what different students need.

And the window where someone is really high level in both at the same time is usually smaller than people think.