One of my teachers once said to me, “roll with empathy.” That’s stuck with me for ten years.

You can feel bad for someone even while you’re the one making them feel bad. You know what it’s like to be stuck under someone’s side control. The weight. The tightness. That moment where you start thinking about surviving instead of escaping.

When you’ve spent enough time in that spot, you start to read it in others. You feel the difference between tension that’s building toward something and tension that’s just panic. You know when someone is about to bridge because you’ve bridged from there. You know when they’ve given up looking for the underhook because you’ve given up on it too.

That’s empathy. And it makes you better at jiu-jitsu.