The Professor Blue-belt Phenomenon
Why people explain things to each other and the various reasons why it gets annoying.
It’s painful to give a sincere explanation to an unperceptive audience. Most skilled BJJ practitioners don’t even talk to newcomers because it’s very rare that somebody shows up with a “coach-able attitude”. The longer you stay in the game, the more traumatized you become by bad listeners and the less you want answer questions, let alone offer unsolicited advice. That’s where the “professor blue-belts” come in.
Professor Blue-belt is the term for people with 1–3 years of training who enjoy “explaining” jiu jitsu more than they like training. They are mostly tolerated, but their loud annoying voices reverberate across the mats. They often indirectly annoy serious trainees more than the person receiving the explanation. They don’t seem to mind if anyone actually listens as long as they can talk. My impression is that the talking makes them feel good, and the effect of the talking is more or less irrelevant to them.
Except for my love of physical exertion, I know full well I fit the psychological profile for one of these bastards and I’m scared to death of turning into one. I’m a single man in my late 20’s, I sometimes have a beard, and I like to write essays. Knowing the danger, I ignore all beginners and respond to questions with the most abbreviated answers possible. As with all virtuous behavior, this practice protects my sanity and my soul. Any more than an abbreviated answer and I’d be out of my depth anyway.
Curiously, this arrogant over-explanation reflex seems to have social value. When I’ve trained martial arts in cultures where men don’t stand around and second guess each other’s grilling technique, the lack of over enthusiastic mid-level practitioners made learning hard. In Asia, the line between student and teacher is so clearly defined, that if you miss a simple instruction and the teacher doesn’t bother hitting your with a ruler, you‘re screwed. When information is precious, five annoying explanations and one good one are better than no explanations at all.
Unlike many “personal stories” found in essays, the following is “an actually true story about something which really happened to me”, which means it’s only tangentially related to my overall point:
A few years ago, I was rolling with a female whitebelt when she suddenly burst into tears. I couldn’t understand what was wrong and my main emotion was frustration that her crying was going to make me look bad. I certainly wouldn’t think much of a man who made beginners cry during routine sparring.
I said “come on, tell me what’s wrong” in the kindest tone of voice I could manage. I was worried she wouldn’t say, thus leaving the door open to the suspicion that I had molested her, but finally she said “If I can’t even beat you, what the hell good am I?” I was considerably relieved to hear her say that.
I gave her my standard line for these situations, “Come on, I’ve put more time into this than you. I could be a fluent Spanish speaker by now but instead I chose to earn this Blue-belt.” She gave me a halfhearted smile and we went back to work. She never enjoyed Jiu Jitsu after than and eventually she quit. The fact that she quit made me very sad. BJJ practitioners understand how sad it made me.
The tragedy is deeper than you might think. The fact that she was rolling with me at that moment, the fact that she wasn’t making progress, and the that fact that she was getting frustrated were all punishments for being a bad listener. She wasn’t performing badly because she was “bad inside” in some vague sense. She had fundamentally misunderstanding about what she was supposed to be doing, and she wasn’t listening to polite attempts to change her perspective.
I was rolling with her because all the women in the class refused to. I say this admiringly: The woman was built like a tank, 5'3" 200lbs and naturally muscular. Her approach to grappling was to heave her bulk onto her opponent until she found herself in a favorable position. It was not the kind of thing which even a strong man could passively accept without risking injury. That’s why I was constantly moving and deflecting her in a frustrating way.
She was a nice woman and didn’t sign up to hurt people. She wanted to learn martial arts. Presumably, she knew that the benefit of martial arts is that they work so efficiently that a weaker person can defeat a stronger person using proper technique. One by one we all tried to impress this on her, but stopped when she said things like “okay I get it” so quickly after we had finished speaking that it was obvious she’d been waiting to say it since we started talking. We gave up, because we cared about what we were saying and didn’t want to waste our breath if nobody wanted to hear it.
The only solution was to pair her up with me to keep her from doing damage, and hope that she someday her desire to learn overcame the natural annoyance we all feel when receiving advice. It didn’t work, which is tragic because she clearly had the potential to be very good. The people who hate losing quit the most, but they also win the most.
I really wish I could have said something to make her stay in the sport. The better I like a training partner, harder it is to resist trying to help them. Sometimes it’s not possible. No matter how much you like someone, you have to balance how useful your advice is against how irritating it will be to hear. Humans instinctively know the value of Knowledge, so we share information as way to help each other and as a way to appear useful. Nobody likes a guy who’s just “trying to look useful”.
Insecure people reflexively share information in order to raise their social status, not to degrade the person they are annoying. This behavior is intolerable in the hierarchical environment of a Tae Kwon Do class, because in that context social status can only be changed by a decision from above. In traditional martial arts, exchange of information is heavily regulated, and any change of status effects everyone’s relative position in the chain of command. In an egalitarian Jiu Jitsu class, we usually put up with it. The extra flow of information is worth the annoying droning noises. The utility of Jiu Jitsu’s free exchange of ideas speak for itself. Unsolicited advice is a net positive, unless it gets out of hand.
Advice implies that the listener is inferior to the speaker, in as much as they have made a mistake which the speaker is in a position to correct. Even when this is true, sound advice is the unpleasant opposite of flattery. While Confucius and few saints are rumored to have appreciated instruction, most of us simply tolerate it like medicine. Just as with medicine, criticism is most tolerable when it is most needed, and easiest to endure when we feel it doing us good.
Pointless criticism is extremely annoying. It tastes just as bad as constructive criticism but also wastes time. Occasionally, one of these Professor Blue-belts will go rogue, and start running his mouth endlessly about nothing. At this point, it’s the larger community’s job to reign him or her in. We have ways of doing controlling the problem, but what causes the behavior?
As I’ve mentioned, there are three factors which prompt explanation 1) The perception of a need for instruction, 2) Personal insecurity, and 3) affection towards target of the explanation. When the presence of these triggers overwhelms a person’s sense of decency the result is an endless stream of disruptive words which take away from training time, and add nothing. When this occurs, the offending party is taken aside and gently reminded of what he is doing, most of the time he snaps out of his possessed state as if exiting a bad dream.
These corrections are given compassionately where possible. The typical offender is using explanations to demonstrate that he has value despite constantly getting his ass kicked. Another type, is an older practitioner who is trying to relive his youth through a protege and using the break in the action to catch his breath at the same time. The worst cases involve young men overwhelmed be Eros. Given the power of the enchantment, you might not be able to break the spell, but you can still moderate their behavior using threats and violence.
Jiu Jitsu has many taboos against inter-gender interaction. We touch each other a lot so it’s important to keep everything businesslike. The community consensus is that instructors are not allowed to date their own students. This is definitely not the case in Karate and TKD schools. We also have a mores against Mansplaining, which exists as a bulwark against the natural weaknesses which prompt compulsive explanation.
Beautiful women are likeable, and the more you like a woman the more you feel insecure. We can’t have that emotion creating a feedback loop drives young women away from our beloved sport. Use caution! For the first six months, limit your conversation to “Yes. No. and Ow, your hurting me.”. Your primal urges have no place on the mats. Try a bouldering gym, if you’re feeling lonely.
Martial arts is a harsh and lonely path, and we’re keeping it that way because “Jiu Jitsu is for everybody”.
