Jocko Willink recently invited one of his children, Rana Willink, to appear on an episode of his podcast and at one point the conversation turned to their relationship with Jiu-Jitsu. It’s no secret that Willink is passionate about the sport and he trains in it as often as he possibly can, so originally he tried to share that passion with his kids. Jiu-Jitsu is undoubtedly beneficial for children and it might seem as though pushing them to take part in it is actually a good thing, but Willink was able to look back on his approach a little more critically than that.
First of all, he was honest about the fact that he might have overdone it from the start:
“I imposed Jiu-Jitsu on all my kids in a big way and when I say in a big way, I mean 7 days a week.”
Jocko Willink went on to explain that it wasn’t even just one session a day, and he believes that was the reason that his children eventually stopped doing Jiu-Jitsu altogether:
“This is because of me, because I was just so passionate about Jiu-Jitsu and you guys were training every day. You were, on Saturdays and Sundays, it was like 5 hours in the gym… You go and you do the striking class, you do the grappling class, and then I would go do class, and then I would do open mat. So there’s 5 hours. This was on a Saturday, every Saturday and Sunday.”
He was also able to reflect on his approach towards competition for children, and how that also contributed to the problem:
“The other thing that I did that was not smart is I would make you guys compete. That’s not bad enough, make you compete and then put you up a weight class, put you up a belt level, put you up an age group. So you’re going with kids that are more experienced, heavier, and older than you.”
Rana Willink has since returned to Jiu-Jitsu and even recently been promoted to purple belt, but Jocko still believes that he could have had a better approach to the sport with his children. He’s been open about adults learning to deal with losing in the past, but children obviously operate much differently to them. For children, losing can be very difficult to process:
“I 100% in my mind thought I was doing you kids the biggest favor in the world and just like ‘oh man, imagine how good they’re getting right now!’ and here’s the reality of the situation: You go, you enter the tournament, you go with someone that’s bigger, stronger, heavier, older than you. You get smashed, it’s not fun, you get defeated. You get humiliated because all fighting combat sports and all single opponent sports, where it’s just you and another person, there’s no team and it’s all you. So it’s humiliating, and there’s an added component that in Jiu-Jitsu you have to admit that this person is a superior predator than you are.”
He’s clearly learned from the mistakes he made when introducing his children to Jiu-Jitsu and now Jocko Willink was able to share some advice for anyone finding themselves in a similar position to him:
“We think that our kid, that we can make him into the world champion like bro, chill. You know who’s going to make the kid into a world champion? The kid. The kid is. So give them some space, give them some room.”
The full episode of the Jocko podcast with one of his children, Rana Willink, was uploaded to their official YouTube channel:
