Letters from Helsinki – Fight day

Helsinki, September 24, 2017

It’s Sunday morning here in the great Finland, and soon I will be heading to the Espoo Metro Areena, where I have a date with my longtime buddy Sanae Kikuta.

On Friday night, I was chatting with a group of friends on a WhatsApp group, and they asked me what I was doing.

I joked: “I am alone here; everybody is inside their room, afraid of tomorrow.”

I remember I was very young and was invited to speak at a college with specialists in their fields.

They put us on a stage; the curtain was closed, and they were going to open the curtain in a minute.

I was extremely nervous.

On that particular moment, I remember thinking:

“Why am I nervous?”

Then I start talking to myself:

“Nobody in the world can have the knowledge or master the subject I am going to talk about better than I do. I am the best in the world on this. Why am I nervous?”

So when they opened the curtain, I was completely relaxed.

And afterward, many people came to me to say I was the best speaker of the night.

All of this confidence comes from training hard and then understanding that the competition is nothing more than a test.

It’s like when you study math and next thing you see you’re doing a test to check how sharp your knowledge is.

So why be nervous?

In truth, I hope that in a few hours from now I face a Kikuta in his best technical shape ever, so this test is worth all the sweating and thinking we put in on those blue and gray mats.

See you at the arena.

Renzo Gracie

P.S.1: You can find the “fight day” and the “competition mindset” videos in module 17 of “Renzo Gracie: Mastering Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” the online course at Gallerr Academy that has a special $30 price until midnight today.  [UPDATE] Offer extended until midnight of this Friday, September 29.

P.S. 2: If you enroll now, you will not only be able to watch 225 videos containing my knowledge, but also participate in a raffle for the rash guard I’m wearing today, signed by me.