Hello, I'm Professor Robert, and today we're going to talk to you about how not to be a victim. You know, we all know what a victim is. Somebody that something happens to them. They suffer loss or injury as a result of something from somebody else or something, sometimes from the choices they make. Today, we're going to talk about how to not have a victim mindset.

You know, the mindset where somebody who's always giving up responsibility, you know, they're always saying, it's not my fault. They made me do it. I can help, I can't help it,

What's the opposite mindset? The opposite mindset is that of somebody who takes responsibility. Somebody who really thinks about what they're doing, what happened, how it happened, why it happened, why did it happen to me? What did I do to make it happen to me? When you change your mindset from being a victim to really looking at what happened and why it happened, you can see that the more you make good choices, the better you're going to be.

The less likely you're going to be a victim. You know, it starts out early in childhood, when parents are raising kids, when you have little kids, we have to let them fail. We have to let them go through the process of problem solving. Even when they're kids, when they're playing with their toys at two years old, and you see two kids in there working and playing with toys and and they're fighting over them.

If you jump in, every time something little happens, you're taking away the ability to solve problems. And when kids can't solve problems, they get frustrated. If you jump in and you take the toy and you make it all good for them. They're not learning. They're just going to be there going through the motions of, somebody is always going to bail them out.

And when that happens, you're building the mindset of a victim. You're building a mindset that somebody else is going to take care of it. It's somebody else's responsibility to take care of me.

We have to let kids fail. Even when they start in sports at a young age, so many times, parents are out there right in the middle of what happens with kids. Kids on a baseball field, they have a bad game. And next thing you know, the parents talking to them at the end of the game, the kid may have had a bad game themselves, and they cost them the win.

But the parents, they'll lean on it and say, oh, the refs were bad today. Your pitcher wasn't, he  wasn't up to par. And so they take that responsibility away from the kid, to make the kid feel better. Well, rather than talking to the kid by saying, what? What did you do? You know, how was it today?

What could you do better next time? When you teach these lessons? When they're young, they're going to take these lessons, you know, when they get older and they're going to look to learn and grow. If you don't let them struggle, they're going to struggle later on in life. And it's because you didn't give them the tools.

Team sports is amazing. It's a great place for kids to learn how to grow. I played many sports starting at a very young age. I was very fortunate. My parents started me in soccer, baseball, football. I played so many, you know, wrestled. And so I had a great foundation for sports. I had some of the best coaches ever.

And they were big influence on my life. And it really helped me learn a lot as an adult. As I said, you know, with five boys and a girl, I've coached 35 plus teams in my life. So I've had a lot of experience in it. And so sports are great for helping kids grow. Team sports, however, has some, some downfalls, too.

When it comes to what we're talking about today, you can blame, you know, results on anybody else on the team. If you choose to have a victim mindset, you can blame the pitcher when the game goes bad because he didn't have a good game. You can blame the catcher. You can blame the umpires. You can blame the rest.

And you can do everything you can not to take responsibility. And if you have parents that believe it or that start to say the same things, you start to believe it. So all of a sudden, now you've got parents supporting you in your victim mindset. Well, you know, Brazilian jiu jitsu is the exact opposite. You get on a mat and you're by yourself.

Everything you learn on that mat is it's on you. Your parents can't help you on the mat. You know, coaches can coach you. They can help you get better. But, responsibility comes right back to you. So when you succeed on the mat, you succeed. When you fail on the mat, you fail. These lessons are some of the most valuable lessons kids can learn.

So I really encourage people when, if you get the opportunity to start a kid at Brazilian jiu jitsu at a young age, you're going to put them way ahead of the curve. A lot of times, sports are seasonal and stuff. Jiu jitsu, I kind of teach it like it's, another school. Yeah. You come and go from jiu-jitsu through your whole life.

You know, take time off is great. You know, kids, because they. I believe kids should play multiple sports, try different things as they're growing up. Don't be the one sport athlete. I think you should go out there and try many things. But Brazilian jiu jitsu, you keep coming back to it, and you're going to build these skills, that are going to help you not be a victim.

We could teach kids not to look like a victim when they start out. Some kids might be not very confident. They have their heads down, they turn to the side. They don't look you straight in the face when you start training Jiu jitsu usually takes about a month before kids start to posture up, look at their coaches straight in the face, start talking even more.

It does wonders for kids on their self-esteem. Going back to talking about how, we got to let kids go through the process. So when I first opened my school in Gracie Barra centennial in 2017, we moved to a new community. We moved to Colorado from Southern California. My son's at a new school, and during the first, few months of school, we did a no bully seminar we teach kids to.

At first, when somebody comes up to you and starts bullying you and talking verbally, we teach them to Just ignore them, walk away. You don't need to engage. If you don't engage, there's there's no fight. And then we have a couple stages. after that If they keep getting close and they get in your face and you, you start to bring awareness, you know, tell them to stop.

Back off. Leave me alone. And if it escalates, we can teach them to, you know, do self-defense, take care of yourself. You know, make sure you do it in a safe way. Jiu-Jitsu does a lot to de-escalate situations. We don't get hotter when we fight. We actually turn them colder by cooling them down, holding and controlling.

And so, during the first few months of my, at school, my son had an incident right after, we, we, we did the snow bully seminar. And when you open a new school in a community, and then all of a sudden your son gets in an incident at a school about bullying, it's quite interesting. So he's walking in line with his friends.

And this one kid, who's known to be kind of rambunctious and, you know, pushing kids around and talking and kind of getting into trouble, was pushing through the line, insulting everybody. He got to Denny, pushed him, and he took his hat off, and he grabbed his hat and he threw it on the ground. Without hesitation, Denny turned to him and does an Osoto Gari.

Puts him on the ground, holds him down and says, stop it. Of course. Didn't go over very well. Parents, teachers come in, they they break it all up and they they stop this altercation. And here you go. My kid gets in trouble in his first few months of school. I have a brand new school in the community.

When I first got that call, I was like, uh oh, I hear the vice president's calling me up. And to my surprise, they were pretty lenient on Denny because they knew this kid. He's always kind of getting into trouble. And, so Denny kind of didn't get in too much trouble. He, they, they did discipline him, but way less than I would have thought.

Interestingly enough, within a few months, those two boys became really good friends.

They really learned how to take care of it by going through the process, going through, kind of fighting it out. But learning from each other and what they do have to do it built, respect. They actually, you know, became they they turn and started talking to each other, becoming friends because they went through this situation. Now, if we stop these things all the time before they happen, where the kids aren't able to do this and just protect them all the time, they don't go through these learning environments.

And then they don't grow.

So as I was outlining this podcast, I was sharing with my wife and she made some really, she she noticed some things that I really got to make clear. You know, when we're teaching kids how not to look like a victim, how to build the self-respect, how to show that they don't put themselves in these positions. There's a fine line between that and the victim, and you're making a victim mentality and being a victim, you know, victims, sometimes you have no choice.

Something bad happens to you. And you can't. It's not always our fault. There's nothing we can do about certain situations.

The things that I'm sharing here are tools that help people reduce their chances of becoming a victim. Tools that help them, you know, avoid that problem before it comes to pass. Sometimes they have no choice. You know, obviously, and we can, you know, there's nothing we can do in a certain situation. But if you start to give your kids these tools early on, the likelihood that they're going to be have more problems later in life is going to go down.

And that's what we're here to do. We're going to here to give them the best shot, the best percentages of, growing without having many problems.

One of the ways we can help kids is through awareness and helping them make good decisions. If you make good decisions, the likelihood of you having problems and having that victim mentality can go down. Sometimes I think when people make choices, they put themselves into that. I had a friend who I every time I saw him, he was late.

He had, the worst tires you could possibly have on a car. Four different styles. He he, you know, whatever he could get for the cheapest amount to get by, you know? But at the other end of it, he had the most expensive phone and clothes. And so his priorities were to look good, but they weren't really good choices.

And so as a result, you know, he'd always talk about how, oh, I have a flat tire again and I have all these problems and, you know, he put himself into that problem world where he's always having something bad happen to him. But it really at this point, it happened because of some of the choices he was making.

You know, rather than buy the $1,500 phone by the $500 phone, you know, pay $1,000 for a whole new set of tires, and you're not going to have these problems. And that's, you know, it may seem like a little thing, but, you know, then you end up into a car accident because you have bad tires. And you say, oh, everything always bad happens to me.

Well, we can help kids with making these kinds of decisions. You know, just bringing the awareness, talking about these situations. I know I was there. I was one of the kids when I was 18, 19 years old, to buy the least expensive tires I could. Thinking that was a good decision. What you end up doing is buying more tires.

So, it's that instant gratification we want that really nice things that we want to spend on ourselves. And then the safe things we don't necessarily think about. But as parents, we got to help kids make good decisions on the safe things.

On the awareness end of things. I was recently in Costa Rica and I met a, hotel manager, really nice, professional gal who is very educated. And we were talking about the Market Prep podcast, and I was explaining what we're doing. And so one of these days, I'm actually going to invite her on, because when you go to a new place like Costa Rica or, you know, Brazil or some other place, these, these people there can give you good insight to what's happening.

She was telling me a story about how recently she was in Brazil, and the last time she went to Brazil, she got mugged. She lost her purse or ID, she lost everything. And so as I was talking to her, I said, so were you on a bike or a moped? And and she was all puzzled. She looks at me like, how did you know that?

She goes, I was on a bike. And I said, well, yeah, that's a, that's a, that's their M.O. down there. You know, you're on a bike. You're by yourself. Nobody's there to take care of you. And then a couple of guys come up and they mug you, and then they take all your stuff. She was. She was, you know, amazed.

She's like, I had no idea. And see, that's just it. If we don't bring this type of awareness to people, when people go travel or when our kids go off to school, we don't tell them about scenarios that could happen. Then bad things can happen to them. You know, just by talking about these scenarios, if, you know, if she knew that happened before, she probably wouldn't have gotten on a bike.

She probably would have thought a different, you know, mode of transportation to to go wherever she was going. And she probably would have avoided, being a victim in that scene. Now, she didn't choose it, but if she had the awareness of it and she learned from, some somebody else's situation, she might have been able to avoid the situation.

Yeah. And I know that that scenario is kind of extreme, but as parents, we can teach kids about habits that they can use that are real simple. Just teaching kids good posture. You know, a kid that has good posture, is it's invaluable. You can tell that they're confident, they're strong. You know, teach you. When you teach somebody to shake somebody's hand, you teach them how to shake their hand the right way.

Eye contact is important. When you teach these things to kids, you're going to see, when they're in a situation and there's a, there's somebody who's around these guys that are assailants or that that, you know, look for victims. They avoid those people. They don't want a confident person. They don't want somebody who's kind of respond, with force.

They want somebody who's going to cower to them. So if we start to teach these, these, habits early on in their life, you know, Brazilian jiu jitsu is an amazing place that's going to, you know, build life skills forever. The better our kids are going to be.

As parents, we need to stop rescuing and we need to start coaching. We need to be ones that help guide our kids to growth. We need to help them learn from their failures. Help them grow. Go through life going through. Making their own decisions. Building their own confidence. You know, encouraging them to play the sports and such. But going through those and being self, you know, being self-aware, understanding, you know that when they do something wrong, they're responsible for it.

Obviously. And when they do something right, they're responsible for it. So that's how kids build confidence. That's how they grow.

Let's help kids reflect on problems they have. Let's talk to them when they have a problem, when they've done something wrong and they go through it. Let's talk to them about the why. Let's be, you know, parents, let's help them understand what they could have done better. Ask them what they could have done better. Most of the times kids have the answers to it already.

And kids, you guys should take a look at yourselves when you're making decisions and when bad things happen to you. Did it happen because of the decision you made? Or did it happen because of, you know, unforeseen circumstances that can happen. That's life. We can't control everything. You know, as parents, you know, we can't follow our kids everywhere, but we can train them for anywhere.

Let's start with our kids early, trying to get them outside of that, you know, victim mindset. Let's help them learn how not to blame everybody else, how not to have excuses, how not to be helpless. Let's teach them to have an ownership mindset. Remember, we talk about our podcast, The Aware, Prepared and Willing podcast. Let's teach them to be aware.

Teach them to be prepared and teach them to be willing to to grow. If you do that, I promise you your kids are going to grow up. They're going to have a lot less problems. When they're getting off to school or wherever they, you know, next job's going to be. Come visit us again at the Aware, Prepared and Willing podcast next time.

And, let's teach him to be aware. Let's teach him to be prepared. And let's teach him to be willing. We look forward to seeing you on the next podcast. You can follow us at Marker Prep. Thanks, and have a great day.