Celebrate Your Partner’s Promotion
With it being time for promotions, it’s easy to feel passed over if you weren’t the guy picked. We all put our time in on the mats and when someone who started around the same time as you gets promoted and you didn’t, it can be discouraging. However, I’m here to tell you that there is a method to the madness. Your professor is the deciding factor in promotions and there isn’t a set criteria for when stripes and belts are given. Every student is different and have diverse goals, strengths, and reasons for training. There’s a lot that goes into promotion: the amount of time you’ve trained, previous grappling experience, natural ability, training frequency, and age of the student. It may seem disheartening, but I ask you to flip your perspective. Be happy for your teammate and use it as motivation to keep training hard and reach the next level. At the end of the day, the important thing is to get better, not stripes.
