Resetting Mindset

When I first started boxing, my coach would often yell at me to “reset” after exchanges with my opponent. It’s good advice.

It keeps you from mindlessly going all in on a tactic or circumstance, usually to the degradation of your skills and strategy, and the detriment of your success.

You and your opponent are in the pocket, punches are exchanged, maybe you land, maybe you get clipped, and you find yourself throwing sloppier punches or exposing yourself to risk more so than necessary.

“Reset! Reset!”

Hands come up. Punches get smarter. Head movement engages. Footwork begins again.

Back to baseline and back to something that makes sense.

Longtime followers of my coaching and writing know that I am anti-mindset. I have written about how a “warrior mindset” is a myth that coaches, trainers, and instructors rely on as an answer when they don’t have a trainable answer.

It’s a weak catch-all that avoids the dreaded “I don’t know” so many of these people are afraid to utter in front of clients and students.

In the absence of a trainable answer, mindset fills in…but nobody really knows what that means. A “warrior mindset” or, more specifically, “mindset” is as loose in definition as anything I have ever heard in martial arts and self-defense tactics.

I’ve written about growth versus fixed mindsets. I believe in those. I’ve lived both and seen the results of each.

Past those definitions, though? No. The definitions that have evolved out of combatives circles for the word “mindset” are bastardizations. Not helpful at all.

Because one warrior’s bastardized definition is another warrior’s confusion.

And that confusion is deadly.

It’s a sophist argument to state that “mindset” makes you train; ergo, you need a “warrior mindset” or other such nonsense to win fights. It’s duplicitous and ill-informed.

“Reset! Reset!”

Which brings us to the conclusion of the mindset debate. The definition of the word has been reset. We, you and I, have returned it to baseline.

I’ve seen the staunchest defenders of this idea that a “warrior mindset” changes outcomes. It doesn’t. Trained responses do.

Trained responses come from having a growth mindset. Whether you’re a warrior or a worrier doesn’t matter; all that matters is that you are focused on growth.

Those staunch defenders of “warrior mindset” have become less and less enamored with the mindset answer the more people with stronger articulation and definitions challenged the word’s use.

It forced a necessary reckoning in the verbiage.

It forced a reset.

Mindset matters. I never said it didn’t.

But definitions matter more or none of us will ever understand each other.

​Reset.