What Michael Chandler taught me about the power of choosing gratitude and optimism (even in an unforgiving place like the UFC)
You learn such interesting things covering the world of pro fighting. Occasionally, you get some stuff that might qualify as “life lessons,” or perhaps even (and this could be stretching it a bit) “wisdom.”
For instance, I recall Dustin Poirier telling me once that in tough times the days only seem intolerable if you try to live them all at once. And I remind myself often of a thing the late Robert Follis used to tell his fighters when they started worrying too much about upcoming fights: If we’re going to make up the future, we might as well make it up in our favor.
So when I interviewed Michael Chandler this past week ahead of his co-main event bout at UFC 309 on Saturday, the first thing I asked him was how he got to be so relentlessly positive. I was asking not because I thought it was necessarily relevant to the story I was writing, but because I just wanted to know. A general sense of positivity does not come naturally to me. I wondered if it was a trait some people are simply born with.
“I think it’s a combination of things,” Chandler said.
For starters, he suspects he learned it from his parents. “I grew up in a lower middle class family. My mom and dad worked two and three jobs, and you never ever heard them complain. You worked, you showed up, and that was it. You made the best of every situation and you worked hard.”
But the thing that really struck me was Chandler’s insistence that the key to staying positive is gratitude.
“Gratitude is a choice,” Chandler said. “I try to hitch everything to gratitude. You can decide to focus on the things that didn’t go the way you wanted them to, or you can choose to be grateful for the life you have. If a bad thing happens to you but a good thing comes of it — whether that good thing is that you got stronger from the experience, you learned something, you grew as a person — then was it really a bad thing?”
The famed fight trainer Greg Jackson once told me that fighters have to be optimists. There are so many ways for things to go wrong in this sport. That’s true in the fights themselves, but it’s also true outside the cage. You can blow out an ACL in training. You can get dealt a bad scorecard by the judges. The big money fight you’ve spent years waiting for can disappear on the basis of nothing more than an injured toe. But if you’re going to stick around and make a life in MMA, you have to believe that good things are going to happen for you — even if they may initially come disguised as bad things.
Back when I first heard that from Jackson, I assumed he meant that fighters have to be the kind of people who are naturally optimistic. It didn’t occur to me that it might be more of a conscious choice, or that any of us could simply decide to be more grateful, more positive, more hopeful.
Because if you’re going to make up the future, you might as well do it in your favor. And if you’re going to get in the cage against Charles Oliveira with the future of your career on the line, you probably better believe that you’ve put in the work to earn a good break or two.
