Jiu-jitsu is more than just a martial art – it’s a vehicle for developing crucial physical, mental and character skills that are beneficial for kids and adults alike. This is the core philosophy at Utopia, a leading martial arts academy.
In this podcast episode of Inside the Wave, Utopia’s owner Perry Wirth and Director of Martial Arts Operations and Kids Head Coach Vern Thornton dive deep into why they believe jiu-jitsu training is necessary, not just an extracurricular activity. Here are some of the key reasons they highlight:
- Builds overall athleticism and ability to defend oneself if needed
- Fosters confidence to stand up against bullying and for friends
- Teaches resilience, perseverance and a “win or learn” mentality
- Develops crucial life skills like discipline, emotional regulation and leadership
- Provides a positive community and accountability
- Challenges the “averageness” and complacency many adults fall into
- Improves mental/physical health via exercise, learning, social bonds
- Gives a sense of continuous growth and purpose
The coaches emphasize that jiu-jitsu is a holistic activity that builds well-rounded kids and adults in a way that many conventional sports and activities cannot. It instills ownership, commitment and a growth mindset.
While not literally a “necessity” for everyone, Perry and Vern argue that the benefits of jiu-jitsu make it a highly advantageous pursuit for most people at any age or stage of life. The skills it imparts extend far beyond the mat into all areas of life.
Episode Transcript:
00:12
Perry Wirth
I’m here today joined by our kids head coach and director of martial arts operations at Utopia, Coach Vern, the legend.
00:22
Vern Thornton
Big title, big shoes, all awesome. Love it.
00:25
Perry Wirth
I’m PERRY. I’m the owner of Utopia. Excited to be with you guys today. And today we’re going to be talking about why we think and why we know our mission and Jiu Jitsu in general is necessary. And we’ll explain what we mean by necessary in a little bit. So give us a little background on youth.
00:42
Vern Thornton
Coach Vern, prior military, then went into the technology field for a while, fixing electronics, and then stumbled upon what used to be called neutral ground and started my jujitsu journey. And I realized early on that it.
00:59
Perry Wirth
Could open up a lot of doors.
01:00
Vern Thornton
And then got awarded the opportunity to coach with you and never looked back and studied a lot more on childhood development, personal development, jiu jitsu coaching, and now we’re here.
01:13
Perry Wirth
NICE. What got you first involved in martial arts? Why? What was your why?
01:17
Vern Thornton
I was missing something. I was extremely successful in business, sold the business, came back, lacked clarity on my purpose again, and listened to Joe Rogan and listened to all these influencers talk about Jocko. Jocko, big one. And got involved and lacked a little bit of commitment for a little bit. And I had a lot of mentors early on that I knew that did Jiu Jitsu, and I saw the benefit to them, and I said, well, if they can do it, then I can. So then started training in nice.
01:51
Perry Wirth
Did you lack commitment in Jiu Jitsu or other areas?
01:53
Vern Thornton
All other areas. I would make excuses for a lot of things that were my own setbacks, so I would have a victim mentality. Why isn’t this happening for me? And then started to look deeper into, like, oh, I’m in charge of all of this, so I can start making better decisions and creating better habits. And a lot of that had to do with Jiujitsu and opening that door for me.
02:17
Perry Wirth
AWESOME. So even though you probably developed a lot of discipline in the army and owning your own business, did you still struggle a little bit managing some of that, keeping some of that?
02:31
Vern Thornton
Yeah. And I did some digging on this, and a lot of it had to do with purpose, is when we lack purpose, we lack direction and clarity on the mission, and we talk a lot about mission at Utopia and our vision and our path forward. And when you’re in the military and when you’re operating a business, you have a clear purpose, especially when you’re in charge of people and leadership, and when you kind of take the foot off the gas a little bit, you start to question a lot of other things, and I think purpose is the big key on finding that purpose and then executing on that.
03:06
Perry Wirth
Yeah. And I think it’s important that everyone has a purpose behind what they’re doing. What is that driving factor? And to me, it’s got to be a little bit deeper than just, hey, it’s something I want to do because I want to do jiu jitsu, but that’s not enough to drive me to do it at the scale and the level and giving back in the way that I do. And I think that purpose is really what is the North Star in our compass to help direct us where we go. We talk about it a little bit, but there’s that Japanese term, ikagi, ikigai, ikigi, one or the other. But it’s where your passion, your purpose, and your skills all meet. And you might have found that. Have you found that in jiu jitsu?
03:53
Perry Wirth
Because I know I have, and I just find everything to be so much easier with that in my mind.
04:01
Vern Thornton
Yeah. That philosophy is important because everyone is always asking, well, how do I become happy? Or I’m not happy? How do I get there?
04:11
Perry Wirth
The happy pill.
04:12
Vern Thornton
Yeah. And the short term fix. Right. But really, is it involved in following your passion, following what you’re good at? What can you get paid to do, and what are you inclined to develop?
04:26
Perry Wirth
And it’s like, what is your purpose on this earth? Right. And some people find that purpose in their job. Some people find that purpose as a parent. Sometimes people find that in a hobby. And I think, speaking for myself, I’ve found that in Jiu jitsu. Now, there’s a lot of other things I like to do outside of Jiu Jitsu, but if I wasn’t doing Jiu Jitsu, there’d be a huge gap, which leads me to our discussion around why we think our mission at Utopia and Jiu Jitsu is necessary. I had a parent once tell me he enrolled his son in Jiu Jitsu because it was important for his son to learn three things. He had to learn how to swim. Kiss fell in water. Really important.
05:16
Perry Wirth
Had to learn about money, because as he was growing up, he didn’t learn about money, which results in not knowing what to do when you have it, not knowing how to get it right. And as much as we like to say money is not important, as an adult, it’s very important.
05:31
Vern Thornton
Very important.
05:32
Perry Wirth
And number three is the ability to defend himself. And I like that analogy of jujitsu is just as important as swimming. Right. If you fall in water, you got to learn at least how to tread.
05:45
Vern Thornton
Yeah.
05:46
Perry Wirth
And in life, we have to learn how to build that confidence to make the right choices, to stand up for ourselves, and to potentially, hopefully never physically defend ourselves.
06:00
Vern Thornton
Well, I’ve heard you say this in passing. I kind of keep it in the back of my mind is swimming in life, treading isn’t an option.
06:09
Perry Wirth
It’s an option. It’s just a very bad option.
06:11
Vern Thornton
It’s a very poor option because the longer you tread, the tighter you get. And if you know how to effectively channel your emotions, be physically and mentally confident in yourself, which Jiu Jitsu provides, it kind of opens up that door of, I don’t need to be a bully. I know how to handle the stress of life because you can’t really get rid of it. You can just manage it. And that’s something that we teach a lot, especially with kids and adults, is how do you develop that emotional regulation to know that stress? You’re not going to ever get rid of it. You’re only going to be able to manage it. And the effectiveness of that. Yeah.
06:56
Perry Wirth
And to me, if we compare Jiu Jitsu or what we do to swimming, like you said, you don’t want to be treading water. Treading water, when it comes to life is complacency. And that’s the last thing that we want, is complacency. We want to teach people what their best is and how to get to their best and how to strive for their best, not just how to make it by right. Because I think that’s where people end up losing that happiness is when they just start coasting.
07:29
Vern Thornton
Or they just start traveling with no destination and they’re just distracted and they lack that purpose. And they wonder, months, years, decades, like, where did all that time go? But when you learn how to effectively swim, using that analogy, you have direction, you have purpose, and you know that things that the storms are temporary and then you can navigate better through that. Let’s talk about kids. Kids, our program. We talk about the necessity of it. And when I think about our kids program, you have so many activities that you can do for your kids. A lot of them are team based sports. Football, soccer, basketball, dance, gymnastics. And what I tell parents is that a lot of these programs, unfortunately, not by nature or design, but the byproduct of those sports can be detrimental to their development. Sports like football, for example.
08:49
Vern Thornton
I used to play football.
08:51
Perry Wirth
I played it. So played a lot of football.
08:53
Vern Thornton
When you get into football, you either are a natural talent and you get on the team, or you have the competency to understand and learn the game, and then you become an athlete. What happens to the 99%? They aren’t necessarily super athletic. They can’t develop that social connection with their teammates because they feel like they’re not a part of the tribe. And emotionally, it subconsciously tells them that they’re not good enough. And what happens when you lose the game? What happens that Monday after for Monday practice, you get punished. Right. So they develop a winning losing mentality that it’s bad to lose. You get punished for losing. And with Jiu jitsu, the philosophy is you either win or you learn.
09:51
Vern Thornton
And we’ve coached many of kids and competitions, and the way that we go about it is when we frame the winning, we say before they go out there, showcase your talents. All these kids are training for that purpose.
10:06
Perry Wirth
Show me everything you’ve learned.
10:07
Vern Thornton
Show off. This is a performance. And if they lose, the first thing we do when they get off the mat is we say, that was brave of you to go out there. You showed a lot of courage because a lot of kids don’t do that. And then we say, now we have some stuff to go over and some more stuff to learn. So winning or learning is the philosophy of jiu jitsu.
10:32
Perry Wirth
Back to the lab.
10:33
Vern Thornton
Back to the lab. Deep.
10:39
Perry Wirth
Very deep. I think one thing that makes jiu jitsu unique is a lot of kids’ activities. They’re broken into sports and activities, right. Where a parent puts their kid in a sport, and that would be soccer, t ball, football, whatever. An activity. Boy scouts, girl scouts, maybe dance. Depends on parents perspective. And I think jiu jitsu in our program is unique because we work on the whole individual. It is a sport, but it’s not just a sport. We work on just as much as developing athletes as we do great people.
11:24
Vern Thornton
Yeah.
11:25
Perry Wirth
And I think that’s something that we have really embedded into our program that truly makes it stand out from a lot of the other activities that are out there.
11:33
Vern Thornton
I agree. When I looked at the criteria of regular sports, we have just a multifaceted criteria. Maybe you’re not the most athletic at that point in time, but you might be the most creative. There’s a spot in jiu jitsu for that. Maybe you’re not the most creative or the most athletic, but you are an excellent leader.
11:58
Perry Wirth
And we know you go tournaments. It’s not necessarily the big, strong guy that you’re scared of in your bracket. It’s the guy that doesn’t look athletic at all, that you should be terrified of.
12:12
Vern Thornton
I agree, and I’ve seen it time and time again.
12:17
Perry Wirth
You should always judge them by their ears, for sure.
12:21
Vern Thornton
I’ve heard that one.
12:23
Perry Wirth
I’m just kidding. If my ears were judged, you shouldn’t judge them too hard.
12:27
Vern Thornton
I would never judge your ears.
12:29
Perry Wirth
Now, speaking of jujitsu competition, here’s another thing that I think is unique. Jiu jitsu, when it comes down to it, in competition, is individual. When you go out on the mat, you are the only person that’s in charge of that outcome. Yeah, you could say the ref has some determining factors on do they make good calls or whatnot? But you’re solo. You just have to go out there and figure it out on your own, which I grew up doing wrestling, and I think that was one of the best things that wrestling did for me, was put me on the spot and just, you got to figure it out. But when you’re in the practice room, it’s different. Right. In the practice room, it’s a team sport.
13:11
Vern Thornton
Right.
13:11
Perry Wirth
I need to help you get better, because if I help you get better, you help me get better. And there’s a direct correlation with that. You can’t really do jiu jitsu by yourself. It’s really up to that team atmosphere to make everyone better.
13:22
Vern Thornton
Right.
13:23
Perry Wirth
But when it comes down to it’s all on you. Do you think that’s a lot different than a lot of other kid’s activities, adult activities that are out there?
13:33
Vern Thornton
Yeah, I think about the notion that most sports, you either win or lose as the team, maybe.
13:45
Perry Wirth
But a lot of times when you win as the team, who gets the recognition in football, the quarterback, the receivers, the line a little bit, it’s getting.
13:54
Vern Thornton
Better a little bit.
13:55
Perry Wirth
Right. But it’s hard because even though it’s a team sport, a lot of times you don’t get that recognition as a team. Right? Or when you lose, it’s, hey, it’s the line’s fault. They couldn’t hold the line today.
14:09
Vern Thornton
Right?
14:09
Perry Wirth
It’s on the line, but where’s the ownership?
14:13
Vern Thornton
Across the accountability ownership.
14:16
Perry Wirth
And I think the real cool thing about Jiu jitsu is it gives you that absolute ownership. It’s on you, and we’re not a team sport in the sense of like, hey, you better be at practice. If you’re not at practice, you’re going to be paying for it, sort of a thing. Your team’s going to be paying for it. It’s, you train as much as you think you need to train, and if your goal is to compete, it’s on you to train the right amount.
14:36
Vern Thornton
Right.
14:37
Perry Wirth
And I think that teaches kids, adults something a little bit different that they don’t learn in other team sports.
14:45
Vern Thornton
Yeah. Jiu jitsu just has a great way of just hitting all the marks. Yeah. You can put your kid in five different activities, or you can put them in jujitsu, and then you have across the board, all things that you would have got out of those five different activities, you would have got them in one. Cool.
15:05
Perry Wirth
So let’s touch on last thing on the kids. Let’s touch on a few things that we specifically work on at our academy. And I’ll start from the sports standpoint, and then I’ll let you take over from the character development standpoint.
15:19
Vern Thornton
Okay.
15:20
Perry Wirth
So I think from the athleticism standpoint, we work on all those things, like building athletes, building athletic skills. We work on making kids be able to defend themselves if they have to. We can use that term bully proof. Right. Where we want parents that are at home and their kids are in school, not worry about if their kids being bullied, but when their kid is bullied, knowing that their child has the skills to stand up for themselves and defend themselves if needed. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard more stories from our parents about our students defending their friends than they have to themselves because they carry themselves with confidence.
16:00
Vern Thornton
Yeah, it goes back to the confidence piece on. I mean, we talk about confidence, but confidence can mean so many different things. It can mean raising your hand in.
16:11
Perry Wirth
Class, picking new friends, asking that girl out on day.
16:14
Vern Thornton
Right. So one of those aspects is intervention. You believe in yourself enough where you can intervene in something to pretty much save someone else. Stand up for. Stand up for something.
16:28
Perry Wirth
And that shows up, even for adults. Standing up for another person in the workplace.
16:33
Vern Thornton
Right.
16:33
Perry Wirth
Standing up for another person that you’re in a relationship with is such a life skill that needs continuous development.
16:41
Vern Thornton
Right.
16:42
Perry Wirth
So what about from a character development standpoint? We’re always trying to build athletes and make these physically strong human beings, but what about from the mental side of things?
16:58
Vern Thornton
My philosophy when I came on board as a coach was jiu jitsu is important from a sports perspective, but what they do outside the academy is more important. They’re on the mat two to 3 hours a week. Everywhere else during that time frame, they’re at school and they’re at home. So I like to reverse engineer this and say, I’m going to work on the childhood development side of it and creating those life skills, then incorporating jiu jitsu. So martial arts is really just the vehicle to provide that service to those kids because they’re unfortunately probably not learning it at school. And as a parent and as a kid at one point, my parents weren’t either the best examples at the time. They didn’t know how to parent or they just needed help. And we are committed to helping parents, like fill in those gaps.
18:00
Vern Thornton
There’s been a lot of times where a parent will come to me saying, hey, I’ve been telling little Billy to clean his room for years, and he.
18:07
Perry Wirth
Gets on the times every time and.
18:09
Vern Thornton
He gets on the mat and you give one mat chat about cleaning your room and the importance of it done. So I think it’s really important to incorporate those life skills and not just the martial arts discipline and focus, but really diving into how do we get them from point a to point b in a positive, constructive manner and holding them accountable in a positive way and using positive reinforcement to get them there. And we have a lot of success doing that just based on studying the childhood development side of it, the psychology behind it, working on our coaches and role playing with them and getting the best out of each coach so they can provide that service to the kids and the parent.
18:52
Perry Wirth
Something that makes our program unique is how much time we spend not just learning how to do martial arts, but learning how to be a coach, learning about kid and adult psychology. And I think that’s something that makes us truly unique. Nothing against other sports that have volunteers, mom and dad, but our coaches, this is what they do. And there’s not 8 hours of jiu jitsu coaching in a day.
19:18
Vern Thornton
No.
19:19
Perry Wirth
Right. There’s three, sometimes one, maybe four. But the rest of those days, we’re always working on developing ourselves and our own ability to work with other people and help them through stuff. A huge thing of what we do and why we’re successful is the level of partnership that we have with families and our students. Like you said, we care about that 1 hour that we have. But the important part is the other 23.
19:50
Vern Thornton
Right.
19:52
Perry Wirth
Recognizing what’s going on at home, what’s going on at school for the adults, what’s going on in their household, what’s going on with work, and really helping them holistically with their goals.
20:03
Vern Thornton
Yeah, I like that you said holistically because there are different schools that do have just volunteers, and we’re grateful to have volunteers.
20:12
Perry Wirth
We have like ten of them.
20:13
Vern Thornton
Right. But having that core coaching group that are professional coaches, when parents are like, oh, well, what else do you do? This is it. This is my vocation. This is something that my purpose is to be the partner and help them grow their kid. Because most parents are parenting on how their parents raised them or the direct. Like, my parents raised me this way. I can’t do any of that. So I got to find a different way. And it’s not necessarily always black and white. There’s a lot of gray area. And we kind of help bridge those gaps. Like, why shouldn’t you yell at your kids? Why should you use positive reinforcement or not give into them every time that they have a request? And we are able to provide those professional answers because, well, we study it every day.
21:03
Perry Wirth
Yeah. Now, let’s talk about adults, right? We have a huge kids program, but we also have a lot of adults. And I would say most of our demographic, being the suburbs is like your 35 to 45 year old person. And yes, we get people that are way younger. We get teens. We get kids in their 20s, adults in their 20s. We get people starting Jiu jitsu fifty s and sixty s sometime.
21:30
Vern Thornton
Right.
21:32
Perry Wirth
But I think Jiu jitsu is also necessary for adults. Hey, you’ve learned how to swim already in life. You made it to adulthood, but there’s still a lot of things that you need.
21:48
Vern Thornton
What do you think I think about? And you’ll love this, but Michael Bernoff’s average sucks.
21:56
Perry Wirth
Complacency.
21:57
Vern Thornton
Complacency. And everyone operates usually within their average. And that could be whatever skill you develop for yourself. And I think Jiu jitsu gets you thinking about that next level.
22:10
Perry Wirth
Well, let’s clarify what average, right? Because I think this is really important. Sure. A lot of people think average is like, hey, I make the same thing year after year. I have the same life year after year. And that’s not what average is. That’s actually going down because we know we’ll take income, for example. There’s cost of living, right? So if you keep making the same thing year over year and cost of living goes up, you’re actually below average.
22:36
Vern Thornton
Right?
22:37
Perry Wirth
So you know that your life, whether you do Jiu Jitsu, whether you do personal development, it’s on a predictable path. Over the next x years, you’re going to make x much more money. This is what’s going to happen in your life because this is how life progresses. And that’s an average trajectory. Right. And that’s also complacency. And what we’re looking for is how do we take people out of that to put them on an above average trajectory.
23:05
Vern Thornton
Yeah. I think it starts with being on the same team, being part of the tribe, having a team.
23:13
Perry Wirth
An external team that’s not just your work team or it’s not just your family team or it’s not just your drinking.
23:21
Vern Thornton
Yeah. Your bar team.
23:22
Perry Wirth
Your bar team.
23:23
Vern Thornton
Yeah. I think the best thing is our community and we don’t always say what people want to hear. One of the things I think about is like, truth is love. So if someone’s not getting to the gym, our staff is calling. Hey, where are you at? Hey, we met you within two weeks.
23:42
Perry Wirth
You don’t show up. You’re getting a phone call.
23:44
Vern Thornton
Yeah, phone call. You’re getting a text message. We might even knock on your door. Hey, what’s going on? Because we want them to understand how committed we are and how much we value their commitment to their personal journey.
24:00
Perry Wirth
And I’ve been huge, you know, I’ve been huge on the Huber Ming podcast.
24:04
Vern Thornton
Right.
24:05
Perry Wirth
There’s an Internet term for it. Huber, hubby, huber, husband.
24:09
Vern Thornton
Oh, okay. They got a little squad now.
24:12
Perry Wirth
Yeah. Like just dads and adults. Males that listen to Huberman and they get into all that stuff. But his specialty is neuroscience.
24:21
Vern Thornton
Neuroscience.
24:22
Perry Wirth
And he talks a lot about these things that people can be doing on a regular basis that help it. His big one is light. Sorry, but in jiu jitsu, like, you’re not going to get more sunlight doing jiu jitsu, luckily, unless you do on the beach. But luckily most of our classes are when the sun is down already so you can get that sunlight. But there’s a lot of other things that he talks about to raise those baseline levels of dopamine and epinephrine and serotonin and all these great chemicals in your brain that jiu jitsu provides is like a one stop shop. Learning new skills, sense of community, strength training, cardio training, even just touching other human beings proven to help. And I tell people when I go to the gym, I kill three birds with 1 st every time. It’s my job.
25:12
Perry Wirth
I get to teach and I get to train. But I neglect those like five other huge benefits in my life of what I get out of it. Right? I’m getting stronger, improving my heart health, improving all these chemicals in my brain through these interactions that I have. And I don’t think enough adults have activities that give that to them and that challenge them in a way that push them.
25:39
Vern Thornton
Yeah. A lot of the activities as an adult become disempowering. They drink. They’re watching Netflix.
25:49
Perry Wirth
Scared of trying new stuff.
25:51
Vern Thornton
Yeah. And then that’s the snowball effect, where you go so far doing that becomes your normal. And then you stay in your box, you stay in your comfort zone, and it’s harder to break out. But when we have a community such as ours, we challenge the status quo and we say, hey, there’s something that you need. Therapy Jujitsu. Go Do Jujitsu. You need to work on your physical health. Jujitsu. You have a hard time making new friends. Jujitsu. So, like, 99% of the questions that I’m asked, the answer I Usually give is, Do Jiu Jitsu.
26:25
Perry Wirth
Do Jiu Jitsu. If you listen to Jocko’s podcast, he looks like his answer for everybody.
26:29
Vern Thornton
Yeah, I get it now.
26:30
Perry Wirth
Two things I want touch on, and these are, like, Jiujitsu fallacies. One of them is Jujitsu is for everyone. And I think everyone can maybe find their place in Jiu Jitsu. But I don’t think Jiu Jitsu is for everyone.
26:42
Vern Thornton
No. I would say if I were just to throw a number out there, probably 5%, low number of people that maybe have a medical condition, which is usually what prevents people like, if you have lower back medical procedures or maybe you have a bad neck. So there are some outliers when it comes to Jujitsu. But I think everyone should. At least most people should try it if they have struggle with real mental health issues. I always tell people I’m qualified to help 85% of people through my experience. There’s 15 that I’m not. There’s 15% of people I’m not. Because one, I’m not a licensed therapist, and then two, I’m not a doctor.
27:35
Perry Wirth
Yeah.
27:35
Vern Thornton
Right? So I can’t give a lot of advice to those 15%, but that 85%, 80% to 85%, I can help.
27:43
Perry Wirth
And here’s the other thing. Even without the physical side of things like Jiu Jitsu might not be for you at this point in time in your life. If you can’t handle losing.
27:54
Vern Thornton
Right?
27:55
Perry Wirth
If you can’t handle leaving your ego at the door. If you are a 225 pound male and you can’t handle getting your butt kicked by a 150 pound female, which happens. Or even just handle going against someone way smaller than you, that can even just hold their own. Right. And you need to be ready for that when you get to the gYm. So many adults come in, and they’re like, I’ve never done this before, either. Has anyone else?
28:21
Vern Thornton
Right?
28:21
Perry Wirth
Jiu JItsu has been only popular in the US since 2007. It really started in the WISCoNSIN. We’re late bloomers in the Jiu JItsu community compared to the coasts. And to think that you’re going to come in, that you’re even going to be good, even if you do have other grappling skills. You might be above average if you’ve wrestled before, but to come in and think you’re going to be good in any way, it’s not going to happen.
28:49
Vern Thornton
Yeah. When I get that conversation, like, oh, I’ve never done it before, or I’m.
28:55
Perry Wirth
A little nervous, neither did I before I did it.
28:59
Vern Thornton
And I tell them, you know what the hardest belt to earn is? It’s your white belt. It’s the hardest belt to earn. It’s like, once you get your white belt, once you sign up and you start making that commitment, all you have to do from there on out is just keep showing up. Me. And you have had conversations where I was fixated on getting the next belt. All right, I got my white belt and I got my first stripe. All right, now I need my blue belt.
29:21
Perry Wirth
We talk about, like, jujitsu goal setting.
29:23
Vern Thornton
Jujitsu goal setting. We’ve done workshops.
29:26
Perry Wirth
I want to get my blue belt. Well, it doesn’t have to be a goal. Your goal just needs to be, keep showing up and you’ll get it.
29:31
Vern Thornton
Keep showing up. So I think just breaking that barrier of entry for people that do have that limited belief, we talk about limited beliefs and lvs, little voice syndrome, where it’s that voice in the side of your head is saying, well, I’m not going to be good at this, so I’m not going to try.
29:47
Perry Wirth
And if you haven’t had that activity that has built up resiliency in your life, that ends up being jujitsu for a lot of our kids. It teaches them grit, it teaches them resiliency. It teaches them when they lose to just get back at it. Right. And as an adult, if you haven’t had that sort of activity in the past, that just beats you down day after day, even when you think you’re really good at it, you still get beaten down. It’s hard. It’s a challenge. And I’ve been rolling, doing jiu jitsu for, I don’t even know, 17 years or something like that.
30:20
Vern Thornton
Now.
30:21
Perry Wirth
I grappled ten years before that. I don’t know. I feel like I’m just making myself really old, but I’ll still go against people in Jiu Jitsu where in 5 minutes, I do Zero JuJitSu to ThEM. They do ALl the JuJiTSU to me. I’d be trying to MuRDer that guy, and they’ll tap me out 15 times.
30:38
Vern Thornton
Yeah.
30:39
Perry Wirth
And I’m still the instructor of an academy with over 300 students, but that’s what I love about it.
30:46
Vern Thornton
Yeah, I think there’s, like, an evolution to it, too. I think when you get into the front doors on your first couple of weeks or month or maybe even a year, it’s that I’m trying to survive. And then you start going ThROUgH, oh, I think I got This. I think I’m on my way. And then you go to this peak, and then you start getting beat Again, and then you go back up, and then you start getting to the, oh.
31:16
Perry Wirth
This is all learning.
31:17
Vern Thornton
Like, I’m just learning every day. I mean, as a black beLt, you’re.
31:20
Perry Wirth
Probably still learning much about jujitsu. There’s positions I haven’t even explored yet. One of my coaches told me that when you get your blue belt, it shows that you’ve learned how to tap out. Like, your white belt is learning how to tap. You don’t really start defending until your blue belt sometimes. Right. And sometimes you don’t really start attacking until you’re purple belt. And I think that’s something that makes jujitsu super special.
31:47
Vern Thornton
Yeah. It was done a lot for me Just Overall in my development.
31:52
Perry Wirth
I look back, and I used to take Jiu Jitsu for granted. Just come to the gym, enjoy it, but I don’t know what I was doing. But one day, I looked back, and I was like, what if I didn’t do Jiu Jitsu for the last Ten years? Like, my friends are through Jiu jitsu. My colleagues are through Jiu jitsu. I love coming. Like, I spend multiple nights a week at the gym. Even before that, I spent multiple times per day at the gym just training because I enjoyed it, not because I wanted to get great at it, just because I loved doing it. I looked back, and I was like, what would Life be if I didn’t have know? Would it just have been Netflix or back when I started World of Warcraft?
32:37
Vern Thornton
Yeah. Do you have answer for that?
32:39
Perry Wirth
Well, I don’t, because that’s not the path I took in my life, but I have no regrets. I love every minute, and Jiu jitsu has evolved. My friends have evolved. Everything has changed over time. I just sent one of my friends a video of his blue belt promotion. We’re whipping each other with belts. We don’t do that anymore. And it’s evolved. But, man, I had no regrets for the past. I love the choices I’ve made.
33:09
Vern Thornton
What I love the most about the evolution, too, is you’ve personally evolved, but our business has evolved as mean. I started when it was neutral Brown and then I started seeing you investing in the business and investing in YoUr team via me. And I started to see were starting to go higher as far as just retention and getting like minded individuals in. And it was really impressive to see just how jujitsu evolves, the people evolved and now we have this culture and we’re always on purpose, like creating that culture of growth mindset and being committed to excellence. And I think that’s important and we have a lot of fun doing it and I think that’s reflective of a lot of our core values that we have here.
34:07
Perry Wirth
You ready to close this out?
34:09
Vern Thornton
I’m ready.
34:10
Perry Wirth
All right. So you might know who said this, and we talk about this in one of our programs that we have at the academy, our storm program, special team and role models, where our goal and you lead this program is to give kids the skills that they need to be the leaders in their lives. Because we know that the kids that we have at the academy are going to put in situations where they’re the leaders because they have a lot of confidence, they have a lot of skills, a lot of people look up to them. And when they’re put in that place, we want them to have the leadership skills that they might not learn in school. But our mission, and this is definitely not something I said.
34:51
Perry Wirth
I said, you might know who said this, but a leader isn’t judged or graded on how many fathers they have, but how many leaders that they’ve created. And going back to what you were saying, that is one of my biggest goals of how can we give all these kids, all these adults, all of our team staff at Utopia, give them the skills to be awesome?
35:18
Vern Thornton
We talk about our vision, that our core focus is to create a community of growth. And how do we do that? Well, we care, we develop and we ensure that they have the tools to be able to do that. I always tell kids because they thank me and the parents thank me, but I say your kid already has that. We just uncover it in different ways. And Storm is our big one, is we see that you have it and now we can grow it. And then our explorers program, they’re exploring that possibility, that they can be a leader. And through our regular programming, we start to uncover that and they start to grow, and then they ultimately get in the Storm team too, because it’s such an exclusive group of people.
36:05
Vern Thornton
But with that program and what we’re doing, it makes me feel a lot better on when we have to pass down the torch to our next generation, that we have very excellent leaders that handle adversity, that can be critical thinkers, that can think outside the box, that can regulate their emotions, that can go and command a room. And I feel pretty confident that we’re doing 110% on ensuring that happens for our future generations.
36:36
Perry Wirth
Awesome. Well, thank you guys for joining us on the Utopia podcast. I hope you learned a little bit about our mission and why we think our mission and jiu jitsu is necessary in so many different people’s lives. Awesome.