Issue 228

April 2026

Former pro MMA fighter and psychologist Jakob Sverre Lovstad explains how fighting strips away excuses and forces a level of accountability most people spend their lives avoiding.

There are few places left where truth can show up uninvited, and MMA training is one of them. Having spent over 30 years of my life in MMA and been involved in a lot of leadership and organizational development work, I can say this sport offers more than just a way to exercise. One of these is the matter-of-factness that comes with having to actually prove that what you do actually works. At some point, you either have to step on the mat or in the ring to spar, or even better, have your first bout and show what you can do while a few hundred or many thousands of people can observe you either succeed or fail. Granted, some fighters will try to explain away losses because of a fragile ego, but everyone, including the fighters in question, deep down, knows that a win is a win and a loss is a loss. My first real MMA coach, Kirik Jenness, told me before my pro debut that has always stayed with me.

“Sometimes you’re the hammer, and sometimes you’re the nail.” 

You can’t really escape that fact, whether in training or in competition, but fortunately, research on MMA athletes found that fighters score much higher in coping with adversity and coachability than other athletes. It means the sport offers a unique chance to audit your ego, as MMA teaches you to process stress as a facilitative response rather than a threat, helping you gain the skills you need faster. Even if you’re in a board meeting, it means you might be more likely to consider if you were a coach watching a tape of this project, what would be the mistake you’d point out? It’s one of the many understated lessons MMA can teach everyone. 

VANITY METRICS

Such an extreme and binary environment, where all your strengths and weaknesses are constantly on display, fosters a mentality in which it becomes absolutely necessary to be aware of what brings you closer to winning every day. Everything from increasing cardio and strength to honing the jab must be continually scrutinized in order to evaluate if these skills are improving and if it’s the best use of a fighter’s time versus, for example, working on takedown defense. And very little time is spent on unnecessary stuff that is still important in many traditional martial arts forms. This can mean how pretty techniques look or how good people are at standing in line, bowing to each other. As anyone who has followed the sport of MMA for a few decades will tell you, there have been a lot of great fighters who didn’t exactly look beautiful doing what they did, especially in the heavyweight division. Having trained with several of them, though, I can testify to the lack of comfort involved in getting punched in the face by a top 10 UFC heavyweight. It’s another lesson that’s highly transferable to the real world because leaders who focus on looking good with polished optics rather than mastery, which is reflected in results, will see the slowest rates of team improvement. Research shows that high-mastery, low face-saving teams don’t just improve, they separate from the pack, learning faster while others stall as they battle to try and to look competent.

LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS

A keychain I got back in the early days of my career has taught me a lesson I carry everywhere. It said, “Your Kung Fu is no good here.” It’s something that has always meant something to me because organizations in both the public and private sectors remind me quite often of traditional martial arts. Once you start getting to the higher levels of leadership, there tends to be politics and maneuvering, which at times are counterproductive to results. It is indeed much like seeing Kung Fu masters saying nonsensical things and showing techniques far removed from reality – knowing they’ll never have to prove that any of it works. Except that, instead of weird kicks and pressure-point strikes, the business and public administration equivalent is things like buzzwords, pretty PowerPoint slides, or talking in a manner that sounds eloquent and contextually relevant while having no real content whatsoever. From a psychological point of view, it’s typically what you end up with when you stop having to showcase your skills in an environment with actual real-world risk. And we see this as a pretty big problem in society at large as well. People in charge can make bold, often public, claims without ever having to prove, in a clear, testable manner, that they can back up their words with performance. Again, this is much like traditional martial arts used to be, and the reason so many started migrating to MMA back in the early days of the sport, when it became obvious what happened when people brought katas to a fight. 

ALIVENESS IN DECISION MAKING

This issue can be bad enough in itself, but it also carries additional consequences for organizational culture that can sometimes be problematic. As people move away from taking risks by showing what they can actually do, the culture becomes risk-averse to avoid the whole issue. When it’s more important how things look than actual testable results, anything that seems like a deviation or discrepancy from “the right way” in terms of presentation is a big problem that must be corrected. Instead of looking at behavior and judging to what extent it contributes to or counteracts meaningful results, the optics of the situation and the attached narrative become the central point. Again, this is why several traditional martial arts do things the same way they did ages ago and even take great pride in upholding tradition, rather than taking a long, hard look at whether a crane kick or a standing wristlock is really the most important technique to focus on. Even in the business world, closed-loop environments, like traditional katas, fail miserably in open-loop scenarios, like a street fight or a market shift, because they lack a feedback loop. It’s a type of cultural stagnation, and to correct it, in an MMA gym, this is the move from hitting a stationary bag to live sparring. In the office, it means moving from pretty slides to real-world testing. The fastest way to improve is to adopt a High Mastery profile, in which your hunger to learn the technique outweighs your fear of looking bad while practicing it. Just as a fighter has to be okay with being the nail so they can eventually become the hammer, a winning culture has to reward the honesty of the tap-or-snap over the fake perfection of a kata. 

MMA FOR LIFE AND BUSINESS

On the other hand, MMA keeps it real. No one starts doing this sport because they seek a safe environment. Anyone who puts on 4oz gloves and thinks it’s fine to try to break a few ribs and noses understands that it goes both ways. Every dayof training carries inherent risk, no matter how good the coach is or how much one tries to mitigate the risk of injury with protective gear and controlled contact. And so, it’s also natural and accepted to work with a true trial-and-error philosophy. Everyone involved in MMA has already implicitly expressed that they’re fine with things not working out perfectly and that it’s part of the process. This means that people don’t get their panties in a bunch when someone messes up or when something looks wrong. There’s a mutual understanding in that it’s the only way to achieve excellence. I wish it were possible to bring continuous tests of skills and results to leadership in both organizational and political contexts. And that we, in the process, managed to rid ourselves of attention to form to instead see what pragmatically works. Seeing the MMA fighter’s mentality combined with the necessary intellect is something leadership roles require. You don’t get better by protecting your image. You get better by exposing your weaknesses because the people who grow fastest are the ones willing to look worst, just long enough to improve.