Emily Kwok
Emily Kwok is a 4th-degree blackbelt under Marcelo Garcia. She is a two-time IBJJF world champion, Canada's first female blackbelt, an ADCC veteran, and a former mixed martial arts competitor. She is the owner and founder of Princeton Jiu-Jitsu in Princeton, New Jersey. She is also an executive coach and consultant who currently lives in Costa Rica but travels the world giving jiu-jitsu seminars and hosting grappling retreats.
Every Person On Earth Would Be Lucky To Have Two Amazing People In Their Lives - A Fabulous Spouse, and an Emily Kwok.
"Many times in our lives, we get to these points where we get stuck. It feels suffocating. We don't know which way to move or how to proceed. Have you ever felt like that in your life? Stuck?
In hindsight, picking Emily Kwok as an executive coach and ranking instructor was the perfect choice for me. In my way, I was attempting to do something that had never been done before. Emily was that special someone who, at multiple times in her life, was the pioneer herself and did things never done before. She came up in jiu-jitsu when women didn't do jiu-jitsu. They were treated poorly, abused, and not accepted by many of the other male students at jiu-jitsu schools. It certainly wasn't mainstream for women to pursue jiu-jitsu with the enthusiasm that Emily did. The same is valid for competing in mixed martial arts. Women didn't do it back then like they do it today. It was like her entire career; she had to repeatedly battle glass ceilings and break through them, which ultimately paved the way for so many other practitioners, including myself." - Paul Kindzia
It was very early 2016. I was a brand-new white belt. I had just gotten hurt in class for the umpteenth time. To my more experienced classmates, I was a disposable and probably a temporary asset that wouldn't last very long.
My spirits were low, and I was growing extremely frustrated. I had a spark of genuine interest in jiu-jitsu. It appealed to me from the "promise" of the art. The marketing pitch for jiu-jitsu was that it worked on my brain, which was attached to my aging body. I was already 46 and starting a very physical activity from scratch.
Jiu-jitsu was supposed to be a martial art in which a smaller and weaker person could neutralize or beat a bigger and stronger opponent.
HOGWASH! (I probably really said, "This is bullsh!t...") After trying jiu-jitsu for a few months and getting creamed, I felt the marketing promise was a giant scam. I obviously could not do it effectively and was at the point of quitting.
I had already discovered Stephan Kesting, one of the early pioneers of jiu-jitsu instructional material. I signed up for his digital downloads, the first one within days of beginning my jiu-jitsu journey, which was called "A Roadmap for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu." It was a helpful mental resource that eliminated early confusion about what was happening during those initial sparring rounds.
Kesting was way ahead of his time, writing articles, producing online videos, selling DVDs, and even having an iPhone App before most people even knew what an App was.
I came to one of what would be many splits in my journey. Should I quit, move on to another activity, or try something different? I tried something different when I saw two DVDs for sale with Kesting and a woman named Emily Kwok.
It was brilliant marketing in hindsight. It appealed directly to me. Here’s this more petite woman teaching jiu-jitsu, and the title of the DVDs just jumped out and punched me in the face. The DVD was “How to Defeat The Bigger, Stronger Opponent.” There were two different DVDs. The first was for No-Gi, and the second was for Gi. I had to have both of them and get them as quickly as possible.
What the DVDs did for me was more than teach me some techniques. What the DVDs gave me was hope. I hope there is at least some possibility, no matter how remote, that perhaps I, too, can learn how to defeat a bigger and stronger opponent. If this small-looking woman could do it, maybe I could do it, too.
Through those initial DVDs, I was introduced to a woman named Emily Kwok. She wasn't like the men in other instructionals. She was well-spoken, precise, friendly, encouraging, intelligent, and appeared to be very capable on the mats. If this was a marketing ruse, it worked.
As the years ticked by, I would follow Emily's journey. She was ahead of her time in every aspect of her career. A true pioneer. She was the first female Canadian jiu-jitsu blackbelt. She was the first female Canadian jiu-jitsu world champion. She was an early pioneer in women's amateur and professional MMA. She was among the first female academy owners when she opened up Princeton Jiu-Jitsu in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2011.
In a remarkable popcorn trail of coincidences, Emily was part of a small group of grapplers I followed, and they all shared a lineage back to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Emily was born in Aomori, Japan, but her family immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, when she was young. Stephan Kesting was in Vancouver. Rob Biernacki of Island Top Team/BJJConcepts.com and Steve Kwan, the founder of the BJJ Mental Models Podcast, were also from Vancouver.
Early on in my journey, I gave a lot of thought as to who I eventually wanted to receive my blackbelt from. The person mattered to me for what they achieved on the mats and what they stood for off the mats. Their character counted tremendously.
During many frustrating points of my journey, I found refuge in the BJJ Mental Models podcast with Steve Kwan. He would often say things (out loud) that I was thinking quietly to myself. He would take it further and even make fun of jiu-jitsu culture. I was shocked by this as it wasn't ordinarily acceptable to talk about jiu-jitsu culture negatively and certainly not make fun of it. I couldn't stop listening to some of those early episodes.
Emily was a frequent guest on the BJJ Mental Models podcast before eventually getting her micro-podcast on the BJJ Mental Models Premium Subscription, "The Highest Levels."
Some of those early podcasts changed how I viewed the culture of jiu-jitsu, what was possible, what was acceptable, and what was not adequate. They gave me the confidence to find my path and stand up for conduct or behavior I thought was negative.
If you are interested in listening to the episodes that solidified my views and opinions on Emily as a person and as a high-performing executive coach, I would recommend the following;
- Episode 109: Peak Performance featuring Emily Kwok
- Bonus Episode published on December 23, 2021: "The Master & The Apprentice featuring Emily Kwok & Dominica Obelenyte."
- Episode 190: Competing After 40 featuring Emily Kwok
- Episode 229: The Abundance Mindset featuring Emily Kwok
- All the episodes of her Premium Podcast under BJJ Mental Models, "The Highest Levels," (Paid subscription required but well worth it.)
I was also a fan of Josh Waitzkin and even highlighted Josh in my book (Master Jiu-Jitsu Master Life). Josh was Marcelo Garcia's first ranked black belt and a training partner for Emily. Josh wrote a book that influenced me called, "The Art of Learning." Josh was a real-life child chess prodigy and the core character after which the movie, "Searching for Bobby Fischer," was made. (It's an outstanding movie that I highly recommend.)
Emily works with Josh as a high-level corporate executive coach for Josh's consulting practice. They have clients like the Boston Celtics, many high-tech companies, and other entrepreneurs in Boston, MA, and beyond.
I started reaching out to people I knew in the jiu-jitsu community who knew Emily, including Dominica Obelenyte (herself a 4X World Champion). Dom was good friends with Emily, as they were training partners at the Marcel Garcia Academy in New York City. I would ask Dom, "Can you please lobby for me with Emily to take me on as a client/student?"
The lobbying campaign was successful. I began working with Emily when she still lived full-time in Princeton, New Jersey, and was running her jiu-jitsu school as the lead instructor/owner, consulting with Josh. She would later relocate her and her family to Costa Rica, where Josh Waitzkin was living full-time so that they could collaborate on the executive coaching business.
Emily was still traveling to more significant North American locations (and the world), giving seminars, competing, and running camps/retreats. I would join Emily on the road to get face time, which supplemented our coaching calls and worked with our work and travel schedules.
As an early brown belt, I knew that my chances of becoming a blackbelt were growing exponentially. However, I wanted to control my destiny and believed that who I got my blackbelt from mattered tremendously.
Even though I was starting to feel more confident about the possibility of making blackbelt, there were many stretches when I needed more confidence. I often found myself confused, disoriented, appalled, rejected, and outcast from many in the jiu-jitsu community. I oscillated from frustration to anger, doubt, sadness, and hopelessness many times during those last few years.
Emily herself would often push my buttons and challenge me to dig deeper into understanding why I was doing what I was doing, why I cared about what other people thought, or encourage me to find my truth. There were many times when I didn't understand what she was trying to teach me at that moment, and only in hindsight did I see the value in her lessons.
I had to dig deep to determine what I wanted from jiu-jitsu and why. Who was important to me, and who wasn't? What did I want to achieve, and was it to impress others or myself? Those were significant differences.
So much of our jiu-jitsu journey could be wrapped up in trying to impress others, yielding power to others, and needing external validation. I was guilty of those things at various times in my journey. I often would be consumed with doing things in jiu-jitsu that, at the end of the day, didn’t matter to me, but I thought they mattered to others. Emily got me to see that all those other people didn’t matter. What mattered was inside of me. I had to figure out what a quality life was for Paul Kindzia.
Jiu-Jitsu has a funny way of getting us twisted up mentally and emotionally (on top of physically). I’m so glad I had someone guiding me on finding my path and being true to myself. I’m so much happier as a practitioner because of Emily. It’s like she cut the control strings on being a puppet to the local jiu-jitsu culture. I became free at last.
In October 2019, one of my biggest goals was accomplished: I was promoted to blackbelt by Emily Kwok in The Jiu-Jitsu Bunker. It was a fairy-tale ending to a journey that was often a toxic waste dump of nonsense.
Emily was with me during many frustrating days and stretches of my jiu-jitsu path, during which I did a lot of my class training at Alliance (until I got kicked out) and then at Odyssey (where I also got kicked out). Many in the jiu-jitsu community accepted my desire to create my path and do things non-traditionally.
One of the things I was grateful for was that Emily was so open-minded about my journey, how I wanted to train, compete, travel, learn from various instructors, have friends at multiple schools, train at multiple schools, and be “non-denominational.”
Very few people get the opportunity to work with world-class people and professionals in their chosen field. I am fortunate to have had that opportunity and learned so much from Emily.
I label myself as “non-denominational,” but that doesn’t mean that I am not incredibly proud to call myself an “Emily Kwok” blackbelt because I couldn’t think of a person who was a better influence on me during my entire journey nor a person that I respected as much in the jiu-jitsu industry.
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