We recently connected with Erik Klinger and have shared our conversation below.
Erik, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?
My optimism traces back to a very young age. Being forced to overcome various obstacles I found early on that anything is possible if you keep an open mind, stay determined, and work towards a positive outcome. I came from a humble home where my mom worked long hours and instilled in me a strong work ethic. My father was an entrepreneur and although he lived far from us and saw all kinds of obstacles throughout his life, he helped me to see that you can create anything you want from your own thoughts mixed with an obsessive desire and determination to find your purpose. As a young boy, I realized that I could create things from nothing and make my own path in the world. I had a strong love for martial arts and began to pursue it at an early age as an escape from a home where there was not much supervision as my mom was constantly working and my father lived far away. I looked to the teachers within my martial arts school for mentorship and I found a great deal of bonding and knowledge there. One day when one of my instructors asked if I’d like to help teach kids classes. At that moment, I knew that I had found something to focus on and something to stay optimistic about. I began to follow him around teaching kids at several different community centers in various nearby cities. As I grew in age over the years he gradually stopped coming to classes and I eventually took over the classes completely. Kids would come to me with problems of being bullied, or having low self-esteem, or with learning disabilities, etc. I began to see that each and every one of them had many chances to overcome their respective issues through their martial arts training and when they did they became a completely different child and were in a completely optimistic state of mind. Before they overcame their challenges they were usually not willing to let their pessimism go. The parents were often quite similar in that respect to their kids. While the kids were usually put in the martial arts classes in order to overcome some sort of obstacle, the parents rarely thought that the classes would actually help them completely get rid of the issue. The parents usually thought that this shyness, or fear, or hyperactivity was physically a part of their child’s personality and was somewhat permanent. When shy kids would become outgoing, and weaker kids would become strong, parents began to lose their pessimistic outlook and soon turned optimistic about what their kids could do. I found parents that were generally not convinced that the classes would help their child when they would first arrived, turn into completely positive believers after several classes and seeing the change in their children with their own eyes. Other parents who seemed worried about their children, or uneasy, became confident and appreciative instead of doubtful and uninterested. I also witnessed parents who had lost faith in their children, and after weeks of watching them grow and overcome their respective obstacles, the parents began to become very optimistic about their children’s ability to change. This really helped me to develop optimism in my own life. Seeing that everyday people, both adults and children could completely change their paradigm through working through their difficulties and learning to overcome their challenges taught me that I too could overcome my own issues and weaknesses. When the kids learned to overcome their difficulties through patience, perseverance, and focus, they became completely different kids. They showed me that by being optimistic about an obstacle and if I would follow along with the teaching and guidance that I was giving, I too could overcome my own struggles and challenges. They taught me that there was a definite positive outcome if I would focus on achieving it.
By watching this transformation in my young students and their parents at an early age, I learned that anything is possible and if we stay optimistic we can see that around the corner there are incredible changes that will be truly magnificent if we believe in them and work towards making them happen.
This later translated into many situations that I have experienced and I’ve seen this repeat itself throughout my life, which has helped me to always keep my optimism strong.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I enjoy being a wealth advisor by day and a self-defense advisor by night. Some friends joke that I wrestle with the market during the day, and wrestle with my students at night. One of my favorite things about combining these two professions is that I get to meet amazing people from all walks of life. This has led me to meet incredible professionals and successful individuals, and has also led me to meet people in need of assistance, care, and opportunity. While discovering that I could be a part of many different peoples lives at the same time, I soon realized that I could use my experience and connections to do greater good for people in need. This eventually led me around the world helping underprivileged families and children by setting up martial arts programs and schools in villages and towns that didn’t have financial capabilities of sustaining a facility or equipment for children to train. By supporting these programs both financially and through mission trips to visit and bring supplies, this has become one of my biggest passions. These trips started soon after founding the first Level up Jiu Jitsu school in 2015 in Santa Monica, California. When a past student of mine moved back to his hometown in a mountainous village in Guatemala, a 6 hour drive from the biggest city. He called me from his home and asked if I could help him to be able to teach the children in his village, At that moment I knew that I had found a calling for myself outside of my normal teaching and advising that I was used to in my normal routine. This trip to Guatemala led to more trips and I soon began to travel around the world helping children in impoverished areas to get uniforms and mats for training and to help support their coaches to become professional leaders for these children in their community. I did this originally with students of mine and later with friends in the Jiu Jitsu community and it soon developed into a major network of schools located in Asia, South America, Central America, and even here in the U.S. where children train and learn at no-cost to them and with support from the Level Up community and friends around the world. Although I wake up early to work in the markets and to help guide my clients through their financial goals, I’m extremely passionate about helping to guide young people through their own personal journey and goals as well. I do this through the Level Up Jiu Jitsu schools and also through what has developed into the Mugen Mindset method of growth and the path towards optimal-experience. Mugen Mindset is a methodology I founded years ago which focuses on pursuing and finding purpose and passion in the various aspects of your life. It evolves mainly around five core-pillars of life enrichment; Spouse (dating, relationship, romantic growth), Family/Friends (personal connection), Work/Career (professional growth), Society/Community (contribution to your community and the world), and Self (bettering your mind, body, and soul). This system for mindset has helped me and many students of the system to grow through balancing life’s various challenges and by becoming more thoughtful about the process towards happiness or what I really like to call, optimal-experience.
Through Mugen Mindset, Level Up Jiu Jitsu schools, the children’s projects around the world, and my financial practice, I find that I have a lot of positive motivation each day to become better, learn deeper, and expand my vision further. I’m excited to see what comes next and eager to share what I have learned along the way.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Looking back, I would say that the three skills that most helped me in my journey were; listening, learning, and being open-minded.
1. Listening is one of those skills that takes so much time and patience. To become a good listener you have to really want to stop talking and stop hearing your own mind race when you want to talk. The more you listen, I’ve found, the more you can find out important things that you need to know or that you want to know and these things can often lead you to exactly where you want to go. I noticed that when I stopped telling people what I thought, I soon learned exactly how to get to a position where I could influence them to want to hear what I thought. This has helped me deeply throughout many phases of my life as I have spent a lot of time with different types of experts. I’ve been face to face with dangerous mixed martial arts experts across the globe, technical market wizards on wall street, and all kinds of people in between. The biggest lesson that I learned along the way is that the more listening I do, the more I grow and become better for the next steps in my own journey.
2. Learning is probably the second most important skill for me in my personal journey. It is the act of taking in what you have heard and making it a practical part of your life. When I began to realize how important it is to learn I realized that if I couldn’t afford a seminar, or time for a class, I would simply pick up a book or throw on an audio book while stuck in traffic. I ended up eventually transforming my evenings and daily commutes into my own private university. I grew this practice to not only reading but re-reading many books every year. I realized that over time we often forget more things we’ve learned over the years than we can imagine. Forgetting these important lessons is why I often focus on re-reading important books that have helped me in the past. each year with the same amount of re-reading as reading new books, as a major goal. Usually 24 total books per year if possible.
3. Being open-minded is something that has truly improved my professional and personal life. By remembering that I almost always do not know the only answer to something and reminding myself that there is always another opinion or perspective, I have been able to become better and better about improving my businesses, my relationships and my health. I used to hate thinking that I would be rolling around with people “grappling” on the ground. I was totally against it! This was my attitude until I got choked unconscious in a underground mixed martial arts match in Okinawa, Japan in my early twenties and woke up to see my opponent with his hand raised and smiling looking down at me. I realized on that day that I was wrong about my outlook on this “grappling” martial art and that if I wanted to become a well-rounded martial artist I needed to learn this foreign art. This helped me to notice other aspects of my life that I often overlooked or looked at from a naive or ignorant perspective. This lesson also helped me to realize that I never know everything about anything and that I often could learn a lot through keeping an open-mind. Sometimes enough to change my life.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
As one of my favorite authors says from one of my favorite books, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. In this quote, Viktor Frankl truly embodies his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, by eloquently describing the essence of attitude. Your attitude is controlled by you, your thoughts, and your mind. Independent of your circumstance, you control the attitude you have in response to that circumstance. Your attitude is simply knowing that you can control your thoughts through practice and care and that your thoughts control your mind’s direction away or towards what you truly want. What you truly want has nothing to do what’s been done to you, or the circumstances that you find yourself in. How you handle those circumstances is what determines your path towards achievement of your goals, and your eventual happiness. Another important quote from Frankl brings this choice in attitude to light again. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Through this quote you can see that Frankl highlights our choice in our attitude and how that choice can lead us towards growth and freedom. If we make a profound and careful choice of course, it can also lead us to the opposite which would be fear, eventual depression, and worse. Viktor Frankl’s experience in the holocaust and having been a concentration camp survivor taught him many lessons including the idea that you choose your thoughts, you choose your attitude, and no one controls these things but you. Learning from his experience has been a great gift. I try to work on my attitude, my thoughts, and improve my mindset daily and I attribute a lot of this to what I have been able to learn from Viktor Frankl’s words and wisdom.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.levelupjiujitsu.com
- Instagram: erikklinger
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/erik.klinger
- Linkedin: Erik Klinger
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mugenmindset2785/featured
- Other: https://www.mugenmindset.com/
https://www.ameripriseadvisors.com/erik.klinger/
Image Credits
I have the rights to all photos.
