What Michael Chandler taught me about the power of choosing gratitude and optimism (even in an unforgiving place like the UFC)

You learn so interesting things that cover the professional fighting world. Sometimes you get some things that could qualify as “life lessons” or maybe even (and that might be stretching it a bit) “wisdom”.

For example, I remember Dustin Poirier once telling me that in hard times, the days only seem unbearable if you try to live them all at once. And I often remind myself of something 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 to our advantage .

So when I interviewed Michael Chandler this past week ahead of his co-main event fight at UFC 309 on Saturday, the first thing I asked him was how he became so relentlessly positive. I didn’t ask 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 were simply born with.

“I think it’s a combination of things,” Chandler said.

At first, he assumes 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 what really struck me was Chandler’s insistence that the key to staying positive is gratitude.

“Gratitude is a choice,” Chandler said. “I try to connect everything with gratitude. You can choose 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 something happens bad thing for you, but a good thing comes out of it – whether the good thing is that you were made stronger by the experience, you learned something, you grew as a person – was it really a bad thing?”

The famous fight trainer Greg Jackson once told me that fighters need to be optimists. There are so many ways things can go wrong in this sport. This applies in the matches themselves, but it also applies outside the cage. You can blow out an ACL during exercise. You may be assigned a bad scorecard by the judges. The big money fight you’ve spent years waiting for could disappear based on nothing more than an injured toe. But if you want to keep going and create a life for yourself in MMA, you have to believe that good things will happen to you – even if they may come disguised as bad things at first.

When I first heard that from Jackson, I assumed he meant that fighters should be the kind of people who are naturally optimistic. It didn’t occur to me that it could 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 make it to your advantage. And if you’re going to be in the cage against Charles Oliveira with the future of your career on the line, you better believe you’ve put in the work to get a good break or two.