Your first tournament, you’ll think everyone else looks tougher. They’re thinking the same about you.

Nerves are invisible from the outside. You get the full feed of your own doubt and only the surface of everybody else, so their warm-up looks confident and yours feels fraudulent. The kid across the mat with the serious face is running the same commentary, and nobody in the room knows this about anybody else.

Look around at the next one and remember you are also part of somebody’s intimidating scenery. Give yourself a routine for the twenty minutes beforehand so the nerves have somewhere to go. And notice that the feeling almost always drops the moment it actually starts.