More secure with the Tani Otoshi
The Olympic slam on Insecurity
It’s a chilly Friday night, me and my cousins on the old cozy family sofas… eyes glued on the 21 inch Sony Trinitron and yes it’s time for the main event. The year is 05 and you know what that means…Kurt Angle vs the Undertaker on smackdown for the world heavyweight championship. Of course Kurt comes out first, Olympic medal on his neck, belt on his waist, Crowd chanting U sack to his entrance theme pumped up like a mf who is fresh from gulping 3 red bulls. One had that feeling he was going to break someone’s ankle that night. You had to be there. Looking back two decades later, wrestlers back then had ‘aura’ which the wrestling nowadays seem to have lost the epic storylines and pretty much the allure it had during the ruthless aggression era.
In this chapter of my life though I’m more into Martial arts. I’ve started Muay Thai at a local training spot as well as BJJ moves on the internet. One of my favorite moves is the Tani Otoshi aka valley drop. A sacrifice throw where the practitioner drops to their side behind the opponent to pull them over an extended leg. Such a cool takedown and a great offensive move in general.
What got me about the Tani Otoshi is that it doesn’t look like a winning move. You’re not standing tall or overpowering anyone. You drop to the mat, voluntarily, behind a bigger and stronger person, and somehow that’s what takes them down. It’s the opposite of what your ego wants to do in a fight.
I’ve been thinking about that move a lot lately, and not only on the mat. It’s the best metaphor I’ve found for insecurity.
What Maltz saw
Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon before he wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, and the book came out of something he kept noticing in his own operating room. He’d fix a patient’s face, sometimes beautifully, and some of them would still look in the mirror and see the same person. The nose was different. The feeling wasn’t. That led him to his central idea: each of us carries a self-image, a picture of who we are, and we act, perform, and feel in line with it, whether or not it’s accurate.
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On insecurity specifically, his view was that the feeling of inferiority is mostly a verdict based on comparison, and the comparison is usually unfair. We measure our behind-the-scenes against everyone else’s highlight reel, then conclude something is wrong with us. He argued that you’re not meant to rank yourself above or below anyone. You’re just you. The insecurity feels like a fact, but it’s really a conclusion drawn from a faulty picture.
His other big point is that the mind works like a steering system. It moves toward whatever target the self-image sets, and it corrects back toward it whenever you drift. That’s why people who “fix” their life without changing the picture slide back to where they started.
Where the Tani Otoshi comes in
Most fight insecurity head-on. We try to out-stand it. Think positive, hype yourself up, force confidence, pretend to be bigger than the feeling. That’s the equivalent of squaring up against a stronger opponent and hoping to win a shoving match. Insecurity wins that one, because it knows your weight and your weak spots better than anyone.
The Tani Otoshi works differently. You don’t push against the opponent. You give up the upright position, slip behind them, and let their own extended leg become the lever. Their own momentum and reach do the work.
Insecurity is always overextended in the same way. It leans out into comparison, into what other people think, into stories about the future that haven’t happened. That’s its extended leg. The move isn’t to meet it with a bigger ego. It’s to drop the ego, get behind the feeling instead of in front of it, and watch what it’s actually built on. Maltz does something similar when he says to question the picture itself. Once you see that the feeling stands on a borrowed comparison and an old self-image, it has nothing under it. Pull on that leg and it goes over by itself.
Angle never went after the head or the chest. He went after the base(ankle lock for my vintage wrestling fans), the one thing a person stands on. Insecurity has a base too or ankle :), which is the self-image, and that’s where the real work is. Work on the base and the rest follows.
The opposite is true
We spend years trying to look strong enough to beat what we’re afraid of. The Tani Otoshi is the opposite: you win by being willing to go down first. The ego can’t stay upright and also be honest about where it’s weak, and the throw only works once you stop trying to.
Standing tall was never the point. The point was never to fall for it.
