Living with social anxiety isn’t easy. And Mikey Musumeci knows that well.

The top-ranking BJJ and ONE Championship submission grappling athlete has been dealing with social anxiety with most of his life.
However, he’s found a way to cope with it – through learning about other cultures.

He explained how learning about other cultures helps him connect with people, in a recent interview for ONE Championship:

I love connecting with people.

I feel like because I’m an introvert, I’ve always felt uncomfortable.
I remember when I was younger, I was very uncomfortable connecting with people.

So what helped me start learning to connect with people was learning about other people and their cultures and finding similarities between my culture in theirs.
And it became very fascinating to me.

He fell in love with the process of learning, which ultimately helped him connect with others:

I started liking to learn and study different cultures.
And once I started learning and studying different cultures, I started connecting more with people because I started understanding people better.

So I feel like that really helped me learn to connect with people when I learned about other cultures.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mikey Musumeci (@mikeymusumeci)