I've been a blue belt ~ 2 years now and I'm just feeling really demotivated lately. I haven't had as much time to come to class since I was promoted (1-2x a week at best) and I feel like I'm stagnating.
Guys who I came up with are smashing me now, and I'm even struggling against guys who I saw come in as fresh white belts - not all of them bigger than me.
I know I shouldn't compare myself to others, and I'm genuinely happy my teammates are doing well and improving. They've been putting in the work and they deserve it.
The part that's killing me is I feel like I'm the one who's not improving, even just relative to myself. My style is so 1-dimensional that everybody in the gym knows how to avoid my A-game so I end up stuck in bad positions just trying to survive the round with 0 attacking pressure. I just feel completely stuck and it's extremely demoralizing.
I used to get excited to go to class 3-4x a week, in fact I used to go too much to the point where I had to slow down due to nagging injuries. Now I'm barely dragging myself to class once a week because "I'm paying for it so I might as well get my money's worth"
I'm sure that others have experienced similar periods of demotivation - so my question is, how do you get that spark back? What helped you break through that plateau and level up your game?
Any and all advice, encouragement, or criticism is welcome and appreciated.