Wading through that aforementioned duality allowed him to spotlight some red flags he didn’t necessarily ignore but more so didn’t realize were anything of note in the first place.
“I was realizing about six months ago that I started wanting a lot of things,” Sandhagen said. “I had always lived my life as minimalistic as an American comfort level can get. I started realizing now, looking back, that I was wanting a lot of things. I think that was messing up a lot of my internal motivators and stuff. It went from internal to a lot of external motivators. I’m back to the internal motivation.”
Although the 28-year-old has just six UFC fights under his belt, he believes he has already accomplished plenty. Not in a cocky or ignorant sense, but just in the understanding of the stage he is on in the world’s highest-level mixed martial arts promotion. This is especially true in the bantamweight division, arguably the deepest and most dynamic division in the UFC, top to bottom.
In carrying the understanding that he has the goods to compete with the best in the world as well as an environment that promotes growth and greatness, Sandhagen zeroed in on what drives him to put hypothetical success into reality – to not waste the chance to accomplish what he believes can be something “really, really great” in his career.
“If you give a tree enough water and enough sunlight, that thing is going to grow as big as it can in its life, and other trees that don’t get as much water and don’t get as much sunlight, they’re not going to grow as big. Same thing with lions and gorillas. If you’re the biggest, baddest gorilla in the jungle, and you’re able to reproduce or able to own as much territory as you can, you just do it because that’s nature. I’m trying to land in on that as my motivation where it’s like, this is just your nature. Your nature is just that you can do this, and nature wants to keep pushing forward, and something inside of me just wants to keep pushing forward and wants to keep driving. That’s where the motivation is coming from now, I’m finding, so I don’t really have too many selfless reasons to fight. (Laughs) A lot of them are really selfish. It’s like, ‘Well, you can do it, so are you going to do it or not?’”
To further cultivate his own understanding of what drives him, Sandhagen turns to his circle of mentors, training partners and other fighters off whom he bounces ideas and asks questions that pop up daily. Sandhagen cites Christian Allen, his head coach with whom Sandhagen has trained since he was a teenager, as his “number one person” he goes to with ideas, and also cites wrestling coach Carrington Banks and Elliot Marshall as other people he can turn to with all the thoughts he has about his life as a fighter.
“I just try to surround myself with as many solid people as I can, again, for my own selfish needs,” he laughs. “I’m one of those guys where if I watch enough of one television show, I’ll start talking like the people on the television show. I’m a pretty vigilant person, but I have to be very careful with who I’m surrounding myself with, so I really just try to surround myself with people that are very, very good people because I know that rubs off on me.”
