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The on-stage Gracie may look poised, but the real Gracie is shy, a little self-conscious, and, before every performance of my life, panicky.

I think we have tremendous media covering the sport of boxing, even if boxing is a little bit lost in popularity with MMA sports. And I think that with the show 'Lights Out' it's going to get more attention to the sport, and it's going to put more attention to the problems that athletes in general have.

I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.

When I came back to the UFC, I was just excited.

Back in the day, I was a Royce Gracie fan and a fan of Tank Abbott. It's always the different-looking guys that you want to root for. Then there were guys like Mark Coleman and Randy Couture, so for me to get in there and fight against guys like that is pretty cool.

People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.

I am very honored and excited to be part of UFC 100; it's going to be the hardest challenge of my career so far and it's going to be pretty tough - I can't wait.

There's such a big buzz around boxing at the moment. Everything's happening and there's so much building up with a lot of young talent coming through.

Coming back to the UFC was huge. I was ready for the spotlight for the first time.

There's always going to be some phenom fighter coming up. If they're special athletes and highly trained, they'll do big things.