Teaching

There's a difference between being a good fighter and being a good teacher.  Just because you know how to do something doesn't necessarily mean you can teach someone else to do that thing you know.  Teaching people is a whole other skill set from actually being a good fighter.  In many cases you can be a good teacher even at a point where you're relatively new, or you're an old fighter that's passed your prime.  Over years of trial and error here are some things that I've learned about teaching other people how to fight.  Some of it's theory, some of it's psychology and it's all presented in no particular order.

General Principles

Everyone learns differently

Everyone learns differently, which means that even if you have a system down for how to teach a particular skill set (say footwork) some people may not understand it as you present it to them.  There's nothing wrong with them for not immediately understanding your particular method and trying to get them to learn in a way that doesn't suite them is going to make both you and your student very frustrated.  Telling a person to grind on something until they get it works for some individuals but not others.  If a person doesn't want to grind on a skill until they've learned it then trying to force them to do so isn't going to get you anywhere.  What I've learned to do in the case where my way of teaching something doesn't seem to be working is to enlist someone else that I've taught the relevant skill set to explain.  Sometimes it's just a matter of re-phrasing something that you've already said so that it clicks in their brain.  Sometimes it can just be repeating something you've already said at a time when the student is prepared to hear those words.  The other solution that I've found to this particular problem is to have several drills that all cover more or less the same thing.  This way you can rotate through drills until you find one that works for the particular person that you're working with.  Once they've got a handle on the skill that you're trying to impart to them then you can roll through other drills that were (at least at first) less obvious to them.

Fake it till you make it

It takes a fair amount of repetition before a skill becomes so second nature that you no longer have to actively think about it's execution.  This is part of why some of the more advanced, meta skills can't be learned by new people.  As an example, in order to have good field awareness you need to be able to both focus on the person in front of you as well as keeping an eye on the rest of the field.  If you spend all of your focus on fighting the person in front of you then you won't be able to also keep an eye on the other fighters around you.  It's important to make sure that you don't overload a person as they begin to learn new skills.  Even if your student is eager to learn  more skills you need to make sure that they've actually internalized whatever you've taught them before you move on to new things.  In the same way that you've got a finite amount of focus, and the more you spread it out between different things, the less focused you are on each thing, you have a finite amount of space for processing new information and the more you try to learn at one time the more of that information gets lost and will have to be re-learned.  Which leads me into my next point...

Start with the basics

People have the tendency to want to learn the most advanced, flashy things that they can right out of the gate because it looks "cool".  Unfortunately trick shots tend to 1) not be very effective, 2) are high risk, low reward and 3) tend to require excellent fundamentals before you can execute them properly.  The last trick shot I taught myself was a spin/wrap to my opponents sword side leg (assuming they're a righty).  To throw this swing I need to gauge the distance between myself and my opponent correctly, step sideways, spin, block my back and then time a wrap shot at the extent of my reach.  It is an absurdly complicated shot so even though looks pretty cool when I can execute it correctly and has been great against slower opponents with big boards, it's a trick shot because it's never the first thing I'd want to throw.  95% of the time I'm happy to just throw a pretty standard leg sweep.  It looks boring because it's just a loop, but it's super safe to throw, it has a high rate of success and it's rare for me to mess up while throwing it.  Fundamentals might be boring but getting good at them is the fastest way to become a better fighter.  Also most of the skills that a person learns become more effective when they have good fundamentals.  As an example every swing you can learn to throw benefits from having good footwork and positioning.  In the same way that getting the first layer of an all foam constructed sword correct is important because any imperfections will be magnified with each additional layer of foam getting fundamentals correct is important because any flaws with the basics will make every other learned skill worse.  For some starting drills you can check out a post on basic footwork or arms.

Psychology

Ego is the enemy

This splits in a number of different directions so let me try to start with context.  As human beings we all have some kind of ego that we take into the sport (and everywhere else).  Too little ego can be bad because you'll be afraid of swinging and you may spend all your time after fights getting down on yourself.  With too much ego you'll be reckless; making mistakes you shouldn't make and you'll tend to blame others for your shortcomings rather then look at what you could have done better.  It's important to make sure, especially when you're learning, that you keep your ego in check and focus on improving for the sake of improving rather then for the sake of your own glory.

Fall in love with the process

If you fight to be a badass and you don't accomplish that goal then you're likely to despair.  You'll be disappointed because there's a gap between what you want and where you are.  The solution is to fall in love with the process of becoming better.  If your goal isn't to become a badass but rather to just improve, or as I've phrased it before, to learn to suck less, then it's much easier to meet your goals and see tangible progress.  If you honestly enjoy the process of learning/improving then getting good is something that will come as a result of that process over time whereas if your focus is on becoming great every time you fall short you'll wind up kicking yourself, which tends to detract from the process of improvement.

Relentless

I think the quote goes something like "the master has failed more times then the student has even tried".  I have a particular thing where my brain is somewhat defective in regards to learning new physical things (it's called dyspraxia if you want to look it up).  What this has meant for me is that I've had to drill on new motions until it all becomes muscle memory and second nature.  My brain simply cannot figure things out on the fly the way some other people's minds can.  That same process though is good for anyone.  Learning to do a swing properly and then repeating it until it becomes second nature will mean that when you're out on the field you don't have to think about it's execution.

Focus

If you're focused on the task at hand then you can avoid some of the pitfalls related to ego.  Don't give yourself a chance to beat yourself up for your mistakes, simply try again.  If you spend less time moping about your errors and simply focus on the thing that went wrong and correcting it, then you'll improve.  But, by the same token, if, after every loss, you're too busy feeling bad about it then you'll pass up your opportunity to learn from the mistakes you made.  Take a moment to play the fight back in your head.  Fighting comes down to throwing a shot that can hit and being able to block your opponents swings.  So figure out what shot they threw that you didn't block.  Figure out which shots you threw that didn't get past their guard and figure out how to make them connect.  Most fighters, especially veterans who love the sport, will be happy to show you how they executed that last shot they threw.  

A random story

There was a fighter I used to work with who had terrible honor because she got frustrated when she got killed.  When I trained her as part of the initial generation of the unit "The Blades" at first it was pretty painful.  But when she got into the flow of things her honor was pretty much spot on during our unit practices, (the rest of the time there were still some issues...).  The thing that we did as a unit was be in constant combat so that you didn't have much time to rest or think.  This meant that you were more reliant on the muscle memory that you'd built up rather then your ability to think on your feet.  The goal was to push oneself to try and surpass however good they thought they were.  By pushing a person they could more easily focus on the fight because they didn't have as much time to think or get in their own way.  We taught people not only to fight honorably, but also to die fast so that you could get right back to fighting.  I found that when dying was less stigmatized because we placed value on learning and trying rather then on succeeding or winning it became much easier to get people to get more fights in by dying quickly and without the usual self-recrimination that tends to go with failure.  When her downtime for fighting became on the order of seconds she stopped wasting those seconds moping because she knew that if she simply got back up we could reset and continue.  I haven't had a group to train with at that intensity in quite some time but it's a set of memories I look back on fondly.