At some point in your journey, many of you will find yourself in this position of simultaneous teacher / student roles, whether you willingly sought it out or the responsibility was dropped onto your lap.  Sometimes you’re the blue-belt who’s asked for help teaching new students.  Sometimes you’re the brown belt who is impatient to start your own school. Maybe you’re just an experienced mat-rat whom a rookie grappler attaches themselves to, and you didn’t seem to have much of a say in the matter.  However it happens, most of us experience one or another version of this growth into teaching roles at some point before we even feel “finished” ourselves, the higher we go in hours of mat time logged. 

Sometimes the demands for either role are a lot on their own.  Meeting the dual requirements can be an even bigger challenge, and not always in just the intuitive and expected ways. You’ll have to keep the humility of a student.  You’ll also have to confront your confidence levels about credibly passing along techniques even if you’re not the best combatant in the world, keeping imposter syndrome (a hindrance serving neither you nor your students) at bay.  And you’ll often have to pivot between both of these situations within mere seconds of one another.

It’s hard, but here’s a dirty little secret: you should have this lifelong dichotomy of student / teacher anyway, if you’re lucky.  Some of us wish we still had so much access to our own teachers, without having to cast a wider net for our own continued learning.  You’ll inevitably do the same, looking everywhere for knowledge to keep yourself growing as a student and teacher of other students.  So your appetite for new information should never dull; just go ahead and throw any impulse to create an illusion of all-knowingness right in the trash, and sooner rather than later.  

Don’t wait for someone like me to tell you that every teacher in this art is mortal, and if they aren’t tapping to training partners, they aren’t training hard enough.  Don’t wait too long to realize that this idea applies to you as well.  Be prepared to have rough rolls in front of your students, wherein you don’t always come out on top.  And use those rough rolls to sincerely advance your progress and fill in your weak areas.  Stay rooted in the real.  Don’t become the mythical teacher.

That’s mostly the secret: be as enthusiastic about serving as a teacher as you are willing to tap, and be as willing to be humbled as you are insatiable to learn new things.  And if/when you’re capable enough to get to black belt, don’t believe your own hype.

Further, if you don’t fall into either of the categories I mentioned above (you sought out a teacher role, or one was thrust upon you): consider going into this split-identity willingly.  It will work wonders for your own understanding of technique.  It’s often said that you never truly understand a technique or principle until you have to teach it to someone else.

These seem like basic truisms, but you can actually make a lot of these concrete disciplines, to keep yourself from getting stagnant.  In case you’re wondering, that is one of the biggest dangers once you’ve been in a teaching role long enough, and yes, your students’ own learning and progress will suffer from that stagnation.  Make wish-lists of areas to research, and check them off systematically.  

And what about serendipity?  Isn’t that a key to continued growth too?  Yes!

Check-in routinely with your level of openness to discovery apart from stuff you’ve already listed out.  Watch grappling sports / arts lateral to your own, and be systematically curious about what’s going on in those areas; make lists of things that catch your eye from those lateral domains as well, and then chase down those lists.

Still have access to your teacher, even if not in an every-day sense?  Great!  Share your research activities with them, even if just in broad strokes.  And be prepared that they might not align with all your curiosities and new avenues of discovery, but good teachers want you to develop in ways diverging from their own mold.

Did I mention to stay humble?  And rooted in a never-ending awareness of your own mortality as the student/teacher embodied in one?  Yes, I think I mentioned that in several different ways, but its worth repeating.  Make this a journey you start early, so you rarely have to re-situate yourself in an awareness of your own vulnerabilities.  Get as much of the cognitive dissonance pre-confronted as you can at blue-belt, purple belt, brown belt, and so on.  If you become a teacher once you’re already supposed to be “the guy to beat” in the room, you may have a much harder time learning the balance it takes to be a lifelong student while also teaching.

As a bonus bit of advice, nurture the ability to see your students as your occasional teachers too.  This will often become literally true the moment you notice they learned a technique (out of all the nearly endless supply of techniques out there) that you haven’t learned yet.  It can be a big honor and confidence booster for your students when you show this willingness to learn from them, and they also feel just a bit more connected to you as a human being rather than an unapproachable mentor figure.

On that note, do your part to nurture a healthy culture of peer-reinforced learning, while still being careful to manage the well-known phenomenon of the white belt in the room who constantly tries teaching literally everyone in the room a bunch of stuff they don’t know themselves.  Which, yes: you will definitely have to confront this challenge at some point too.

On the note of dojo-cultures to nurture, that’s a great part of it: a sense of appreciation for students investing in one another’s learning.  Set that example as both a fellow student and a teacher.  Make it about the school, not about you.  In fact, that last bit can serve as a skeleton key for just about every other aspect of advice listed above.