Recently, the company I work for has been asked what our secret to success is.
I’ll share a quote my boss said yesterday.
We had just finished a day-long course with Mike Seeklander on single-hand pistol, cq combat and fitness.
We never stop learning because we LOVE teaching.
All three LST instructors are accomplish shooters and instructors. There are many instructors who rest on their laurels; they’ve taught for decades and, because of that, they claim they are great instructors. Yet they haven’t taken a course on Pistol in decades either. They stopped learning.
Being a great instructor means being a great student. Practice. Learn. Struggle. Observe.
This with a dash of humility and kindness is our recipe for success.
One of the the most gratifying things an instructor can hear from an experienced shooter is “You taught me something today.” The only way to gain additional experience is to be a student.
I teach a bit of long range and in one of my last classes I had a Marine sniper with significant real world experience. Fortunately he was of the Humble variety always looking for new tools (I’ve had the other kind too) that came up to me as we were packing up and started picking my brain about something I said during the class. It was a tidbit that I learned when I was on the Navy Rifle Team passed down by a vintage (VietNam era) Army sniper. He said “That (what it was we were talking about), was worth missing my son’s birthday party for, I’ll pass it along.”
Never be too proud to be a “student” and never be afraid of adding an experience to a lesson.
While I was working through my post graduate degrees, I helped create my Universities online tutoring program. I will say I learned more individually, when I was teaching a student. That’s just me though.
YMMV
