Recently, I was thinking about, in terms of teaching karate, how a teacher's ability to help students work on their weaknesses in training is limited by the weaknesses that teacher has had to work on themselves in their own training. Because how can they give advice or even see it from the student's perspective if they've never experienced it themselves?

I've come to the conclusion that it actually isn't a problem.Studying karate is mainly a process of independent discovery which doen't require an external teacher. Besides, no two karateka are the same and different things work for different people; two karateka might've experienced the same weakness and found different ways to overcome it. Therefore, when teaching karate, it's important to see students, not as 'students', but as independent karateka who can think for themselves. It's important to accept that they're capable of finding ways to work on things which require work in a way that suits them. It would be naive of me to assume that all karateka make the effort to look at their training in this much depth, but only they can control how much they put in to their training. If they don't put much in, then they miss out on the benefits that karate has to offer with nobody but themselves to blame. It would also be naive of me to say that accepting students can work on their training unaided applies in all situations. With minor technical inaccuracies, a teacher often has to demonstrate the correct way of doing something. But a karateka's long term progress is theirs and theirs alone. This is particularly true if it's a teacher like me who dosen't teach the same students on a regular  basis.

Alongside this, the  act of teaching itself is not just a matter of passing on infomation. When I see my Sensei teach, someone who does teach the same students regularly, he's doing more than just passing on infomation. So many of us, myself included, would miss out if he didn't teach in the open way that he did. The effort he puts in to helping each student improve show that that's his genuine aim; he's not in it for himself. The way he teaches dosen't hide the fact that he's passionate about martial arts, which is infectious. If it wasn't for him, I might've given up long ago. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Teaching is not jst a matter of passing on infomation so the teacher's own experiences in terms of that aren't too much of an issue. It's about being sincere in your aim to help them improve their karate and loving and practicing karate in a way that does it justice so it comes through when teaching and students go on to realise the huge benefits that karate has to offer. This is way more than just passiing on infomation; the amount a teacher can help students work on weaknesses within their training is most certainly not limited by the weaknesses they've experienced themselves- I think I've made that point clearly!