Force Multipliers

Tell me if you’ve watched this scene play out before. You’re at practice and there’s clearly one person there who Is by and far the most experienced. They’re a great fight and spend their whole practice teaching the newest folk, giving them the highest quality introduction possible out of anyone there. They were an inspiration to you when you started and you wouldn’t still be here without them. However, now that you’ve been around for a few years and are starting to make a name for yourself, it’s getting harder and harder to get time in with them.

Now let’s look at this from the other side. Let’s say you are the one person in the room with a lot of experience. You could spend all of practice beating on a bunch of new folks, but we all know that’s the wrong move. Instead you give, and you give, and you give. You take the newest person, that fighter who needs the most work to improve and then you do it again when the next person comes through the door.

I would like to suggest a better path.

Giving constantly can be an admirable thing, but it’s also a recipe for burnout. 

There’s this idea out there that I stole from the military called “force multipliers”. There’s a lot of different use cases for this, but overall someone who is a force multiplier shows up somewhere and doesn’t just add to the power of the local forces, but serves to help multiply what that force can do. You can do the same thing at your local practice.

101 classes are a pretty straightforward thing to run. They can be some of the most demanding, but you’ve given that lesson a dozen times before. Really advanced students largely know what they want to work on and just need someone to serve as a sounding board. It’s those folks right in the middle that often fall through the cracks.

Now I realize that you’re concerned more about whether or not that new person has a good first impression and want to make sure they don’t have to relearn something they might have picked up early on, but that doesn’t mean you should do all of it yourself. Instead, I’d like to suggest something that while straightforward, can be agonizingly difficult at times.

Invest in your force multipliers.

Each practice, set some time aside to help your mid-level folks grow and take that next step. I realize it might not feel that they need help RIGHT NOW, but if you keep putting it off they’re never going to grow to the point where they can really pitch in. This is going to be a long term investment, but it’s something that pays off. The more you can bring those mid-level folk in, the easier the work of helping people up from the bottom becomes.

Invest in them both fighters and teachers. The fighting part you likely already know how to do. Help them improve their personal game, advise them as to what their personal area of excellence might be, and let them run little science experiments when they face off against you to see what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, you’ve gotta invest in them as teachers. Bring them in to help TA your next class, tell them what you just showed that new person and tell them to teach whatever’s next, encourage them to go and lead their own classes. Being a good fighter doesn’t make you a great teacher. Teaching is a skill all on it’s own and is something you need to grow into and constantly refine.  For however much literature we have on how to fence, we’ve got multitudes more on how to teach. I can count the number of people I know with advanced degrees in fencing on one hand. How many do you know with teaching degrees?

I know it can be hard and that you can feel like you’re doing your newer people a disservice by not spending the entire time with them but trust me. Investing in your force multipliers can lead to exponential dividends and will overall make your practice a more attractive place to be.