Ever look back on yourself after years of training?

When I first started competing in open competitions I thought my victories were due to simply being in a superior style. That any riff-raff from Kyokushin was better than someone who'd trained the same amount of time in another style.

Yeah, daft.

A certain amount of self-reflection is healthy I think and I can think of several mistakes or times when I should have done or handled something differently in the past. That's part of learning really and using prior experience and prior events in helping you to adjust and not continue to make the same mistakes again or to repeat them is a good thing.

In regards to my training I don't have a lot of regrets and have been very fortunate and lucky in that aspect. While I have and call myself a TMA and come from a strong background in that I was also always a bit of a maverick in my approach to TMA and what I would also seek out and learn as well as hand down to my students.

Any mistakes or regrets I have about my past are more along the lines of things outside of martial arts like not pursuing more college education during my free time when in the military or maybe marrying my first wife or my last girl-friend who turned out to be a beautiful, sociopath, with bi-polar tendencies who uses her looks and body like you would use a gun and still seems to think she should bother ex boyfriends today, many years later.

I always saw kickboking as a brutal sport/martial art now I train semi contact kickboking and it's not brutal. Upi see difrent now of any kind of m art or sport.

Sure. It helps to do that, so you can better relate to new students. My outlook has changed with my abilities and responsibilities of rank.

yes i do, i like to reflect and it shows my improvement sometimes, and others it shows where i could improve. and how i used to think and how that's changed