As I move on in years, I've lost all my original teachers. They've all either died, retired, or moved on and I've been unable to reach them. So, recently, I've been reflecting a lot on my own personal journey in the martial arts, and how I was affected by my contact with various instructors. All taught martial arts, but the relationship they had with their students was very different. Some I would call coaches or mentors, others were martial-arts celebrities with champion-level physical skills, another was a "Grandmaster" of some renown in his day, and finally some were simply skilled individuals willing to share their craft.
What kind of instructors have you all had? How would you characterize your experience with them? And, finally, what do you value and look for most for in a martial-arts instructor?