What do yous like to do to frustrate or confuse your opponents to make your attacks easier and them more likely to mess up? My trainer told me an old trick is a stop and go footwork technique. Your moving around your opponent and you do a sudden stop as they react to you you move again.
I go for their openings. Eventually it will become overwhelming and they'll screw up big time and leave their face wide open.
The best way to learn to do this is experience and making your own fighting style while being able to understand your opponents. You achieve this through full contact sparring, and a lot of it with a lot of different people who have different styles of fighting (not karate or judo style, but rather different techniques different people try to use while fighting in a specific combat sport).
In terms of striking... Learning to use beats in your combinations. Most people are trained (whether they know it or not) to fight in a typical musical 4 beat (even if throwing 1,2,3,4,5 or 6 hits). Learn to drop a beat, insert half beats and even use a 3/3 rather than a 4/4. Use feints/fakes on some of the beats, fake on a half beat, etc. Also, mostly people hit left-right-left-right alternating sides as they strike (starting with left or right). This is good as it allows good power chambering for the follow on strike.... But, if we learn to do combinations in a left-right-right or left-right-left-left we break the mold a bit. THEN... you combine beat training with multiple same side hitting and you end up with a plethora of combination types which tend to go beyond the standard left-right-left-right (jab-cross-hook-cross) template. NOTE: I am not dissing the 'standard template' there is a reason that practically everyone uses it, because it generally works and is the platform from which we develop further skills.
If someone gives me an open guard in submission wrestling, I like kneeling on their shins. It hurts and it's surprising. So, it helps you transition to guard passes and other techniques.
I like to create openings like, I will purposely take a big step backwards, and they do the same (a big step forward) . This puts all there weight on the front foot, and I kick it really hard, because I know they can't defend it.
I do taekwondo, and my style of fighting is generally to try and produce an opening. By faking a punch or kick off the reverse hand or foot, you can make the opponent react by exposing a point area, and then score with the front hand. For example, if you pretend to do a punch off the back hand aiming at the head, the other person will probably lift their guard. You can then throw a kick off the front leg at the body because it will not be guarded. Basically, just try to fake attacks to create openings.
