You don't want to get caught in a ring thinking too much, and on the flipside you don't want to don't want to walk into the ring like a chicken with your head cut. You're fighting a more experienced fighter than yourself and his gloves ought to tell you whan you need to work on. At first you'd use your learning experience from sparring to create starting points that you can work on when you're training. If you're getting hit, then you're probably getting hit for a reason. Spend your time after your sparring sessions to figure out what happened and how it happened. Ask the right questions. Find out what the problem is, and then break it down and find out what will happen when you do something different.

As a beginner there are many different techniques that you can learn to help you deal with different punches/situations. Discipline yourself to stick to techniques and just keep improving at it. You'll see what happens to even professional fighters when they revert to their old ways, they get shot down, end of story. Real guts is not so much about taking the best that your opponent can dish out, it's about thinking yourself out of a dillema even if you have a skilled opponent that's trying to take your head off.