Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Mistakes: How Fantastic!

Good judgment comes from experience, and most of that comes from bad judgment. -Will Rogers

From a young age, I learned that a mistake was the worst thing that I could make. I think most of us are burdened with this idea. We are taught that a mistake means that we are incompetent, or that we don't care enough to know the right answer, or that we just aren't smart. When our actions are received this way long enough, we begin to lose faith in ourselves, believing the perceptions of others must be more accurate than our own.

What leads to most of our fear of making a mistake is our cultural emphasis on strict dichotomies. Since the time of Aristotle, Western culture has been predicated on the idea that something must be one thing or another. Black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. By forcing these distinctions, we often create an either/or situation out of something that is actually a both/and. We say something is black, simply because it is not white.

Most of us learned to fear making a mistake because we were made to feel "wrong," simply because we were not right. In most situations, there is no need to make a person "wrong" for something. Wrongness carries with it a feeling of ownership. If we make a wrong choice, there is something wrong with us. This is a heavy burden to put on our backs every time our choice does not turn out to be right.

To learn, we must be willing to judge incorrectly at times. We must be unafraid of being not right. For if we fear "not being right," we learn to only risk ourselves when we are totally sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are correct. As we age, we discover that there is nothing certain in life, and we slowly, painfully learn to take fewer and fewer chances so that we won't have to feel wrong.

Because we have learned that not being right means we must be wrong, we often end up teaching the same way. I don't think that most of my teachers and mentors meant to instill such negative thought patterns in students like me. No doubt they were just human beings, trying their best to act with good judgment. However, because they believed in the wrongness of not-right actions, they unwittingly passed that belief on to their students.

In order to truly be free and content, I feel we must break out of this cycle by understanding that it is ok to be "not right." Our horses offer us a wonderful place to start making this change.

Our horses are always learning from us, and we are always learning from them. Sometimes learning is even a conscious process, where we feel we are teaching or training the horse. Every interaction is a process of trading information about what works and what doesn't work to create better communication and a deeper relationship.

Many trainers teach us to make our horses wrong all the time. We are taught to tell our horses no, to punish them whenever they do the "wrong" thing. But they too must learn good judgment though making mistakes. If we make their mistakes wrong, as many of our teachers made our mistakes wrong, they quickly learn the same fear of offering to try.

Without the spark of initiative, horses soon become dull and withdrawn in their interactions with us. If we are not careful, we might continue to raise our expectations while their ability to confidently offer us new answers dwindles. We may get angry with the horse for dawdling, but somewhere inside we know that we are actually disappointed in ourselves for having done the wrong thing yet again.

As you can see, a vicious cycle can easily arise, gaining speed as it oscillates between our disappointment in others and our disappointment in ourselves. Fortunately, the path to breaking the cycle is simple, if not always easy. All we have to do is separate not-right from wrong. If we can give ourselves, our horses, and everyone else in our lives the freedom to make mistakes without punishment, we grant the power to love learning again.

There is a story about a famous orchestra conductor that illustrates the power of the freedom to make mistakes. At one point, he was the conductor most sought after by musicians. They loved to play for him. The key to his success? He empowered his musicians to make mistakes. Whenever a player made a mistake during practice, the conductor would have them jump up and shout "how fantastic!"

At the start, many musicians found this to be a very challenging practice. They had always been condemned for their mistakes. They didn't feel there was anything "fantastic' about an off-key note or poorly syncopated rhythm. However, the conductor insisted. The musician might have felt silly at first, but soon the exercise actually changed their mental habits. They learned to feel good about their mistakes, to embrace them as opportunities to become better, rather than regard them as signs that they would never be as good as they hoped. As their confidence bloomed and their fear of failure dwindled, the quality of their playing increased dramatically.

What I love most about this story is that it gives us both a powerful lesson about the true nature of mistakes and a tool for creating change in our own lives. Simply stated, the lesson is this: when we learn to love our mistakes, we can again love to learn. And how do we learn to love our mistakes? By changing our reaction to them.

So why not give it a try? Often times it is harder to forgive ourselves than others, so consider using your time with your horse as an opportunity to cultivate this new attitude. When your horse doesn't get the right answer, tell yourself, "how fantastic! A chance to learn something new!" At first it will feel silly, but I urge you try even saying it out loud. Giving voice to our thoughts makes them real in a way they can never be in our head.

I think you will find that this simple act will begin to change your whole attitude. You will find that many things that used to upset you no longer do, as they have become opportunities instead of failures. Soon you might begin to apply the tool to yourself, saying, "Fantastic!" to your own mistakes. Not long after that, you might find the practice reaching beyond the walls of the barn into your work or other parts of your life.

As with any practice, only by using the tool will you make a change. But if you can find the courage to love mistakes and learn from failure, you will also find a freedom and joy that you may have been missing for a long time.