“When learning a skill you have to go off target to learn the coordinations, synaptic connections, neural pathways that let you learn the skill or hit the target.”
Babette Lightner, “Learning - Target Practice”
I’m going to begin with a bold statement:
There are no such things as mistakes.
Okay. We’ll come back to that later.
Learning is target practice
We aim for the bullseye, but we likely won’t hit it right away. The bullseye - or learning goal - keeps us on track and allows us to chart a path. Or more accurately, your wholeself notes “okay, that’s not the target” and adjusts accordingly (click here for Babette Lightner’s article, which goes into more detail about the other-than-conscious, systematic adjustment process of experiential learning).
The juicy part of the learning process actually happens during the process of taking shots at the target and missing. These off-target moments - “mistakes” - are what teach you where the target is and where the target isn’t.
In order to carry out the process efficiently, though, it is helpful to get as specific as possible about your desired outcome. “Sing the phrase correctly” isn’t as specific or achievable as “sing the interval of a 6th accurately in measure 6.”
Once you clarify your learning goal and consider the learning context, you are empowered to assess whether you have the appropriate tools to actually achieve your goal in this moment, or if you need to hone some side-skills first.
You might consider the following questions as a way to get more specific about what you want to assess:
How familiar am I with this song?
Have I sung a 6th before?
Do I know what a 6th sounds like?
Are these pitches in a comfortable range for me today?
This line of inquiry may seem pedantic, but it’s amazing how often we set about trying to achieve a specific outcome without checking our tools first (i.e.: preexisting knowledge and experience). Imagine walking into a dark room to find your phone without turning the light on first. You could bumble around for several minutes, crashing into things and banging your toe five times, without changing how you are searching for your phone. Or, you could turn the light on first, survey the space, decide how and where to search, and then move accurately and efficiently toward your phone. It’s less about doing things the “right” way, and more about having choice and intention.
The target practice model can be applied to your learning process in this way:
clarify your specific goal - decide to aim for the bullseye - see above re: 6ths or finding your phone
aim - see the bullseye - have your specific goal in mind
take action - pull back and release the arrow toward the bullseye - take action toward your goal
assess the result - note how close the arrow landed in relation to the bullseye - note how close you were to your target
decide what to do next - am I satisfied with this outcome? If yes, choose a new target. If no, reassess your goal and allow your system to adjust before going again.
take action again - lather, rinse, repeat
Cozy up to failure: understanding your response to “mistakes”
The other important piece that can get in the way of how we respond to off-target moments is the negative value judgements we ascribe to making a mistake, often internalized from some earlier experience before we had the agency or lived experience to assess outcomes for ourselves.
Remember: the moment of being off-target is the rich, fertile learning moment when you are most available to awareness, potential, growth, and change.
We often want to rush through this off-target moment because it’s accompanied by an “ugh” feeling, which may be unpleasant, and can even be downright anxiety-inducing. “Ugh, I made a mistake! Now everyone will laugh at me and see the truth: that I’m stupid/untalented/a fraud!” Because maybe at some point in your history, you went off-target and someone did laugh. Or mishandled the moment in some other unhelpful, unsupportive way. And no one was there to remind you that going off-target is a crucial part of the learning process, and that that person’s laughter says more about them and their value judgements around “mistakes,” than it does about you or your juicy learning process. And so you internalized the belief that “mistakes are bad,” and maybe even, “if I make a mistake, I am bad.”
No wonder your system may respond to off-target moments with “ugh” or discomfort or fear or anxiety - it made sense in that long-ago moment. But does it make sense now? What is different now, in this moment of being off-target? How are you different now? What supports, knowledge, lived experience do you have now that you didn’t have then, that tells you a different story about your worth and value?
See what happens when you slow down to attend to what happens for you when you go off-target.
You could invite a new sort of inquiry that might look something like this:
What happens in my body when I realize I’m off-target?
What sensations am I aware of?
What thoughts come up?
What feelings come up?
What support do I need in this moment as I sit with these sensations and thoughts?
How old do these thoughts and feelings feel?
Whose voice do I hear speaking those negative/chastising words?
Radical Courage and Radical Curiosity
It’s fair to say that this approach to learning - allowing all sounds and outcomes to be welcome and encouraged - takes GUTS. It takes courage to allow and accept unfamiliar sounds and sensations. It takes courage and patience to sit with the “ugh” response to being off-target. It takes courage to trust your system’s ability to course-adjust to support your learning process, to trust that your only job is this: to intend - aim - do - assess - adjust - do again.
Letting go of “being right” takes a heck of a lot of GUTS. Being vulnerably, fully, wholly YOU takes guts. This type of radical courage allows curiosity and creativity to emerge. And it makes sense in a new way when you consider, this might just be how learning happens.
Here’s the bold statement I opened with:
There are no such things as mistakes.
What do you think about that now?
What happens in you when you allow this possibility: it’s the off-target moments - what you used to misdiagnose as “mistakes” - that allow you to assess whether you have honed the necessary skills yet, and allow you to constantly reassess your path toward your learning goals.
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Many thanks to Babette Lightner for framing Dr. Leon Thurman’s learning research into a fully embodied learning experience for singers, teachers, and conductors. Her article “Learning - Target Practice,” which inspired this post, can be found here.
Thanks also to David Gorman for the clarity of his Learning Methods approach to systematic inquiry. His article “What’s the opposite of perfect?” speaks to the effort of striving and how it interferes with learning and creativity, and can be found here.
