High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 204: Mistakes Worth Making with Sue Halden-Brown, Mental Skills Coach, Business Mentor and Executive Coach

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

Sue Halden-Brown is a former Olympic equestrian coach, multi-disciplinary mental skills coach, business mentor and executive coach from Australia. She is a businesswoman and internationally-published author whose published books include “Mistakes Worth Making: How to Turn Sports Errors Into Athletic Excellence” published by Human Kinetics.  She launched Equestrian Coach Education International (ECEi) earlier this year, which is the world’s first online hub for equestrian-specific coach education and professional development resources. She is also a classically-trained equestrian rider who has coached in England, Ireland, and all over Australia. In this interview, Sue and Cindra talk about: What is mistakes-management and how it applies to all areas of life The principles of mistakes-management Why we need mistakes-management skills The best mistakes-management strategies The ideal way to correct a mistake Coaching tips to help others deal with a mistake You can find a full description of the Podcast at cindrakamphoff.com/sue

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to episode 204 with Sue Holden Brown. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best leaders, athletes, coaches, and consultants, all about the topic of mindset to help us reach our potential or be high performers in our field or our sport.

Now with two episodes weekly, we explore everything related to mindset. You can learn secrets from a world-class consultant like today, or listen to me provide a short, powerful message each week to inspire you to be at your best consistently. Now if you know that mindset is essential to your success, this is the podcast for you. Now today I've interviewed Sue Holden Brown, who is a former Olympic equestrian coach, a multidisciplinary mental skills coach, a business mentor, and an executive coach from Australia. She's a businesswoman and an internationally published author whose published books include the book that I read called Mistakes Worth Making,

How to Turn Sports Errors into Athletic Excellence, and this is published by Human Kinetics. She recently launched Equestrian Coach Education International earlier this year, which is the world's first online hub for equestrian-specific coach education and professional development resources. She's also a classically trained equestrian rider herself, who has coached in England, Ireland, and all over Australia. In this interview, Sue and I talk about what is mistakes management and how it applies to all areas of our lives, sport or outside of sport. We talk about the principles of mistakes management and how it applies to all areas of our lives, sport or outside of sport. We talk about the principles of mistakes management, why we need mistakes management skills,

the best mistakes management strategies, the ideal way to correct a mistake, then she provides coaching tips so that we can help other people deal with a mistake. So my favorite part about this interview is when she talks about how mistakes are just simply variations in performance. And when I asked her, you know, how do you correct a mistake? And she said, well, you don't. It's history. But you can minimize the consequences and modify your next effort, which is really what this podcast is all about. And before we head over to Sue, I'm going to read a rating and a review over on iTunes.

This is from A. Torb. A. Torb says, top-notch and you must listen. This podcast is really upbeat and packed with actionable tips to stay focused on what you need to do to be successful. Thank you so much for keeping us on track. Highly recommended. Thank you so much, A. Torb. I super appreciate your rating and review over there on iTunes. If you enjoyed today's podcast i encourage you to wherever you're listening to head over and leave a rating and review so thanks so much for joining me here today you can find the full show notes and description over at cindracampoff.com slash sue that's cindracampoff.com slash Sue. Thanks so much. And without further ado, let's bring on Sue. Sue, I'm excited to talk with you joining from Australia. How are you doing today, Sue? I'm well, Cindra. Thank you very much. It's delightful to be here

and thank you for the invitation to join you. Absolutely. I read your book some time ago, several years ago, Mistakes Worth Making, and I really wanted to have you. Absolutely. I read your book some time ago, several years ago, Mistakes Worth Making, and I really wanted to have you on the podcast to talk to you more about our approach to mistakes, what you call mistake management. And I wanted just to learn more about kind of what you've been doing since then. So thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, my pleasure, Cindy. Thank you. Thank you. I know that the listeners are going to get a lot out of your interview. So to start us off, tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about and what you're doing right now, Sue.

Well, I'm passionate about excellence in performance and I have a pretty wide range of interest in that. I don't really mind whether it's sport or business or any art. It's the process of learning to do something really, really well. The discipline that that involves and the learning skills that someone has to bring to such a task fascinate me and always have done. I have done a lot of coaching in the past of course but now I'm into coach development and coach education and I have just spent the last three years building the world's first online hub for training and professional development resources for equestrian coaches and this is across all levels and all disciplines and it's grown like topsy it started off as a small idea to help the australian coaches

at times we needed more learning resources and it was a small mind map on an a4 piece of paper and it's grown now the entire site the architecture of the site has been rebuilt three times and it is huge. We're just trying to manage it down a little bit right now because there's more to go. But it's a fascinating project and wonderful to feel that it might be useful. Absolutely. And you yourself are a former Olympian equestrian coach, so I could see, you know, why you might be interested in that and passionate about that.

Sue, tell us a little bit about how you got to your career now. How I got to my career now? Oh, my God. Well, I'm a classically trained equestrian to start with. So that's like saying you're a classically trained equestrian to start with. So that's like saying you're a classically trained dancer. You know, that took me 10 years in Europe of training and discipline to learn the equestrian skills. And really, I wanted to share them because it's like being given

the crown jewels when you have something like that. It's quite unusual and it's not to be kept in the cupboard it's to be shared and so that has led me to to coaching and teaching others and I was particularly interested in coaching coaches and teaching coaches how to coach well and those who coach well how to coach better and and that led me on and then further into into exploring some of the dynamics of the actual coaching structures that we have in in Australia to try and contribute to them and I set out the coach education system here years ago and I'm now very involved in refurbishing it, which is what's happening here today.

Absolutely. So, Sue, you know, today what we're going to talk a lot about is, you know, mistakes management, something you call mistakes management. And, you know, we might give some examples in sport, but mistakes management also applies to any activity. You know, I know that you are, you know, you're a mental skills coach, but a business mentor and executive coach. So what we're talking about today can apply to business, performing arts, cooking, gardening, maintaining relationships, you know, practicing life skills, you know, many different ways that we might make mistakes in different arenas we might make mistakes. So tell us first, Sue, what you mean by mistakes management.

Well, that's exactly right, Cindy. It's that applied to everything. And we all make mistakes all the time. I mean, that's the way we learn. It's the way we are. We're never born just doing everything wonderfully well. We have to make mistakes and find out how not to do things. And mistakes management, it's a little bit like risk management.

You know, risk management once upon a time didn't exist. And now everybody's well and truly familiar with it. And mistakes management is a little bit like that. But it's a whole system of managing your mistakes because mistakes management is a little bit like that, but it's a whole system of managing your mistakes because mistakes management is facilitating your success through understanding and thereby controlling these mistakes, these errors. If you don't really understand them, what happens is we repeat them

because mistakes like to go together. They're always plural they always run around in in in lots of um lots of good companies so we need to understand them because they will reoccur like anything else we learn we're very good at learning mistakes just as we are good at learning anything else right absolutely so we facilitate our success by managing these mistakes that we have. Tell us what you see the process, you know, being in terms of what do you see that the best do in terms of getting over their mistakes or letting go of their mistakes and learning from them? Well, there's a whole system. The first thing you have to do is understand the mistake. There are

lots of different sorts of mistakes and this has not been understood before. We tend to think, oh yes, we make a mistake. Well, we do, but which one? Because they all have different causes and therefore they all have specific corrections. If you don't understand the cause, you can't give the right correction as a coach or for yourself so you need

to really understand what sort of mistake it is what causes it what triggers it what makes it happen in the moment and then you can say ah now i've got you now i know what's really behind this and i can fix it but up until that time you don't know and and it's therefore you are at risk of doing it again okay when you keep when you keep a mistake log this is helpful because it it enables you to know what how big your mistake was I mean obviously the big ones you'll remember, probably. But there are lots of smaller ones that you also need to keep tabs on. And you can decide whether you want to put up with that,

and lots of times we do, or whether you want to do something about it. So the first thing is keep a log of your mistakes and then you can start to, that's really the first part of an action plan to deal with them. Got it. Okay. So what about, Sue, those people who maybe are listening and they're saying, I don't know, I don't know if I want to write my mistakes down. Do I really want a log of my mistakes to, you know, what if I keep on remembering them and really I want to let them go? What would your response be to that? Why do you think that we need to make sure that we're

keeping this mistake log? Ah, well, I think to think that you just want to let them go and forget about them is dangerous territory because that means you're ignoring it and that's uh you want to ignore the mistake and forget about it but that's not a good plan you need to deal with it uh because if you ignore it sure as eggs it will come back to bite you again so we need to own your mistakes you need to say hey look jesus that one's mine now i can deal with it but to do that and be kind to yourself as you're doing that you have to get rid of the idea of perfection in your life that you you don't make mistakes and you have to you have to reorganize your ideas about what a performance of any kind is.

It's lots of little mini performances. And some of them are good and some of them are brilliant and some of them are terrible. And some of them are muddling along in between. And that's fine. That's perfectly normal. And if we doubt that, all we need to do is to have a camera and to look at what we actually do and we see some bits are good and some bits are not or we can listen i mean i'm going to listen to this podcast and i'm going to listen to me saying um uh uh oh and all sorts of silly things like that and that each one is a variation on my vocal performance

I could say they're a mistake so I have to say that's okay that's all right right once you've owned up to it once you've owned up to it and said this is fine this is perfectly usual everybody does this all the time then you're in a position to do something about it. Right. It sort of reminds me, Sue, like how do you even define what a mistake is? You know, and what would you say about the definition of a mistake? I would say a mistake is a variation in performance. Okay.

It's not good. It's not bad. It's not terrible. It's just different i like that so it's not it's it's not you're not evaluating or you don't need to evaluate it right and and maybe what you were saying about being compassionate with yourself i think sometimes we are so judgmental of ourselves after we make the mistake, absolutely, yes, yes. You need to be kind to yourself and say, look, everybody does this all the time. If you ask somebody to say something,

if you ask them to wish you good morning ten times in a row, each time they say it will be a little different. Mm-hm. And you choose, they choose which one they like, which one they want to use. So, yes, you need to be kind to yourself. I think, Sue, sometimes we think that we need to, if we beat ourselves up more for the mistake, then maybe we won't do it again.

But, you know, I would argue just like you, that the more that we're compassionate with ourselves, the better we're going to be. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes. All that happens if you beat yourself up, you put another scar on your confidence. And so that doesn't have to beat yourself up at all. You need to say, ah, I don't need that variation in my performance. Just as you would say, I don't need that particular you know i don't need

to to burn my breakfast again i don't need that variation in my breakfast performance you know i can cook breakfast without burning it and so you weed it out how do you weed it out you find out why you burned it whether you answered the phone when you were cooking it, whether your dog distracted you, whether your child distracted you, whatever might have happened. And you say, okay, I will rearrange things so that doesn't happen again. Therefore, I don't burn my breakfast. It's no good saying, oh, I'm a terrible cook. Oh, I made such a mess of my breakfast. It's awful.

Well, that may be so, but you don't need to go to that party. Absolutely. Yeah. And Sue, you've already talked about some principles of what you call mistakes management. Like you said, don't ignore the mistake, kind of own your mistake. You said, you know, plan for excellence. I'm not perfection, I heard you say. What might be some other principles of mistake management? Well, you need to understand or perhaps accept that mistakes management is a process of value. We only have things in our lives that we value. We wouldn't waste our time on something that we thought was no value. So I guess you don't easily take mistakes management on board until you see the value of it and recognize that by getting to the bottom of mistakes and sorting them out and understanding

them, therefore you can arrange your life so they don't happen again or they don't happen too often. And that's a very important thing to give mistakes management space in your life to happen. Okay. It also helps you. It also helps if you have a mistakes-wise coach because the coach can see things that are quite difficult to see for yourself, as we know.

And you also need to develop a series of mistakes management skills. Okay. Yeah, perfect. Sue, let me ask you two follow-up questions on that. First, what do you see as a coach who is mistake-wise? What do you mean by that? And maybe it could be a coach, but I bet it could also be a manager or it could be a boss. So what do you think does that mean to you? To me, mistakes-wise is to understand the different sorts of mistakes and why they happen. And if you talk to the manager or boss at work, I mean it may be that the mistake is an organizational mistake. It's not an individual's mistake at all if your boss is aware of that then you're not going to get the mistake laid at your door if it is not in fact your mistake so to have somebody with you in any capacity to understand mistakes management

and understand the different different types of mistakes and how and why they arise will be very helpful to you sorting out your own mistakes. And give us a little snapshot on what are the different types of mistakes that we can make. Oh, there's lots of them. The big ones. The big ones are survival mistakes. We've all heard of survival mistakes. that really, while we say we should learn from our mistakes, I think there are some mistakes we should never make.

Okay. And survival mistakes we should never make. They're dangerous, they compromise us, and they usually finish our confidence off in that activity. We've got comic mistakes sometimes when people laugh at us and we've all had that happen when we're terribly embarrassed, we've said the wrong thing or we've done the wrong thing in front of others and they laugh at us. And the mistake itself may not be particularly significant but the laughter is and we find

that difficult. Serial mistakes, mistakes that recur again and again, and we might go back and talk about those. They are quite tricky to correct, but they repeat. Chronic mistakes also repeat, but they repeat over long timeframes. We all make school learning mistakes. We make big mistakes when we're beginners. We make technical mistakes when we are intermediate learners and we

make probably timing is the critical one of advanced learners and they are quite normal. The thing is we don't want to stick with them. We usually want to progress our skill learning. There are lots of other sorts of mistakes. Follow-up mistakes are common where we make one mistake and then we're so distracted by it, we go and make another one. This is true. At that point, we think whatever we're doing is falling apart. A good place to see that's on the tennis court where you very often you get one mistake and then it's it's not catastrophic but it's

distracting and it rattles your confidence cage and bingo there's another one i'm thinking about how that happens quite often in golf as well you You know, you see you're so distracted by a mistake and thinking about a mistake that, you know, you've continued to make another. So, Sue, what would you say are the skills that we need to be able to manage the mistakes? Oh, awareness is the first one. Okay. Awareness to understand the mistake mistake we certainly need that we need to have the skill to recover to refocus on what you're doing recovery is difficult because it mistakes have an emotional backlash they they shake your confidence, they increase your anxiety, they may include embarrassment

or all sorts of other things. And you need to be resilient, emotionally resilient to cope with that. So you need to have some mental skills training, preferably. It's helpful. Things like imagery are very useful. And if you have imagery skills then that's terrific um it's hard to retry it's hard to to have another go sometimes especially after bad mistake or a mistake at a critical time in competition it takes a lot of courage and not everybody can front up to that and try with as much commitment as they did with the first effort that went wrong especially if they don't understand why it went wrong so it's there are lots of there's a whole swag of things there which normally a lot of sports

people would include in their mental skills training but specifically need a real awareness of yourself. It's the metacognitive skills, I guess. You need to be able to watch yourself in action to recognize the triggers that make you do things and to recognize what you're thinking when you make a mistake. I think that's what's hard for people, right? To sit back and watch themselves sort of like, you know, being like sort of like a flying eagle over themselves and being able to watch what's happening. Yes, yes, it is.

And most of us, it's not so difficult because we're not making critical mistakes. If you're talking about high performance in sport, yes, there are critical mistakes and you need all these skills really finely honed. But in general performance and recreational performance, you don't need that. You do need a reasonable awareness and a reasonable sort of responsibility

that, yes, I did that. Now I want to choose. Am I going to do that, yes, I did that. Now, I want to choose. Am I going to do that again? Or would I like to change it? And that's not so difficult. Okay. Okay. And I know, you know, you were talking, Sue, about these different mistakes that we experience, survival, comics, serial, chronic, are the examples that you provided us. How would you, I know you have a way of kind of quantifying those mistakes by kind of the size of the mistakes. Tell us a little bit about that so we can learn more about your perspective. Yes, okay. Well, micro mistakes are the little ones.

They're the tiny ones that the elite athletes make. They're the ones that account for tenths of a second here and there, and they decide the medals on the roster. That's not really our sort of territory for most people. Many mistakes, when you're out and about, and where a lot of people would enjoy competitions at perhaps not quite the level of the elite athletes. Stakes there, yes, they'll cost you, but they're not quite of the order of the micro mistakes. Mercantile mistakes, now these are quite big, in the stakes term, they're quite big. And these are the ones that most of us make, most of the time in what we're doing.

They're quite recognisable if we care to have a little closer look at them. And they're more easily corrected because we can identify them more easily. So we needn't be afraid of them. They're out there in everything. And we can just decide, well, do we like that bit or don't we like that bit in our performance? If we like it, we keep it. If we don't like it, well, how are we going to get rid of it? And then we've got the mega mistakes, the biggies, real biggies. And we make those usually when we're learning something for the first time.

They are a normal part of learning a new skill of any sort, typically foot skills. And so that's okay. We will probably outgrow them as we get better. And then as our performance improves, we make maximum mistakes. If we get really performance improves we make maximum mistakes if we get really good we make mini mistakes and again we can choose how good we want to get with all this stuff and if we want to go to the elite level and the absolute tops well we've got to get rid of all this lot and so we're right down to making the micro mistakes of the elite athletes but most

of the time we don't need to worry about those. We'll stick with the maxis and the minis, and we'll totally avoid the mega ones if they're survival mistakes. But we'll accept them if they're just normal running mistakes. You know, and Sue, as you're talking, it's easy for me to apply what you're talking about to, like, sport, because, you know, I'm thinking about elite sport and competitive sport and recreational sport and

recreational sport but we're also talking about today how mistakes happen in business and you know in life can you give us an example of maybe what you might say is that is a micro mistake in business or in life a micro mistake in business, that might be maybe forgetting your way in a presentation momentarily. At a meeting, at an important meeting, it's not enough to throw the whole thing off course, but it's just enough to maybe for you to take a shot at it. It might be so small that the people there didn't even recognize it, but you knew. Right. Because it deviated from what you were going to do. Right. And maybe something very small. And maybe it did impact your confidence for a little while because,

maybe you're questioning if you were going to get it back, but, you know, that it was pretty small and minor. Yes. Okay. Okay. And I know, Sue, you talk about these different systems that mistakes can happen within. Tell us a little bit about these systems and what you mean. Okay. Well, the systems that give rise to mistakes can be grouped fairly easily. Let's start with the easy ones. The physical or the mental systems that we all have. Our strength, our fitness, our physique, if

we're in sport obviously that's critical. Our mental systems, our ability to concentrate and to engineer our tension and anxiety levels, to control them, to focus. These are our mental systems, our mental equipment. Our self-management system is all about our body management, particularly relevant again to sports, our emotional control and resilience, the effects that sometimes significant others have on us that we allow them to have on us. And that may be your parent or your sponsor who comes to see a training session in sport. It might be your boss who comes to an important meeting. It's anybody who's significant

in your life and your self-management of that situation is important. Another system that we all have is our learning system. This is how we learn, how well we learn, how we like to learn, and that's important when it comes to mistakes. And as I mentioned before, sometimes mistakes are not ours per se, they're actually the organisations that we're with. Maybe equipment isn't working properly or the system that's been set up is not appropriate to what we want to do. And then there are circumstantial things

like weather conditions or crowd pressures with children's sport or like important people being at meetings that we don't know them, we don't know how to deal with them, or they come in unexpectedly. Those are circumstantial things that are beyond our immediate control that we have to deal with, and they cause us mistakes. But it's not actually, we made the mistakes, but the cause of the mistake was not within ourselves. It was within, it was circumstantial.

Absolutely. Okay. So the six were physical, mental, self-management, learning, organizational, and circumstantial systems where, you know, those are examples of mistakes. And tell us, Sue, do you think that depending on these systems, does that determine how we should address the mistake and how we should deal with the mistake? Or do you think that really doesn't matter? Oh, no, absolutely it determines how we deal with the mistake.

And this is why it's so important to understand these systems and know where the mistake really arises from because for instance if you have if you make a mistake that is based in your physical system maybe it's a fitness problem then you address it by changing your fitness training if however it's rooted in your mental, or maybe it was a concentrational problem, then it's no good doing all the fitness training in the world. It's not going to change things. If you lost concentration at a critical moment, that was not because you weren't fit physically. It was because you needed better concentrational skills.

So that's where you go to retrain your concentration skills and therefore to avoid making that mistake again. So it's very important that you know where it comes from because otherwise you can be busy saying, oh, you must pay better attention when actually it was because you weren't strong enough or agile enough or well enough prepared or whatever it might have been that was not in the same system that you're addressing. But it's important that you do know which system gives rise to your mistake, because that's where you go to make changes. Ah, okay. And, you know, do you see, Sue, are people pretty good at, you know, understanding maybe which system that their mistake falls in?

Or, you know, as I'm listening, I'm thinking about how, you know, I might make a mistake where, you know, I, let's say I make an emotional control mistake, which would be within self management, but I might really infer that to a lack of confidence or maybe the judges or the officials or the weather conditions? Like, do you think that people are pretty accurate at understanding, you know, where their mistake or why they experience the mistake? I think they're very accurate, yes, at knowing really what's happening. I don't think they're necessarily accurate in sharing that information oh of course unless they feel it's in a safe environment and that's why a coach why a mistake

wise coach or or mistake wise boss is so important because they they are the people who will not just jump on a mistake and say, oh, don't do that again. They will have the caring to say, I understand what's happening here and it's okay that it's an emotional control mistake. You don't have to say it was the officials or it was the weather or something else because you're too shy to say it's an emotional control mistake so that's very important the context in which the person is is trying to find help with their their mistake here that the the the boss or the coach is caring and kind and makes it a safe environment for them to do this.

Okay, great, Sue. So let's talk a little bit about strategies that we should use individually when we make a mistake, something you call mistake management strategies, right? So what we should do. And then let's talk about, you know know how we can be a mistake wise coach or leader or boss so let's kind of divide it in that way and and tell us a little bit about first individually what would your recommendations be like what should we do then when we experience the mistake okay well you need to be proactive that's the first thing and that that is very

very different from being dismissive and saying oh i mustn't do that again or being negative you know mistakes are good things and they've had a lot of bad tests but they're good things so you need to bring them in from out of a cold there and say okay i'm going to deal with this and to recover from from making a mistake that really is the most important thing to do first. Really take them on board, embrace them as part of your performance and your management plan to deal with them.

You promise yourself you're never, ever, ever going to ignore them. Then you refocus on what you originally wanted to do or you change the goals of what you originally wanted to do. Sometimes, you'll see this very, very often in, again, going back to tennis, you'll see somebody who goes to serve an ace, and it's a critical moment in the game, and it goes straight into the net. And what do they do? do they try to serve another eight or do they change it and they serve out wide well it's very interesting some some just refocus and go straight back to that eight but most of them will go wide and it's your choice

you can you can refocus and you can do the same thing again if you're absolutely sure and certain that you can do that or you change your goal. And then you have another go. Oh, I was going to ask you one question about that before you move on. So when you think about refocus, right, like could you tell us a little bit more about how you would suggest people refocus? Yes, the most useful thing to do is to use your visualization skills, imagery skills, and do a lightning run through your technique, through the fundamentals of your technique, and giving yourself the positive outcome that you require. It also means blocking out things like crowd noise or weather conditions or anything else that might be distracting you and you're focusing on what you are about to do.

And the most important thing to do that with is your routines. So you need to bring in your pre-performance routines at that point, absolutely the same as you have done every day of your life in practice for heaven knows how long beforehand. Nice, nice. So recover, you said, recover from the mistake, refocus it by doing imagery, you're focusing back on your routine and then tell us a little bit more about what else we should do well you need to manage your learning experiences in training to review your goals and your milestones and make sure they are appropriate and that you're not overstretching, overreaching your skills, making sure that your goals are absolutely

in sync with what you're doing and the point at which you're at with your skill development. You need to plan your mistakes management so that you understand the different sorts of mistakes you make at different levels of skill learning. And be kind to yourself that you know you make big mistakes when you are a beginner. You know that you make different sorts of mistakes and you need different sorts of coaching through your learning stages.

If you have a coach who understands this, you'll be in good hands. And then, of course, you need to practice. You need to practice your mistake management skills just as much as you practice your sports skills or your business skills or your presentation skills or any other skills that you are using. Your mistake management skills must be practiced just as well because you'll be practicing your mistakes just as well if you don't do that. Okay. Okay. So recover, refocus, retry is kind of what you're suggesting in terms of how to address the mistake.

And do you think, Sue, that we should correct the mistake or what do you think about that? No, you can't correct the mistake. It's happened. It's history. It's gone. It's too late. All you can do is to minimize the consequences, to change what you're doing, if you didn't like it, and to mitigate, again, we go back to the risk of management, mitigate it happening again, to say, okay, we go back to the risk of management, mitigate it happening again to say, okay, I'm going to put a fence around this.

I don't really want this in my life. So I'm going to make sure that I contain it and I control it and I have a go at working out what's going on. And that first of all means you've got to own it and revalue it as we have talked about and we also have to redefine what you feel is success i mean sometimes just having a go at something is success it's huge success especially if you've been intimidated by a task, it's a very first presentation you give at work. It's going to stand huge in your life.

You're going to tell them, what does this mean? Most people would rather die or pay taxes than they would stand up and speak in front of other people. So success is standing up there and doing your best with or without the mistakes that that involves.

And you have to congratulate yourself on that. And when you've done it a hundred times, well, that's a different matter. But success is very personal and you define it for yourself and you don't let anyone else on the planet define it for you. So we shouldn't correct the mistake, right? I think sometimes in sport, at least, we think we should correct it. Maybe that we should try harder or make up for it. Yeah. But really what you're saying is like, it's done. It's, it's history. We can't correct it. Right. But all we can do is contain it and gain our reaction to it. Yes.

And maybe trying harder is the worst thing in the world you could ever do. And we'll probably ensure you make it again. Yes. Isn't that true? Yeah. And you, you suggest Sue that we should understand the sort of the trigger, you know, for the mistake. Tell us about that. And like, why do you think we should understand that? Like, what do you mean by that? Okay. Every, every mistake has a trigger. It has a little button that we flick that makes the mistake happen. Sometimes it's a thought, sometimes it's a memory, we remember similar circumstance, oh dear there we go

again and we do or sometimes it may be our self-talk, the little voice in our head that doesn't always say kind things to us. And it might say things like, oh, you make a mess of these sorts of strokes or these sorts of words or whatever you're doing. And this little voice might be quite unkind sometimes, especially if you've made mistakes before. And that can be a trigger for making the same mistake again sometimes it's what other people have said to you right and it might be might be anybody who's

who's said something that was perhaps that unkind you know oh you fluffed that one didn't you oh gosh well you sort of know that you know you doned that one, didn't you? Oh, gosh, well, you sort of know that. You know you don't need anyone else to tell you. But sometimes those words come back to haunt you. Sometimes it's a feeling. It might be a feeling of anxiety or nerves that you feel out of control or you feel threatened or worried or anxious so depending on what that trigger is you can bet your bottom dollar that that is the trigger that

will trigger the same mistake in similar circumstances again and also you know your own triggers and you'll get to watch for them after this. Absolutely. Oh, what was I thinking? What was I doing at that moment? It might even be an action, you know. You might brush the hair across your face or something like this just before you do something. If you're really anxious and bingo, that's the trigger. It becomes the trigger for your mistake uh perhaps you start to stutter or lose where you're going or with a conversation

or something like that so there's a trigger for every single mistake and we have to know what that is because then you can flip the switch off so you don't have to move that to make it again and two questions i have about that. Sue, do you think these triggers are always conscious or would they, you know, be something that would be subconscious? Sometimes they're subconscious. And this is why to have a coach helps you so much because the coach can perhaps see or ferret out some of the triggers that you find difficult to identify yourself. Some of them are very

easy and you will once you get to look for them you will understand them. For instance feeling butterflies in your stomach you know you'll know that and you'll recognize that very easily but sometimes if your stress level gets too high maybe your chin or your face turns a pale and you won't see that but maybe your coach could see that and could say now look it's time for some better better tension management here. So a combination of you and your coach will help to sort out the ones that are obvious triggers and the triggers that are not so easy to find. Okay. Okay, great.

And Sue, so let's kind of shift gears a little bit and talk about mistake-wise coaches or bosses or leaders tell us again what what you mean by that and then you know if you could give us some some tips or tools or suggestions that you might have for people to be a mistake wise coach leader or boss okay well i think as as as a leader of any kind if you have someone in your team who makes a mistake you need to you need to assess the size and shape of that mistake and the impact of it and that may be very obvious, generally speaking, but it may not be so obvious, the impact on the person who's made the mistake. And you need to think about that because mistakes that are made publicly in front of others

often have a very damaging impact on the person who's made them it can be that it can really dent their confidence and be very upsetting for them and this has an impact because as a leader and as a boss or as a coach how are you going to address that you're going to do it in front of everybody else or you're going to do it quietly to one side are you going to do it as though the mistake doesn't really matter that much? Was it that catastrophic? Has it sure felt that way for the person involved? Well, you've got different values here which need very tactful handling, very kind handling, because something that may not seem very significant to you as the boss or as the coach

maybe makes it feel terrible for the person who made the mistake so you need to do that because that will steer how you how you address the consequences of the mistake okay to do that yeah for sure keep going to do that you need to ask the athlete or the team member or the person who made the mistake you need to ask them what exactly happened for for them not for the general rest of the world. What happened to them? What were they thinking at the time? What did they do exactly? What did they do?

Did they lose concentration? Well, they don't know. You can say, well, what were you thinking about? What were you thinking about? Oh, I suddenly remembered. i wondered if i'd left the stove on at home you know oh of course that will distract anybody they think the house is on fire what exactly did they do what what were they thinking at the time and it's very important that you try and let them express that let them tell you exactly what they were thinking and feeling and doing at the time and how did it feel how did it feel that's a big key to knowing where to start you know how did it feel? They felt tired. They felt excited. They felt nervous. They felt frightened. How did they feel? That will give you a great help when you put that together with what you have already established as the side of the mistake for them as to how to go about helping them through it. Then you've got the systems.

You can work out the systems. Was it an emotional control problem? Was it a fitness problem? Was it this? Was it that? And lastly, you can identify the triggers with care and letting the person who's made the mistake talk to you, not you as the leader talking to them which is usually the way that mistakes are addressed somebody says oh you mustn't do that again and

and uh and that was terrible blah blah blah and well hang on hang on let the person speak who made them speak and let them work out the triggers and we can help if you if you can and work out also the frequency of this mistake how often they've made it because that's difficult for sure you know as soon as i'm listening i'm thinking about how coaches and leaders and bosses might they they definitely like in general don't follow this process where they ask somebody, you know, to tell us what they, you know, ask them these questions that you suggested, like, what exactly did they do? What were you thinking? You know, how are you feeling? And then they, you know, at least generally don't identify the trigger. So I like the idea of really

having this caring and loving environment where, you know, you're not punishing for mistakes, but helping people better understand the mistakes that they made and perhaps, if they have a coach or a boss or a leader who does wade in and try to punish them for their mistakes, all they can say in their own defense is that the leader is making a mistake and doesn't realize it. Right. Because it's a mistake to try to punish someone who has made an error. They know they've made an error. They don't need punishing. Sure. Do you think that any mistakes should be punished for at all? Like meaning, okay, let's say I have two boys and let's say one punches the other. Okay. They tend to wrestle around a lot. So, okay, well, let's say one gets a little crazy.

What do you think about that? Do you think that might be a mistake that, you know, as a parent, you should punish? Or what are your thoughts on that and the impact of punishing how that might impact the behavior later? Oh, goodness, that's a clever one. in general i think punishment is a fairly negative thing it tends to have more negative consequences than it does positive okay that's that's difficult i mean as an equestrian coach i come up against that you know should you punish in in a question in terms of the answer generally speaking is you can usually avoid it sure yes and that's only because the consequences are likely to be less than useful if you can avoid punishing if you can work your way around it and discipline yes oh yeah we all need discipline

and boundaries in our life yes but punishment I'm not so sure about that one got it got it well that was a that was a tough example so let me throw that out to you so your your book mistakes worth making how to turn sports errors into athletic excellence this is published by human Let me throw that out to you. So your book, Mistakes Worth Making, How to Turn Sports Errors into Athletic Excellence, this is published by Human Kinetics. Tell us where we can find this book, Sue. Well, you can find it online. I've got the second edition in preparation. It was in print for many, many years.

It was tremendously successful, but I want to, I've had a lot of time to think about this since then. So I would like to now, I'm working on the second edition, which will be available in eBooks and it will be available online through Amazon or other agencies.

Okay, perfect. When could we expect that to come out? Oh, well. Aha, soon. Yeah, no date, no date yet. Okay. I'd like to say later this year. I'd really love that.

Yes. Because I've been asked by so many people to do the one on, well, the first one people ask about is relationships. Oh, you must write this all about relationships. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That would be much too difficult. But I certainly would like to do this on business and in business coaching and in in the workplace because i think there's a long scope

in there for productively helping people who do make mistakes and of course they do this is it must it must somehow be possible to make mistakes the norm rather than than the uh than the terrible sort of aberration that they generally are in the workplace and to make them normal and say, okay, but which normal do we want in our lives? And then to then choose not to have repetitions of mistakes we don't like. Okay. got it. And Sue, how could we reach out to you or follow along with you? Or what are the ways that we might learn more about what you're doing now in your work? Well, of course, up on the internet and Facebook and things.

And also busy writing, very busy writing and lecturing. And I go to a number of conferences around the world and sometimes these papers are available on the net. But what I'm looking to do is to put my own presentations on this sort of work up on the net. And certainly anybody's welcome to contact me through Facebook. I'm very happy to talk to anyone who's interested in this and to give them any resources that I can. I would love to discuss my ideas with others.

Excellent, Sue. Well, I'll make sure that I post the links to contact you on the show notes page. And people can go over to drcindra.com and go slash Susan, slash Susan, and you'll be able to find the description of today and some tweets that you can tweet out some of the key points that Sue made, as well as an opportunity to follow along with her later. So I wanted to tell you how appreciative I am for, you know, I know that we're in different time zones. It's five o'clock here, 8am there. So we had some fun times scheduling this interview. And I'm just so appreciative that you joined us there from Australia to really talk about how we can best overcome mistakes. And Sue, I wanted to tell you what I really got from this interview. And my favorite parts were this idea that we can become a mistake-wise coach or leader

and how we might do that. And then I liked what you said about, you know, when we, a strategy we can use to overcome the mistake. And you said, recover, refocus and retry. I liked that. I thought that was really sticky, but then also, you know, as a mistake wise coach or leader, better understanding why that the person made the mistake and asking them these crucial questions like, you know, what exactly did they do and what were they were thinking and how were they were, how they were feeling and then helping them identify the triggers, which is something that I think we don't kind of dive into what causes the mistake to help people understand it. So I am grateful that you spent time with us today. And for all those

listeners, I'd like to say thank you for them. Thank you for joining us today, Sue. Oh, my pleasure entirely. Thank you so much, for them. Thank you for joining us today, Sue. Oh, my pleasure, Charlie. Thank you so much, Cinder. Thank you. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Cinder's free weekly videos, check out DrCinder.com.