“There’s no right time to do the right thing. Now is a good enough moment.” Nitya Prakash

It’s very easy to wait until everything is perfect before we take action. We don’t want visitors round until the house is clean enough. We don’t want to go to the Pilates class until we’ve lost enough weight. We don’t want to get a dog until we have enough time available. The list goes on…

Sometimes though, we just have to give things a go. We need to be careful, of course, that no one will get hurt in the process. It’s no good promising someone that we will do something, and then letting them down. But sometimes we just have to make things happen. Sometimes we have to take risks, and see if things work out.

If you want to do a Prelim test, but your canter isn’t as good as it could be, maybe you just need to give the test a go. Perhaps it’s about what your goals are. Are your goals to compete, or to win? Or maybe just get safely through the test?!

I wonder what stops us from just giving things a go? Is it worrying about what other people might think? Is it fear of getting hurt? Are we afraid failure?

I read about a company which has a failure conference every year. They asked the audience how they felt about their own failures. People used words like ashamed, scared, embarrassed. Then they produced a file of records of failures, and the learnings that had come from them. Employees had come forward with these failures in order that they and others could learn from them. The audience were asked what they thought of the employees who had shared their failures. The words that came out included brave, intelligent, helpful, and more along those lines.

Isn’t it interesting how differently we look at other people who fail, and who learn from those failures, compared to how we look at ourselves and our own failures?

What have you been waiting to have a go at, and when can you start?

© Sue Palmer, The Horse Physio, 2021

Treating your horse with care, connection, curiosity and compassion