A lightbulb!

It's getting pretty late at night here and I was about to head off to bed and was thinking over some things and suddenly had this lightbulb moment that I felt the need to share, it's not to do totally with riding but with learning in general.  Teaching is something that I think about constantly as it is such a skill and one that has to be constantly developed, I don't believe that just because someone can ride that they can teach I think teaching is a skill that you develop over lots of time by working your way up through the ranks and studying under people who are not only excellent riders but also excellent teachers, I studied lots of psychology in school to help with my teaching background as well as learning styles in addition to my coaching education through the horsey industry and am continually striving to improve myself as a coach, I consider how my students ride as a direct reflexion not necessarily on my riding but on my skills of communicating what goes on in the saddle and the most difficult thing in the world to teach without a doubt is feel-no amount of barking out instructions or directions will ever teach someone correct feel, this can only be achieved by teaching as though you are in the moment yourself.  I was wondering about why some things (such as feel) are harder for us to grasp and understand than others and somehow went back to my highschool years, in highschool math was always a subject that I struggled with more than any of the others, my main problem was never getting the right answer, I could usually come up with the correct answer but where I would lose all of my marks was usually in the work, I never was in to learning the correct formulas and figured that so long as I came to the correct answer at the end what did it matter how I got there, most of the teachers just got annoyed with me doing things my own way and barked at me to learn the formulas and do it their way which I could never understand, why not do it my way if it worked??  Then I had one really outstanding math teacher a little later on who actually was able to make me understand not the numbers but the concept and he achieved that by explaining to me that the formulas we learn build upon one another so it's important to learn them each individually as they are steps that link together to build a staircase, finally a teacher had given me a REASON why I needed to learn things a certain way rather than just telling me to do it that way because that is how it's done.  I finally realized that all of the 'directions' I had been given actually eventually led to a longterm 'destination'-and voila a moment of clarity, directions with no clear course of a destination become useless orders and we lose the bigger picture and what we are trying to achieve.  Anyways I had this revelation tonight that this applies very much to many many learning circumstances in life and riding is no different, there are many ways to ride a horse and train a horse however to achieve a certain result over time the correct path must be taken, you can skip steps or take alternate routes but at the end of the day the end product will suffer if each step on the staircase has not been taken.  I think this applies to lessons in life as well, I've never professed to be a perfect person and have made many mistakes, in riding and in life in general, however I have always tried to take every 'mistake' I've made (in riding and life) and tried to learn from those mistakes and do better in the future-obviously I can't change the past (though I really really wish I could!;) and I haven't always been successful in my attempts and sometimes the mistakes I've made have haunted me, whether it be horse or human, but the past can never be changed so I've always tried to look to the future and 'do better', I think this is a key not necessarily for 'success' but for clarity and direction in riding and in life in general and perhaps this is personal success in and of itself, to learn from mistakes of the past and not try in vain to repent for those mistakes as it's usually just not possible but to learn from the past and look to the future and say "this is how I will handle it next time", anyways that's my deep philosophy for the day, as I've mentioned before I really enjoy writing these posts as they really help me better understand some of the things that I sometimes lose in day to day life, hopefully they also make a little bit of sense!:)