Can you watch my mistakes?

Repeat after me: someone is always watching.

Always? Yes always.

Even my mistakes? Especially your mistakes.

"Mistakes appear to be embarrassing when you look too close, but all they need is a zoom out, to see the bigger picture, to realize losing composure is part of the process."

None of those words made sense to the 7-year-old ears I was relaying it to. All she wanted to know was, "how can I do what you do...now."

She had been watching me in the park practising gymnastics. First, she walked past calmly, then let out her excitement on the second meeting.

Her mum shared that she was "excited by my practice, that she wants to do as you do."

I was taken aback. This was the first time a child had asked me to teach her a move. I am not a teacher. But I was excited at her being excited, so I gave it a go.

How hard could it be?

Much harder than I anticipated. Teaching a child a skill is not as easy as knowing how to do it yourself.

Where do you begin when something is second nature to you?

"Let's start with a cartwheel," I said.

"Okay!"

one try turned to two until we'd spent 30 minutes trying to perfect my mistaken instructions. We'd hopped back, forth, back and forth. We mirrored jumping frogs with no composure.

A laugh was let out amongst the various disappointed looks across her face.

"why is this so hard to teach? I learned by observing and trying until I could do it; why is that not the same here."

By the end, I was unsure who was more frustrated, her or me.

When a child is around, you want to give them what they want, but that is a mistake when learning something new. A skill, in this case, required making mistakes over and over. until we both made better mistakes.

For her, it was learning that she was not going to learn a brand new skill in 30 minutes,

for me, it was accepting how hard it is to teach a lesson for the first time.

"We practice to make better mistakes; that is how we learn."

seeing her frustrated face and crossed arms made me question if she'd heard the message.

But it reminded me that we can move forward with fewer frustrations by listening to what we do not want to hear.