Imitation or Inspiration?

Taking Root: finding our voice in an information drenched world

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Imitation is the lowest form of learning, and it’s where basically everyone has to start.
-Kathleen Beckham

There is an exercise that I use often in group coaching environments, camps, and workshops, that involves turning to the person beside you and giving that person a compliment. We continue this around the group until everyone receives a little gift of words. This exercise clears the space and settles our nervous systems into a state of receiving. When we’re all finished I ask, “What feels different now?”

My work as a coach found me because I needed the tools first, and the same was true with the compliment exercise. In my last workshop, I was already speaking the follow-up question before a participant alerted me that I hadn’t received a compliment yet.

I strive to be a continuous student in my work, whether that be with horses, people, philosophy, or science. In the role of teacher and student it is a balance between giving and receiving — being open to accept and being comfortable enough with the subject to give. Sometimes those lines blur — and they’re supposed to.

The workshop participant reminding me that I hadn’t paused what I was doing to receive a compliment gave me pause. I’ve taken some time to study my response and what I’ve found is a full-muscle brace within my body, my breath held, a push inside me to get the compliment finished and move on.

I do this because of the situations I’ve encountered where my work has been used against me.

I said I wasn’t going to write about this, but here I am, doing it. The lessons that keep repeating themselves are the ones asking for my closest attention.

As I write this, I’m coming out of a few years of being battered by my own work. And by battered I mean beaten up. My nervous system recoils from compliments now like a physical punch — because compliments are where it all started.

Someone showed interest in my work. I allowed them to learn and grow beside me. I gave them access to all my resources. My gut occasionally told me to take heed, that something was incongruent, but I was being lavished with so much direct praise, I brushed it off as paranoia. I began to doubt my judgment.

I’m an old pro at spotting gaslighting in a romantic relationship. I lived that lesson enough until it stuck, but this was my first time encountering gaslighting from a colleague. When I was face to face with this person they showed nothing but appreciation for access to my brainstorming and program development. But when I walked away, they sowed seeds of doubt about my character to literally everyone around me. Because of this situation, I’ve lost the trust of entire beloved communities. Trust develops slowly and artfully placed questions can destroy it.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — and it was — until it wasn’t.

As I forensically evaluated the situation — how to keep it from happening again, what lessons did I need to take from it, what was the whole thing trying to tell me? — I realized that my questions led me to queries that touched on a deeper philosophy of information, learning, and teaching.

My experience with this colleague made me defensive. It’s tough to take in new information when our nervous systems are in a state of protection and being open to learning is who I fundamentally am — questions are my metaphorical food source.

How could I take my situation and use it to deepen my understanding of how we learn and connect, how we make new ideas from old seeds, honor our mentors, and fundamentally grow?

These thoughts have larger implications with the emergence of AI and the dissemination of information across digital platforms. My professional world — like most of our day-to-day lives — exists in two places at once: the entirely organic connection with horses and the wholly constructed digital world.

The horses respond to real-time authenticity, they require people to be present and aware. Connecting with a horse asks us to drop the constructs we’ve created to keep ourselves reasonably safe in the face of uncertainty. That’s why they’re so great at helping people self-actualize and make needed changes in their lives.

Horses encourage us into a state of receptivity and learning by their very nature.

Learning anything requires us to step beyond what is familiar and make space for something new. So much of what we do with horses arrives through word of mouth and has for centuries/millennia. No one owns the information. Horse skills are like musical notes, like an alphabet — they’re the material used to create.

Horses are OG public domain. So is writing — diving into the craft of writing, developing a unique voice through age and use and mimicry.

This mentor-heavy environment is seemingly at odds with the virtual world where most students are now going to learn more about any subject, not just horses. How can we glean what is real and true when we’re bombarded with so many answers?

Who can we trust?

Can we trust ourselves? Imposter syndrome is real and while most arts encourage the student to immerse themselves in the work of masters, imitating and practicing until the student’s unique tone, their voice, finds its way to a seat in the front of the class — we’re not given similar guidelines in the lessons of life.

The difference I see from masters of their various crafts is the ability to ask the question — is this mine? (Thank you, sister from another hemisphere and master of numerous crafts,

Jane Pike

, for that question.) And if it’s not mine, how can I respect it and learn from it? How can I credit the source while continuing to learn and grow and develop my own voice in whatever enterprise I’ve embarked on?

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I reached out to people in the horse industry and beyond who are far more visible than me, people have spent their lives traveling and teaching across the world while also prolifically writing and using digital platforms to share their knowledge.

I asked them if they had ever experienced their work being used against them and what, if anything, they had done in response to imitation. However, as I contacted them, my question — my focus on imitation/protection — felt increasingly hollow.

I broadened my field and reached out to wise people whose voices I trust — the people I would go to for advice — some were horse pros, some were not.

What began as a series of industry-specific questions morphed into an existential collection of inquiries that encompassed the topic of creation itself — art, business, life, one’s own persona.

This was about so much more than someone taking one’s work and making it their own — it was more about becoming, of moving into the confidence of one’s calling and work.

Their responses drew me into a complex and soulful web of knowledge — and more questions (yay!) — that cut to the heart of authenticity, bravery, and balance.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to share various short interviews with people. Some work in the public eye, others do not, and I’m going to spotlight their wisdom on becoming — of doing the work to find their voice in all its iterations.

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Kathleen Beckham

Kathleen is a writer, teacher, and founder of Ethos Equine, and her career spans the transition from grassroots, hands-on horsemanship to the present epoch of digital teaching. I asked for her thoughts on imitation of her work, giving credit to mentors and any fallout she had experienced from people taking her work and using it as their own.

Here are Kathleen’s words:

I think it's difficult to balance credit due, which is respect, with doing your own work and taking credit for what you've worked so hard at. There's a balance there.

There are students who, because of who they are, or circumstances (like not being able to work in person often enough), are kind of a collection of their misunderstandings of your work. This kind of seems like a "fact of life," because there are so many variables, and it can be difficult for a student to "keep up with" a teacher who continues to learn themselves.

Imitation is the lowest form of learning, and it's where basically everyone has to start. I love it when a student is around long enough that they're past the imitation stage, and they've progressed to applying the principles in their own unique way. This is fascinating to watch and exciting to be a part of.

I also think that especially for women, who are so often mentored by men, I can maybe flip that script a bit, and instead of thinking of "imitation," think about "inspiration." So my work is not an imitation of so-and-so, it's "inspired" by so-and-so. I am in the process of actively making this change in my mind and in my language.

I went through a period of time where I was known as "so-and-so's former assistant." Like, I didn't have a NAME. While in the beginning, that felt like status of some sort, it quickly started to feel like a burden, and I spent years figuring out how to get out from underneath that. No one talked about what I did, they talked about me in the context of the guy I worked for. I only existed in comparison to him. That was a tough time, and I was much too young and inexperienced to navigate that well.

It's taken years for me to establish my own identity, my own voice, and my own work. This would have gone better and faster if I'd focused more on the horses at that time, I think. As I age, and I distance my work from my male mentors, I find I'm focusing more and more on the horses themselves (and "the horse" in general), and that feels more authentic.

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Finding Your Voice

Long ago, when I was a young adult studying creative writing with some gifted masters of their craft, it was universally understood that I would develop my voice through imitation, immersion, and doing the work. I would read and explore and mimic the voices of other writers until — with time and practice and understanding — my unique voice would emerge through my dedication to the task of showing up and putting words on the page.

Like Kathleen says, “focusing more and more on the horses.” Our immersion in the subject develops the unique stamp of our work, our voice, in a way that riding on the coattails and the accolades of our mentors does not.

I’ve taken a lot of breaks through the decades, but here I am still — trying to put words on the page (screen? the world?)

I’m writing this as I just received word that one of my mentors in the horse industry, Sherwin Lindsey, passed away. Sherwin was many things to me through the decades, but the root of his influence was his encyclopedic knowledge of the teachers who formed him, and their teachers, and their teacher’s teachers. His legacy was cemented through connection — bringing history into the present so that it could work and evolve into the future. He used his teachers’ words to guide him as he created his own work.

Imitation can be inspiration if we allow it to be. Our own brilliance can shine through homage to the work that forms us. With work and practice and patience, we can find our voice.

This is my fiftieth year of being on this ball of plants and animals hurling through the ethers. I don’t know what is at the center of the sun we’re spinning around, but I’m okay speculating alongside people who are way smarter than me about the matter that forms it.

The smartest question I’ve ever asked was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to find the answer.” And the quest, I’ve found, has been the cure for my relative insignificance, my inferiority, my yearning to keep asking.

I will keep writing to hone my way down into my voice. I will keep asking you for your opinion. As I move from student to teacher to grandmother (figuratively), I will tell you what I’ve discovered, but I will also leave space for your perspective.

As I learn to accept compliments, and to be okay with you taking any knowledge I’ve given you and messing it up and misquoting me, and potentially using my own words against me — I am beginning to understand that this is the whole point. Our progress isn’t linear.

Time is a circle.

And we will come back to our questions time and time again until they are succinct — until they have evolved into the right questions. The first attempt is an imitation. But the work we create through the fertilizer of our mistakes is the gold the alchemists hinted at so long ago, before the periodic table, before Wikipedia, before we flew overnight across oceans.

I’m convinced that the human nervous system was designed to receive information at the pace of a person walking/running or horseback. Any quicker than that and we’re trying to keep up with the sensory detail and any meaning is lost in translation.

Tell me about the mentors who formed you. Tell me about the compliments you haven’t/don’t feel worthy to receive.

I want to hear your stories.

And if there is someone you would like to see micro-interviewed here, send them my way.

Love,
Kim

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If I haven’t drenched you with too many words already and you’d like more reading, check out my latest posts at Stable Roots. And while you’re there, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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