The first time you make a particular mistake, it’s far more emotionally affecting.
The first time I made homemade pasta, I learned to roll it through my pasta roller, tightening one click after each pass, so that the dough became thinner and longer each time. And what I discovered is that it’s easy to forget and leave it at the thinnest setting when you start the next piece of dough. When you do that, the dough gets mangled because it’s not ready to be rolled that thin.
When I first made that mistake, I didn’t know what was causing it, and I tried to persevere in rolling out the dough, getting increasingly frustrated until I finally figured it out and reset the roller to the widest setting. Since then, I still regularly forget, but when it happens, I just remember, nod, and fix it quickly.
The first time I made the mistake, I was far more emotionally hooked, and far more vulnerable. I was vulnerable because I was trying something for the first time, and I was vulnerable because I didn’t know all the ins and outs of the process.
That’s our students, all the time. Conductors and educators have made so many mistakes, over our own education and our careers, that we are not so emotionally affected when we or the ensemble make a mistake.
But we do well to remember that our own emotional response isn’t the same as our singers–they are probably more less experienced in these mistakes, and far more emotionally hooked as a result.