Homestead Training: Accept Feedback & Practice Self-Regulation (4th Permaculture Principle) • Homestead Lady

As an integral part of our homestead training, it’s imperative that we learn to accept feedback and practice self-regulation. In fact, feedback and self-regulation are a vital part of any goal setting process! But what exactly does this mean and how do we create quality feedback loops? How do we monitor our own homesteading practices and make plans to improve? Join us today for practical tips and applications on how to improve our homestead training.

Before we get started, I need to mention that the idea of internalizing feedback and self-regulation as a homesteader is 100% necessary if we want to succeed.

However, these ideas also apply to many other areas of our lives like:

Parenting
Home Educating
Working Professionally
Pursuing Hobbies

In short, these principles apply anytime and in any space where we have a relationship with something or someone. Which is everywhere!

After reading this article, I suggest you pull out your homestead journal and jot down a few areas where your struggling anywhere in your life. Ponder whether the following discussion on essential homestead training techniques in self-analysis and tweaking can be applied to the other areas of your life.

If so, how?

Homestead Training: Accept Feedback & Practice Self-Regulation

Quality control is such an important aspect of any business or building venture that there are people who base their whole professional lives on analyzing systems to provide constructive criticism and actionable goals for corporations and even small ventures.

The sooner we can think of the homestead (at least in part) as a business, the sooner we’ll be able to improve our personal homestead training to include frequent self-checks and analysis of the various parts of our homestead.

In short, if we want to create a successful homestead, set and achieve realistic homestead goals, save money and time, and basically improve our homesteading efforts, it’s time to learn to apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

Permaculture Principle #4 – Apply Self-Regulation & Accept Feedback

This article is the fourth in a series of articles whose purpose is to articulate how the twelve principles of permaculture are relevant to homesteaders. Today’s principle, apply self-regulation and accept feedback, is perhaps at the heart of all the others.

No system, plan, or goal will survive very long or enjoy success if it can’t be tweaked and improved along the way. This is true of businesses, families, homesteads, and individuals alike.

What Skills Do I Need for Homesteading?

Study/Ponder
Set Goals
Establish Quality Control and Self Regulation – learn to accept feedback and make changes!
Adapt and Be Elastic

This is why ANYONE can homestead no matter where they live or what their life is like.

Resources for Further Learning:

A Short Introduction to Permaculture

How to Have a Successful Homestead

Plan a Permaculture Homestead Layout

Homestead Training In Goal Setting

The most common steps to quality and realistic goal setting are as follows:

Determine which course of action is needed; a fancy way of saying decide what you need to do. This is your goal.
Commit to the achievement of your goal even before you articulate it. This step is vital and will ensure your success even when you stop working on your goal for a time or are otherwise interrupted. Life gets messy, but commitment is the key to successful homestead training on any topic.
Articulate the goal and make it as detailed as possible. Vague goals remain unachieved and unrealized. It often helps to give yourself a timeline to complete the goal as this keeps you motivated. Make the goal challenging but realistic. We are motivated by the anticipation of achievement but can be immobilized by unrealistic expectations.
Post the goal where you will see and interact with it daily. Work at it consistently and give it your all. Recall your first conviction of commitment from step one.
Analyze your progress and be honest about it. Request feedback from others, as well. The quicker we receive these reviews of not only our performance but our overall goal, the quicker we can reach a desirable conclusion. Ideally, we should be able to use this critique to fine tune our goal, as well as improve our methods to achieve it. Without this step, our goal will poop out and die, or worse, be mediocre in its results.

One last note on step five is that the more quality analysis we receive, the better we can tweak our results. A positive outcome in one experience setting homestead goals will empower us to set even more challenging goals in the future.

We won’t be afraid to engage in homestead training or in learning new skills because we will have built confidence in our ability to improve!

Learning to accept feedback and practice self-regulation is at the heart of effective goal setting.

The Problem is the Solution

One of the catch phrases we often hear in permaculture circles is, “The problem is the solution!” What does this mean?

This refers to the truth so often observed that as we start to analyze a difficulty to dissect it down to its roots, we discover that a simple change of perception can solve the problem. In other words, maybe the problem is actually a blessing that we just haven’t understood yet.

One of my PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) course instructors, Bill Wilson of Midwest Permaculture, always encouraged us, upon finding a “problem” in our design elements to say,

I am SO lucky I have such-and-such problem!

Then, he said to go figure out why were so lucky to have this challenge.

For example, an abundance of water (one homestead design element) on our land can cause flooding, pooled water, humid conditions, decay, and even an abundance of mosquitoes in summer time.

So why on earth would we say we’re so lucky to have this problem?!

Well, because water is one of the greatest assets we have on the homestead – water is life! We’re lucky to have it because with good permaculture design we can learn to:

Direct the water to where we need it to water crops.
Store the water in rain gardens, rain barrels, and in other ways.
Use perennial bushes and trees to help soak up and put to use all that free water that comes onto our site without our having to do a single thing!

There are so many different ways to look at any given situation! Maybe the first thing we need to do in our homestead training is to learn to change our perspective.

When difficulties arise (and they will!), let’s take Bill’s advice and first say,

I am SO lucky! Now, why am I lucky…?

Permaculture & Self Regulation

Here’s a quick quote from permaculture co-founder, Bill Mollison, explaining a bit more:

Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. It seeks to provide a sustainable and secure place for living things on this earth.

Permaculture is a functional design system: Every component of a design should function in many ways. Every essential function should be supported by many components.

Permaculture design applies the principle of self-regulation: The purpose of a functional and self-regulating design is to place elements or components in such a way that each serves the needs, and accepts the products of other elements (toward zero waste).

Homestead Training in Self Regulation

Some homestead personality types are very naturally introspective. These people almost always ask themselves how they could have done better after performing any given task.

They also readily accept constructive feedback from others on the homestead – from their spouse to their kids to their livestock to their gardens. Everything in the home and in nature is providing us with feedback all the time. The key is to listen!

For others, though, learning to consistently analyze our behavior, our reactions, our goals, our systems, and even our personal way of being doesn’t come naturally. It’s a skill we need to gain through targeted homestead training.

Here are some basic steps to learn to effectively self regulate:

Identify an action, system, or personal reaction in you that needs to be analyzed for improvement.
Begin to gather information about your chosen topic. First, think about how you feel and what you think. Then, begin to ask others their opinions. If you’re analyzing a homestead element like a chicken coop or a laying hen, write down observations you’ve made about that element. Put everything down on paper that you can think of to make better sense of your subject.
Decide on a course of action to attempt improvement. This may be one of many ideas you end up trying as you seek to perfect your chosen topic. Since “perfection” is an elusive, relative idea, be prepared to try and fail and try again as you engage in this third step. Winston Churchill once said, “Failure isn’t final.” Each time you try, you learn and improve.
Note the outcome of your improvement experiment. What worked and what didn’t? Write it down.
Try again or decide you’re satisfied with the outcome for now. Be prepared to revisit improvement ideas later on.

As Morag Gamble of The Permaculture Education Institute once reminded her students,

Reflect, review, revise!

This is a never-ending process on the homestead!

Homestead Example of Self Regulation – My Old Goat

I once had a dairy goat named Maizie. She gave the most delicious milk, produced the most wonderful baby goats, and was an excellent herd leader.

Sometimes, though, she was also a royal pain in the butt.

Although smarter than me and more stubborn that you can imagine, Maizie was usually easy to handle and milk. With one exception.

Maizie refused point blank to ingest her herbal wormer.

She’d eat her rations, her homemade dietary supplement, her forage grasses, and pretty much anything else, but not her herbal wormer. And it didn’t matter how I disguised it or tried to turn it into a treat.

Most of the time you can get the herbal wormer down a goat’s throat in something tasty like peanut butter or a healthy fat like coconut oil. A quick raise of their chin, a swift insert into the back of their mouths, and they swallow.

Some goats will even eat them right out of their dish. Ha! Not Maizie.

After yet another “argument” with my goat over taking her herbal wormer, I lost my temper. I said some less than kind things and stormed from the milking barn. (I’m sure that showed her who was boss.)

After calming down and thinking about the situation, I reached a conclusion I should reached have long before. What I was doing wasn’t working. Continuing to do it wasn’t making it work and continuing to fail was a waste of mine and Maizie’s energy.

Applying the Self Regulation My Goat Taught Me

Maizie was a goat. I was the human and I need to act like it to find the best solution for both of us. To do that, I sat down and brainstormed a few ideas and questions:

Since I had tried, literally, every form of treat and trick by mixing the wormer with some other substance, maybe that was the problem. Maybe she recognized the lump of whatever it was simply by smell and had learned that whenever the lump was around, I got frustrated and she was forced to eat something she didn’t want.
Maybe there was a better way. If so, what was it?
The herbal wormer was a collection of herbs I was giving to her in dried, powdered form. Maybe she would eat the herbs fresh? Hmmm…one of the herbs was wormwood (only given now and then), not the most palatable of herbs. But some of the others like fennel, garlic, thyme, or hyssop – maybe she’d eat those fresh.
Or maybe there was a way to get her to ingest the powdered stuff using a different method?

Going through this reflective process produced several helpful results. Which were:

I did finally find a way to get Maizie to ingest the herbal wormer in its powdered form. I mixed small amounts into her grain ration until she got used to the flavor. Then I increased and decreased it as needed. She didn’t need it every day, just every week. We seemed to find an accord with this method.
I also started thinking about the herbs in my purchased herbal wormer formula. I decided to start growing all of them to see how they did in my climate. Since herbs are great garden plants, they all survived and thrived.
Since I had the fresh herbs on hand from my own garden, I started sharing them with the goats during the growing season. I still purchased my powdered herbal wormer and used it regularly, but these fresh herbal offerings were an occasional supplement for my goats that they enjoyed.

My appreciation for Maizie actually increased with this experience. I was still relatively new to milking goats at the time and was still a young woman and homesteader. Maizie taught me a lot of essential lessons over the years we knew each other, but this was one of the first things that working with her taught me:

If a system isn’t reaching its full potential, first analyze your place in that system and improve your function.

In other words,

If something isn’t working on the homestead, figure out what you’re doing to mess it up and fix your behavior.

This lesson applies anywhere, by the way, not just in the barnyard with a stubborn goat.

What is an Example of Self Regulation in Permaculture?

If you’re new to permaculture, please read the article “A Brief Introduction to Permaculture” or any of the articles link at the very beginning of this one under the “Resources for Further Learning” section.

David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture, writes of this fourth principle:

This principle deals with self-regulatory aspects of permaculture design that limit or discourage inappropriate growth or behavior. With better understanding of how positive and negative feedbacks work in nature, we can design systems that are more self-regulating, thus reducing the work involved in repeated and harsh corrective management.

From a permaculture design perspective, the principle of self-regulation requires us to check ourselves against all the other principles of permaculture.

Constant self-regulation in our designs and homestead planning especially inspires us to come back to the first principle of permaculture which is: Observe and Interact.

It also requires that, once we’ve observed, we MUST apply our observations to change and improvement. To know something isn’t enough if we don’t do anything about it!

This process of assessment and improvement means we waste less time and energy doing things that don’t work. It also means we have less to clean up and repair afterwards. As Holmgren said, “…thus reducing the work involved in repeated and harsh corrective management.”

The Permaculture Principles in Brief

Just to review for those who’ve never heard of permaculture, here is a very brief synopsis of the permaculture principles. Notice how they can all be applied to homesteading?

Observe and interact with the natural systems already in place on your homestead to learn how she functions, manages and renews resources, and produces harvests.
Capture and store energy (or resources) on your homestead. There are so many forms of energy besides electricity!
Obtain a yield, or in other words, harvest something!
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback to improve systems and designs on the homestead. This is how we ensure quality control!
Use and value renewable, or natural, resources to keep solutions simple, reduce cost and our workload, and keep as close to the land as possible.
Produce no waste, or in other words, create systems that use up any “waste” product so that everything is put to good use.
Design from patterns to details, which means we go from a broad picture down to specific implementation on our homesteads.
Integrate rather than segregate elements and systems on the homestead. Everything is connected to and supporting everything else so no one element stands alone.
Use small and slow solutions to keep projects to a reasonable, local, human scale that employ methods that are doable by the homesteader or homestead community.
Use and value diversity on the homestead from many opinions to a variety of plants; this is often called using polyculture in the garden.
Use the edges and value the marginal areas of our homesteads and gardens to observe how the unique spaces produce equally unique plants and microclimates.
Creatively use and respond to change by learning to adapt people and designs to the needs of the homestead over time. This requires us to maintain a vision of what our homesteads could and will be – which brings us around the first principle again!

Homestead Training in Accepting Feedback

It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not.

-Bill Mollison, from Permaculture: A Designers Manual

Remember when we talked about changing our perspective from, “Oh no, I have this homestead problem!” to “I am SO lucky!”?

Getting feedback, critique, constructive criticism, etc. is one of the most important aspects of homestead training and education. Like my old goat, Maizie, literally everything on the homestead is sharing with us its opinion of how we’re managing things.

Sometimes, as with an abundant summer harvest, the feedback is positive and it’s clear that our garden systems have been designed well.

Other times, our goat bites us as we try to force feed her wormer. Feedback in all it’s forms!

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this part of permaculture principle #4 – Apply Self-Regulation & Accept Feedback. Mostly because, if you’ve made it to the end of this article, you know how to persevere and do hard things.

You already know as a mature and responsible homesteader that we need to seek out the opinions and ideas of others. No homesteader is an island unto himself. And if he tries to be, he’s going to mess stuff up.

So, while I’m not going to belabor the point, here are some things to think about.

Accepting Feedback on the Homestead in Various Ways

Always keep permaculture principle #1 in mind; observe and interact with your family and your homestead environment. Be willing to experiment and analyze with what is working and what isn’t. Pay attention to what’s happening around you – like pests, weather, the light and the seasons – at different times of year and adjust.
Know your limits but expect miracles and wonderful things to happen; be open to them. Windfalls, happy serendipity, things working out, blessings – these are all a form of feedback from the universe at large. You may struggle, but you’re doing well.
Allow yourself and others to mature, especially your homestead family. Always invite their feedback and helpful critique. Offer this to them in return, remembering to let them develop – not everyone gets to be what they want to be all of the time. Be forgiving.
Be elastic and adaptive to change once feedback has been received, whether from people or homestead elements and systems. This is good for our own peace of mind but it will also show a good example to other homesteaders, especially the aspiring and the burned out.
Ask the question “Why?” all the time and remain curious! Feedback will come to us naturally and be easier to discern if we’re constantly asking, “Now, why did that happen that way?”. Ask LOTS of questions.

Homestead Criticism & “Failure”

Here are a few more ideas to keep in mind so you don’t get discouraged or feel like a failure when things go wrong.

Expect mistakes and learn from them because they are great teachers! Mistakes are a useful form of personal feedback.
Move on from what isn’t working – this is the system telling you that it’s malfunctioning. It’s insanity to repeat the same ineffective actions and expect different, more pleasing results. Remember my goat.
Look out for and try to avoid waste. Observe how natural ecosystems use and reuse material to sustain themselves. Anything that is produced in abundance beyond what can be used (waste) is put to use or discarded. Are you able to do the same on your homestead? If not, your waste is giving you feedback on possible changes.
Don’t expend more energy than you have on fixes and don’t overload on the feedback coming in. You can’t fix everything all at once. Remember permaculture principle #9: slow and simple solutions found right on the homestead will be the ones that are the most effective.

One last thing I feel it’s important to remember. One of the best ways to apply feedback and critique is so stop repeating the same mistakes. If you find yourself continually falling into the same unproductive patterns, stop immediately and take inventory of yourself.

make a list
set a goal
break a habit

Do whatever it takes to find the heart of the problem and not only fix it, but turn it into a strength. Remember, we are SO lucky that the problem is often the solution. So, don’t waste your energy moping or tearing yourself down or wasting your energy doing the same dumb thing over and over.

As Desmond Tutu is credited with saying.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in…

Homestead Training Exercise

The homestead homework for this permaculture principle is to fill out the worksheets in the productivity planner provided for FREE when you join our newsletter family below. These worksheets could be applied to any goal or problem to solve on the homestead, in your family, or even in your own habits.

Applied to the homestead, this simple workbook will help you:

Identify what’s most important to you and to focus in on what you want to accomplish.
Set realistic goals for the homestead this year.
Tackle “problems” in a measured way – remember that you’re SO lucky to have these challenges!
Record all your plans and notes in an organized way with multiple layouts to from which to choose.

If all you want is the notebook, you can unsubscribe from the newsletter once you’ve printed the sheets. I will say, though, that there are A LOT of other really helpful free resources in the Newsletter Member Library that you’ll be able to access with every newsletter, and there are more being added all the time.

Get your workbook below…

So, What Makes a Good Homesteader?

Remember the list of skills we outlined from the very beginning?

Study/Ponder
Set Goals
Establish Quality Control and Self Regulation – learn to accept feedback and make changes!
Adapt and Be Elastic

What would you add to this list?

Can you see how at the heart of it is the ability to change and adapt to a higher, better way? If we can do this, our homestead training will be effective as we mature as homesteaders. All that work will be worth it because we have, in essence, learned how to learn!

As far as applying permaculture principles to the homestead goes, remember that you are most often following these principles in a circle, not a line. If you struggle with one, put it down and pursue the next.

Everything will come back around in its time.

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