Similarly in meditation, for example today I sat for half an hour and I spent almost the whole time running after irrelevant thoughts. I know it's ok and normal and it takes time and practice to "improve". But when I think about my session, on one hand I get this kind of "do not expect anything, accept the present experience as it is, there is no such thing as a bad session" vibe while on the other, it still seems to me that it should be possible to "make some progress", so that with practicing it becomes easier and easier to stay mindful, which makes me think of it as a sort of mental training, and I worry whether it occurs automatically with practicing or whether I could go on for years without ever getting "there" if I don't do it "right".
So it's like I have these two sides of the coin in my experience so far, "just keep sitting everyday, studying and doing your best and do not worry, it will work anyway" vs. "if you don't manage to find how it's done properly you will never get better at it" and I'd like some advice to understand how to disentangle this!
From my own experience what I found was the biggest difficulty to overcome was my expectation of meditation, easy to say just let expectation go, good luck with that !, expectation is often the reason you are meditating in the first place.
The answer I found was to divert expectation into curiosity, this is developing the ability to see your experience as if through the eyes of a child, the amazing revelation that you sat for half an hour and your mind was wirring away in irrelevant thoughts, what were those thoughts, what was powering them, was there accompianing body sensations, emotional element to the thinking, I could go on but the point is to be curious about your mind and how and why it is doing what it is doing.
This curiosity takes away expectations of performance, you can be curious and that is "doing it properly", what is more you are learning all about yourself and how you are in the world at the same time, that is wisdom