Failure
noun
1. lack of success.
In a recent conversation I had with a mum with a young family, an interesting question came up; how do we teach our kids to handle failure?
As I’ve sat with that question, it has raised another; how do I handle failure?
This question feels less comfortable, a little more confronting.
If I’m honest, my instinctive, default reaction to failure has been to avoid at all cost. If you don’t go out on a limb, you won’t fall. Play it safe, just keep colouring between the lines, convince myself that I didn’t really want to do that new … (whatever it is this time) anyway. Potential crisis averted.
Except I’m left with not much room to move. That familiar companion fear has put me in a small cardboard box where the sides keep getting higher and higher until I’m left living in a very beige world.
I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s experienced the view from the cardboard box.
Our world doesn’t do failure well. Success is the goal, preferably with as little inconvenient messiness as possible. Our kids enter a performance driven culture the moment they commence school; a culture that unfortunately has to operate within a structure of reaching learning outcomes, getting the good marks, achieving ATARs. The working world isn’t that different really, the language just changes. We’ve created a black and white system of winners and losers and no-one wants to risk ending up on the losing side.
We’re back to the old story of performance-based functioning. And yet, failing is human. Our physical and cognitive development depends on us trying, falling down, getting up and trying again. How else do we learn to walk?
Sadly, somewhere along the way we lose this curious reaching out for. We experience shame, we taste fear, the stakes become too high and we climb into our box. We get stuck in safe mode.
So how do we teach our kids?
By showing them that it’s ok to fail.
With patience, gentleness and compassion we help ourselves climb out of that box, we hold our own hand and practise taking the smallest risk.
Then another.
We learn how to support ourselves when we are afraid of being judged, ridiculed, falling short, not being good enough.
We let our kids witness us as we try and fail and then be kind to ourselves in the process.
I love the words of Winston Churchill – “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”.
Will you permit a little stumbling in your life?
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Photo by Alexander Dummer