Imagine if your child sat across the table from Mistake. What would Mistake look like to them?
For some of my students, Mistake is a big F- staring at them. For others, it is a dark and gloomy shape. No matter what it looks like, however, there is little doubt that mistakes leave all us feeling uncomfortable. Right?
In fact, mistakes often lead us to believe that we aren’t good enough or there is something wrong with us. True?
Read on to discover how your child can learn to embrace mistakes as part of learning and success.
The Truth About Mistakes
As a teacher, I know that mistakes are the key to learning.
As a learner, I still don’t like the feeling when I make one.
In my teens, I held a crippling fear of making mistakes. This fear kept me from stepping outside of my comfort zone, speaking my true opinions and asking for help.
Looking back, I can see that I subconsciously believed mistakes would show me to be less than perfect and prove that I wasn’t good enough.
Can you see this in your child too? What are they afraid that mistakes may prove about them?
Today, I now understand that mistakes are not a personal reflection of who I am, but feedback about the actions I have taken.
Over the last few years, I have made more mistakes than in the previous two decades, but in doing so have found my purpose, passion and authentic voice.
Three truths about mistakes are:
- Truth#1: Mistakes are not personal
- Truth#2: Mistakes are feedback about the action
- Truth#2: Mistakes are the pathway to success
Nobody gets good at something without making lots of mistakes. So, it important to get to used to making them if we want to be successful.
How To Overcome Fear
At the heart of those uncomfortable feelings around making mistakes is fear.
Fear is an emotion caused by a perceived danger or threat.
So, you can tell yourself or a child not to be afraid of making mistakes, but this rarely helps to change your or their perception. True?
I am often asked by parents how you can teach a child to overcome fear.
In my experience, the first action is to talk about the fear.
“Fear has a large shadow, but he himself is small.”
~ Ruth Gendler
I love this quote because it is so true.
I teach kids how to identify fear and courage in the first week of Mindset Zero To Hero. Every time I guide them through our discussion about fear and courage, they tell me how insignificant fear is compared to courage.
Students tell me that fear is scary thoughts of what could go wrong, what might happen, why not to do it or why they can’t.
By comparison, students tell me that courage is a powerful feeling that makes them believe they can, trust themselves and see solutions to problems.
An initial discussion of fear and courage will help your child identify where they feel fear and courage as well as what thoughts and beliefs that have in both of these states. Self-awareness is a critical skill that helps kids and teens to understand their emotions, their strengths and helps them empathise with others.
However, as I mentioned earlier, the fear of making mistakes is linked to the beliefs of not being good enough, not being perfect or not being capable.
A Meeting With Mistake
Kathryn Sandford, a Career Resilience Coach, writes that “beliefs are the thoughts in our head that influence our behaviour, attitude and actions. The beliefs that affect our lives are either Empowering Beliefs which enable us to lead flourishing lives or Self Limiting Beliefs that stop us from achieving our goals.”
To be honest, I have spent years and years trying to overcome limiting beliefs. I have tried a variety of healing techniques to heal myself so that my limiting beliefs would no longer be true.
However, the invisible instruction by doing this is that THERE IS something wrong with me!
In all my teaching and coaching, I make sure that the kids and teens know that these limiting beliefs don’t need fixing because they aren’t true.
Recently, I learned a mindset tool that starts with the premise that our limiting beliefs are not true. Celebrate that! As such, I believe that is why it has produced amazing results for me and my students!
The mindset tool is to sit in a meeting with our biggest fear and discover what we can learn from it. Sounds crazy, right?
In this case, I ask my student to sit across the table from Mistake and describe it for me. No surprises with the answers we get.
The surprises come when I ask them to switch places and become Mistake. This is when the mindset shift occurs.
Next, I ask them to be neither mistake nor fear. This is when students learn to detach from themselves and change their perception of their fear. It is truly remarkable to hear their insights.
There is always something each student learns and a strategy that they will use in the future when they make a mistake.
Mistakes Lead To Success
When we become comfortable to make mistakes, we start challenging ourselves to do things we were once afraid of failing in. Obviously, this action will lead us to success.
In the case of my students, they have learned to train their brain to understand that mistakes are safe to make.
They have also learned to use those uncomfortable feelings to trigger a new response: mistakes teach you what you can improve.
Now they are ready to learn!
What I have seen my students do with the mindset mistakes are not personal, is to take on new challenges that may have seemed impossible to them earlier.
For example, when one of my students overcame his fear of mistakes he suddenly became this learning dynamite! He found the courage to learn his times tables, something that he had always struggled with. He used the same learning routine to then practice his weekly spelling words and found more success. In one year, he had changed his whole outlook on what he thought was possible to achieve.
Therefore, if students no longer need to prove they are good enough, then they don’t need to hide their mistakes. If students no longer need to be perfect, then challenges are the keys to their success. It is a natural progression!
When we focus on the solution, not the problem, then we inspire courageous action.
The secret that I share with my students is to make Mistake your friend. Celebrate when you see them! Sit next to them and find out what you need to do next in order to find Success.
The ‘Embracing Mistakes’ mindset tool is currently only available to students in my mindset training courses. If you’d like your child to learn how to become comfortable with mistakes, then please contact me or head over to my website for dates on the next round of training.
Till next time, Tara