Help Me to Learn from Mistakes

My teacher helped me see mistakes aren’t embarrassing moments; instead, they are for you to grow and treat them as part of your learning. - Noel

No one wants to be wrong or worse for everyone else to find out that we are wrong. It can be mortifying, but only if we let it be. It takes work for a student to be able to see that for themselves, but it is harder to build an environment where it is ok to fail or to do something wrong and seek forgiveness or make it right.  

That is the bigger challenge of all we do as we fill their brains with facts and figures. We also need them to learn to be kind to others but kind to themselves as well. The ability to self-regulate emotions is an extremely difficult skill to teach directly because we always want to seek the blame in ourselves or others. It somehow still seems to happen as kids grow and mature through their years. Most of them figure that out along the way.  

It helps that there are so many opportunities for them to try and try again, but we don’t want to leave it for chance. We need to be intentional about those opportunities, trying small challenges that can build towards bigger ones. We want to have them try these strategies out in a safe place before they have to really be put to the test in something much more grave.  

Entrepreneur and author Noah Kagan talks about the “Failure Olympics” as a strategy to get over the fear of failing. He prescribes several little challenges to decrease the weight of each failure by making it almost fun to fail. He challenges us to ask for a free coffee at the coffee shop or call back from someone famous, and you will likely get shot down, but do it enough and you will get what you want, or you won’t care as much about being rejected.  

While we can’t take our students on a field trip to Cup-of-Joe’s to practice, we can give them plenty of opportunities to take small risks and to live with the result, good or bad. We can probably use the practice ourselves.  

What will you add to your own class’s Failure Olympics?