Celebrate mistakes
What if we saw mistakes as opportunities and not as failures? Many of us live in fear of making mistakes, especially children who receive this pressure from a young age. Changing this perspective can transform learning and life.
Sharing mistakes and learning from them is essential to help the little ones grow up with confidence and without shame. This proposal aims to show how to do it in a natural and effective way.
I have spent half my life afraid of making mistakes. And I have seen that same fear in the eyes of my students, or my daughter. That tension when you have to answer a question, that panic of getting it wrong, that embarrassment when you make a mistake or don’t know how to do it.
The reason is that we live in a success culture where mistakes are penalized. At school, at work, in life. But if we think about it carefully, all our most important learning has come from our mistakes.
When a child starts to walk, they fall a thousand times. And no one tells them "that’s it, you’ve failed at walking". We simply encourage them to try again. But what happens as we grow up? As we grow, mistakes are no longer seen with this normality.
What would happen if we changed our view on mistakes? If instead of saying "you did that wrong" we said "how interesting, you’ve discovered a way that doesn’t work"? If we celebrated mistakes as learning opportunities?
Children need to know that making mistakes is human, normal, and necessary. That the people they admire also make mistakes. That I, as a mother, as a teacher, sometimes am scared too and also do things wrong, that I make mistakes.
This month I suggest you share your mistakes with your children or your students, explain to them that you have made many mistakes and what you have learned from these stumbles along the way. Talk about your mistakes naturally. And when they make mistakes, change the "it’s okay" to a "what have you learned from this?".
Because mistakes are not failures. They are steps toward growth.
Until next month and “ThinkDeeply” a lot.