{"id":76,"date":"2009-08-23T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T14:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/?p=76"},"modified":"2009-09-11T14:19:21","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T19:19:21","slug":"learning-is-%e2%80%9cmessy%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"If It Looks Like You’re Failing…You’re Actually Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you become frustrated when learning a new skill or studying a new area,\u00a0take a moment and recall what it was like \"ridingwhen you were learning to play a sport for the first time or what it was like when you were learning to ride your bicycle for the first time.\u00a0 As you are recalling this experience consider this thought:<\/p>\n

Before you had balance things were very wobbly, that you fell many, many times, but eventually you got balance on the bike and in order to get that balance you had to get on the bike again and again and again. When learning to play baseball, for example, there were times when maybe you got \u201cbeaned\u201d on the head, slide into a base and got a scraped knee, get dirty and muddy, got sun in your eyes, dropped the ball, the other team got a run, some time the game was canceled but you came back to another game the next day.\u00a0 Sometimes the team may win yet it may also tie or loose.\u00a0 Learning and outcomes are uncertain\u2026 the only certainty is that we stay the in the game.\u00a0 That\u2019s how we learn.<\/p>\n

Consider this thought as well:\u00a0 Edison went through 1,900 possible filaments–1,900!!–before he found the one that was the perfect one to conduct electricity for the light bulb.\u00a0 An amazing act of perseverance–1,899 failures!!\u00a0 \"learningYet, it seems to be the nature of our thinking that failure is to be avoided because we can give it such negative connotations (e.g., this should have been avoided, there is something wrong with me, or this must mean I’m stupid).\u00a0 One failure, one tumble, one slip, one mistake and more often than not we are likely to stop exploring or doing what we would love to do because we might feel too silly or too embarrassed or too upset with ourselves.\u00a0 Good thing we didn’t have those kinds of thoughts as infants when we were learning to roll over.\u00a0 After one attempt we would have said, “Forget it, I can’t do it.”\u00a0 Good thing when we were learning to walk that\u00a0 after just one tumble we didn’t quite and say “I can’t do it, I’ll just stick to crawling.”<\/p>\n

So, consider this thought:\u00a0 failure is not good, it is not bad, it is not right, it is not wrong.\u00a0 It is information, it is an indicator telling us we do not yet have what we want, we have not yet brought to fruition what we are creating.\u00a0 Seeing that, keeping our judgments at bay as best we can, we can then explore this gap.\u00a0 Edison might surely have asked himself, “What is it about this particular filament that isn’t working?\u00a0 The length, the width? the particular metal?” etc.\u00a0 Inherent in each of us is the drive the propels us forward–as infants to sit up, pull ourselves up, hold on, step out, wobble, fall, do it again and again–and again–until we, with utter amazement and joy, master standing, then walking, then running, then hopping and skipping and then riding a bicycle.\u00a0 And each becomes so automatic we have to take a moment and remember: before we mastered any of these amazing skills, we failed and failed and failed, but we did not lose our determination, our perseverance, our tenacity.\u00a0 It is the poet Maya\u00a0 Angelou who said, “It is not that I have confidence, but I believe if I fail, so what?\u00a0\u00a0Now <\/em>I have the chance to try again.”\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, she also wrote, “Courage allows the successful person to fail…and to learn powerful lessons form the failure–so that in the end, it was not a failure at all.”<\/p>\n

So, you see, when you are failing…you are really learning.\u00a0 Be bold, dare to risk, take heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you become frustrated when learning a new skill or studying a new area,\u00a0take a moment and recall what it was like when you were learning to play a sport for the first time or what it was like when you were learning to ride your bicycle for the first time.\u00a0 As you are recalling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lessons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joycejuster.com\/thoughts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}