How do you speak to your children and students about failure? Do you create an environment and engage in a dialogue with your children where failure is a tool for discovery? At VentureLab, one of our exercises with elementary-school children is to brainstorm ways they can think about failure.
In doing so, girls learn that failure has a vocabulary all its own, one that's fraught with meaning, both negative and positive. Here are some connotations our VentureLab students offered for failure:
- Setback Messed up Lesson
- Challenge One more down Now we know
- Opportunity Hit a wall Time to redesign
- Epic fail Experience Teachable moment
- Blunder Goof Screw up
It’s apparent that children internalize the way in which we talk to them about failure.
Rather than calling attention to failure as something to be ashamed of, when a child makes a mistake and accepts it in the right spirit tell the child, “I am proud of you.” This reinforces the idea that not only do mistakes happen, but when you own them, you prime yourself for learning from those mistakes.
The home should be a safe place for children to tell you the truth about the parts of their lives that aren’t going so well. Make failure safe. Demonstrate unconditional love by being somewhat oblivious to easy achievements while enthusiastically supporting children in pursuing and discovering their own passions. Celebrate achievements that require perseverance and learning from failures—not ones that rely simply on talent or luck.
Children have a remarkable ability to overcome failure and bounce back when they are on a path that interests them. The phrase, “I believe in you,” really matters. Girls carry those words as they learn from setbacks, stay on task, and deliver on the promises they make to themselves.
I'd love to hear from you. What do you do when the girls in your life experience setbacks or make mistakes? How do you help them to accept and profit from them?
