Thought For The Week: 

Fail Up:

Picture yourself as a 6-month-old baby. Sitting upright on the bed with a cherubic smile. It’s taken you six months to get there, to gain the strength to sit up.

From there, you become something of a  mini-drunkard - stumbling, struggling to keep your balance as you strive to stand. People laugh good-naturedly. No matter, you keep trying and trying ... and then one day, you stand ...

And you walk!

There are claps all-around, some scraped knees, and a few embarrassing falls. Yet, again, soon forgotten, as you are now an accomplished walker, the child genius of walkers no less.

And so it is that failure-amnesia repeats itself.

The process of learning is a challenge every child faces head-on. All is new. Failure is life. So our youngest ones approach failure without fear because that's all they know.

No judgement from the "standards measurers" - each child's progress is accepted as it comes, the way it comes.

And for each child, falling over and getting back up is natural, normal, no big deal - until one day, for some reason, it suddenly isn't. Doubts sneak in. Failing is something to be avoided, even feared. We begin to take a failure as a sign - that it's too hard, too embarrassing, not possible, or not meant for us.

We must fight that voice in ourselves and help our children hang on to that initial feeling they started life with. Failure is natural. Failure is normal. And most importantly of all, it's not just a step in learning; it's HOW we learn.

Instead of fearing failure, let's find comfort in the possibility of failure because it tells us we are moving forward... and as we fail up, we'll go places we never dreamed possible.

"WHAT YOU DO FOR YOURSELF DIES WITH YOU WHEN YOU LEAVE THIS WORLD, WHAT YOU DO FOR OTHERS LIVES ON FOREVER."

SIR KEN ROBINSON, 'THE ELEMENT', 2009