Falling in love with failing

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Fostering openness to learning and growth

Taking on challenges, struggling, failing, analyzing mistakes, and reengaging is the route to growth, competence and self-esteem. Therefore children must learn to tolerate this process, including the failures. False praise and unrealistic labels create a focus on judgment that undermines a child’s willingness to risk failures.

Striking out in baseball is a mini failure and to some of us, quite painful. So how can I avoid this pain? If I don’t go up to bat, I will never strike out and therefore, never have to feel the pain of humiliation and frustration.Or … I can only hit against pitchers I am sure I can handle – therefore staying free of another dreaded strikeout. Two elegant solutions if I don’t say so. There is only one problem, however, with this elegant plan. If I never bat against challenging pitching, I will never improve. I have to meet the challenge of better pitching so that I can master it and grow.

The act of striking out represents engagement in a challenging zone I have yet to master. If I want to get better, I need to risk striking out. In fact, if I analyze why I missed the pitch, I will get better – whether that analysis takes place behind a video screen or at bat having missed the first two strikes. This is a longwinded way of saying that to become a good baseball player, I must learn to tolerate failures, because they become the sources of learning.

So how do we convince our children that they need to welcome failure as a means of learning and growing? Listen to this praise from a proud baseball dad:

“You are such a good hitter.”

“Wow, you are so good. You hit the ball every time.”

“Three hits today! What a great hitter you are!”

What do you think of the praise Dad has handed out? He’s pretty proud of his son, isn’t he? Does anything worry you about what you just heard?

This is a loving, well-intentioned father. He believes he is heaping well-deserved praise on his son. What he is also heaping on his son is some unnecessary pressure. He has labeled him a “good hitter”, even a “great hitter”. That is a tough standard to live up to. There is added pressure if the child thinks Dad’s interest and caring is dependent upon continuing to be “good” or “great”. Unfortunately, Dad has also attached an unintended standard for what it means to be good or great. He observed, “You hit the ball every time” and “(You got) three hits today” in the process of labeling his son “good” and “great”. So what happens if the boy goes 0 for 4 in the next game? What if he strikes out more often than he gets hits? Is his status as “good” or “great” at risk? Will he worry about disappointing his dad? Will he view himself as a failure?

What do you think of these comments?

After striking out to end the game, his father consoles him,

“Don’t worry. You played great.”

“You guys will win next time.”

So what is a boy to make of that? He certainly knows that striking out is not playing “great”. And what if they don’t win next time? Now do you understand why a kid would only want to go to bat against easy competition? That would certainly eliminate this confusion and potential for disappointment. Or, how about this as a solution? Blame the umpire for a bad third strike call. And find a good excuse why the other team won, such as cheating or unfair home field advantage. These are “great” ideas because they allow the child to preserve the label or expectation that he is “special” or “great”, as his dad called him, and can go on playing.

Can you think what would have been more helpful?

“So, how was it?”

“What did you think of that pitcher today?”

“Did you have fun?” “Why not?” “Is that something you want to work on?”

If this boy is to grow as a ball player and not let the game get the best of him, he needs to tolerate losses and failures, like striking out. He also needs to know that failures or attempts are how he gets better. Perhaps they need to be labeled something other than failures. Something like trials or attempts? Linking trials with analysis, learning and improvement is the preferable route rather than linking success and failure with ratings of the person. Judgment is ultimately what steers boys away from activities such as sports, academics or talking to girls. Sometimes avoidance and a good set of excuses are better than multiple wounds to lick and explain.

Perhaps the best way to promote this openness to failure and learning is for the father or coach to model it himself. When the child sees that the adult welcomes and learns from failures, it clearly becomes something acceptable for the child as well.

Key words: tolerating failure; failure as learning; resilience; labeling;

Our assumptions about natural ability and the capacity for change profoundly affect our approaches for working with children. Mindset by Carol Dweck is a must read for all teachers and parents. After reading the first chapter your “mindset” will be forever altered. You will begin to quickly recognize teaching strategies and parenting approaches as growth promoting or fixed and limiting.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address eloquently describes how he turned the three greatest “failures” in his life into sources of creativity and growth.

“He’s a natural born superstar”

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Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

A fixed mindset assumes that one is naturally born with talent or giftedness. A growth mindset assumes that competence is gained through hard work. A label such as “gifted” can be a curse if it leads to a lack of engagement in hard work or a reluctance to risk failure – which is an essential part of learning and growing.

If you visited a 3rd grade class for a day, do you think you could pick out the kids who will be successful in life? A kid like Anthony would jump right out at you. Anthony was the biggest, strongest, and fastest kid in 3rd grade – by far. In middle school, he had the sweetest jump shot and the quickest release I can ever recall. Even at that age, the people around him knew he was “special” – and told him so. In high school, he lived up to that label – setting a state scoring record and then breaking it the following year. Anthony was one of the most highly recruited shooting guards coming out of high school before landing at VSU. To everyone’s surprise, Anthony transferred midseason of his freshman year, unhappy with his playing time. This was not the “one-and-done” route to the NBA predicted by his uncle who was already interviewing agents on Anthony’s behalf (unofficially of course). He was welcomed with open arms by his new teammates at Tremont who nicknamed him “Lights Out” after two jaw dropping exhibitions of shooting. Ineligible to play, but free to practice with the team, he became Tremont fandom’s great hope for “next year”. Again, his uncle had him only playing one year at Tremont before jumping to the NBA. And after one year, where was Anthony? Transferring to his third basketball program in as many years. Once again, he had not gotten enough playing time. There was no doubt Anthony could shoot. On several occasions he came into games late, producing a torrent of scoring. But more often, he entered games only to play mediocre defense and fail to make passes to wide open teammates.

Anthony and his uncle held a fixed mindset about his natural talent (gifted) and future (golden). Unfortunately his coaches adhered to a growth mindset – that improvement comes from hard work. Anthony watched with contempt as less highly recruited (and less “talented”) athletes passed him by in terms of playing time. But if we asked the coach, we would hear a different story. He would paint a sharp contrast between the athlete who sought coaches’ critiques, came to the gym on his own, lifted weights all summer, and never missed an opportunity to play against better competition versus the young man who rested on his laurels and transferred every year. By transferring to a new program and blaming the coach for not playing him, Anthony could hold on to his fixed mindset belief about his “talent” or “giftedness”.

A growth mindset assumes that change is possible, regardless of what natural abilities people are born with. A boy may be well coordinated, but he still has to apply himself to become good at a sport. And regardless of how good he is at present, he can always “grow” and make himself better. A growth mindset assumes that competence is gained through hard work, while a fixed mindset assumes that natural abilities or deficits determine outcomes.

The old adage, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a good example of a fixed mindset. What we have since discovered, however, is that we can teach an old dog new tricks; it just takes longer. We now know that brains can grow, even in our old age. We also know that brains grow in relation to how much certain skills are practiced. Quite a bit of my brain lights up when I hit a forehand in tennis, but sadly there is barely a flicker when it comes to hitting a golf shot. But that is directly related to how many hours of practice I have dedicated to each sport.

The well-developed part of the brain related to a skill practiced for 10,000 hours is like a super highway. Without those hours of practice that part of the brain is comparable to a bunch of backcountry dirt roads. Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity basketball team his sophomore year of high school. 10,000 hours of practice later, he was helping North Carolina win a national championship. If talent were all it took, all those grueling hours in the gym would not have been necessary. Jordan’s approach to the game epitomized a growth mindset. Anthony and his uncle somehow missed that part of Jordan’s biography.

“I suck at math” and “I can’t draw” are also fixed mindsets. If you compare yourself with others who are doing better, you can conclude you simply don’t have the ability. But improvement comes one small step at a time, advancing on developmental time, enhanced by practice, not simply by the passing of chronological time. If a child is expected to keep up with his age cohort in reading or math, he may conclude he lacks the talent to be good at those subjects. Math is learned one concept at a time, with explanations, demonstrations, practice problems, error analysis, and then more problems. Learning math is like building a house, one brick at a time. It occurs on developmental time, not chronological time.

The scrawniest guy on our high school tennis team epitomized the growth mindset. By all appearances, he felt no shame. Failure didn’t faze him. He just wasn’t a normal guy. He would play anyone, usually someone better than he and didn’t mind losing. In fact, he equated losing with learning. Still short and bowlegged even as a senior, he was the only one who emerged with a full-ride, Division I tennis scholarship. Anyone who watched his growth mindset at work would notice that every week, he was a better tennis player than he was the week before. That could not be said about the rest of us, with our egos safely protected.

Do you still think you can spot the future successes in 3rd grade? Could you spot the future failures? Can you spot a child with a growth mindset? How about the teacher? The parent(s)? Can a fixed mindset be changed? For Anthony’s sake, let’s hope so.

Mindset: The new psychology of success by Carol Dweck fully explains the powerful effect of a Growth vs. Fixed Mindset for development in all areas – ourselves, our children, our students, and our players.

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle explains that people are not born with greatness, but develop it with effective practice.

Anthony is a fictional composite of all too common “can’t miss” athletes.