Atychiphobia: the fear of failure. I like having an uncommon word to describe something so common. Granted, atychiphobia is the dysfunctional fear of failure; it keeps a person from trying anything new. Although most people aren’t considered atychiphobic, it’s been my experience that people, especially adolescents, tend to be failure-avoidant when it comes to taking healthy risks.
Young children aren’t afraid to take risks or to be wrong. They are innovators by design. It’s how they learn. But something happens as our children enter middle childhood and adolescence; they begin to think that being wrong is not okay.
There are many great quotations about the value of an epic fail. However, I am particularly fond of this one because it reminds me that failure is critical to creativity. Sir Ken Robinson, an author and, more importantly, an education reformer, in his 2006 TEDTalk says that as a culture, we have created a stigma around making mistakes, being wrong, failing. He goes on to say that this stigma around failure is disastrous because “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original.” Wow.
I’m not a perfect parent. From time to time, I will share some of my failures in that department with you. One thing I believe I am doing well is letting my children experience the distress of failing. Whether it happens on the soccer field, in a chess match, or in the classroom, I am confident that that experience can foster the desire to improve. I can do this because I know these failures are safe ways for them to build resilience. In the world of educational psychology, we call it “grit.”
Dr. Angela Duckworth at University of Pennsylvania and her team of graduate students have done considerable research to define key predictors of success. Grit, basically, is “passion and perseverance.” It’s the determination to see something through, to stick with it and continue to work toward a long-term goal until you reach it. Being resilient means that a failure doesn’t constitute the ending of the work; it is the start of something that could be even better.
As parents, counselors, good human beings, it is our job to foster a growth mindset in our children. Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, argues that success comes from our ability to persist and learn rather than the ability to get things completely right the first time. How can we help our kids feel safe to take risks/potentially fail? It’s called autonomy-supportiveparenting. When we provide our kids with the sense that they are competent to solve problems by not solving problems for them, but sharing guidance instead; when we provide our children with parameters, but don’t direct their choices, they will be invested in the outcomes rather than just pleasing authority. Because that is where the fear of failure is born and intrinsic motivation dies.
While it can be scary for some parents to consider the words failure and school in the same breath, consider this: school should be a safe place for kids to take risks and challenge themselves. School is a laboratory and our children should experiment; take a course that is outside his or her comfort zone, start a new club, or simply make an announcement in assembly. Accepting the challenge is what creates the grit. Autonomy-supportive teachers create those safe environments for creative thinking and when/if a student “fails,” those teachers acknowledge the effort, or maybe the lack thereof, and provide more opportunities.
There’s another F-word that applies here: feedback. What would it look like if failing was always seen as feedback? An opportunity to do some creative problem-solving? A low grade on a test or a paper offers a student a moment to reflect on how he or she earned the grade. It provides an opportunity to talk with a teacher to learn how to improve. Feedback isn’t always kind; it’s not always packaged as care and concern. Kids who have developed that grit described above are much better equipped to accept feedback and not be discouraged to keep trying. The real success is growth and maturity.
But let’s not romanticize failure or sugarcoat it. Success doesn’t always mean that we are going to reach the goal we originally set out to achieve. It could be the realization that our goal needs some tweaking.
Another quotation that speaks to grit is by a man who overcame many obstacles to become one of the most important innovators in American History. Thomas Edison reminds us that “many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” We need people who dare to fail many times until they find a success.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all experienced failing. How did your failure support your success?
