If you dont try.... You'll never know!

While writing my journal after teaching yesterday, I had a revelation that I felt may be relevant to more than just me so I thought I would share.

I was talking to my class about confidence, and doing things half heartedly, the girls who are lacking in a little confidence can often be seen marking, rather than risk being wrong and doing it full out incorrectly, they do it half-heartedly thinking that no one will notice because it’s small. I keep saying to them

 “If you’re marking because you’re scared of being wrong, you’re not doing it correctly anyway, you’re automatically wrong without giving yourself a chance.”

I was trying to get across to them that they are taking away their opportunity to be right!! (or their opportunity to improve by getting it wrong and learning from it.)

And then I realised, I often take away my opportunity to be right, or to improve by avoiding situations or not doing anything at all. This fear of making mistakes can often hold us back.

This then took me back to some things I had reviewed in the reader about experience, reflection and learning, John Dewey felt

“…the quality of the education was linked to the level of engagement with, and consciousness of the experience”  

If we are not engaging with the experience, by marking instead of dancing, thinking in our heads but not blogging, knowing how to improve our workplace but not communicating it, all for fear of being wrong or reprimanded then we have no opportunity to improve ourselves or our situation.

In order to learn we have to take risks, my Mum always says to me “If you don’t try… you’ll never know!” and this is exactly what I was trying to say when I was teaching. And something I need to keep in my own mind more often.

In the environment of a dance studio I find it easy to take risks, to try and fail and use that opportunity to improve, but in every other area of my life, I see trying and failing as a negative. Maybe it’s time I changed that perspective.

In Peter Honey and Alan Mumford’s model inspired by Kolb’s learning cycle they identify four stages of learning

• Having an experience
• Reviewing the experience
• Concluding from the experience
• Planning the next step

If we are avoiding experiences (in case we fail) then we have nothing to review or reflect upon, and while we may think we know what will happen we have nothing concrete to go from and so we stay in the same place, situation or mindset that we had previously. (You could call that failure in itself?)

In order to be reflective we have to do something to reflect upon, something that matters, an action or an attempt, and then in reflecting upon this we can make decisions about the success of that experience and use this to plan, move on and grow.

I liked Adesola’s post about getting messy…

“Hopefully you are well into everything, possibly getting acquainted with the feeling of ‘not knowing’, which comes before that light-bulb moment as things click into place. I think the biggest thing to check at this point is that you are ‘in it’.”

We have to be “in it” whether we know what we are doing or not, we have to keep trying and engaging, then we can get it wrong, reflect and learn or as Adesola says have a “light bulb moment” and succeed. Either way it’s a positive thing, through not trying we are failing anyway, so what is there to be afraid of?

References.

Adesola Akinleye. Blog,  08/03/2012

Dewey J. 1916

Honey 1982, Honey and Mumford 1983

WBS 3730, Reader 2. The Reflective Practitioner 2011/2012