Failing Forward

Teaching Kids to Move Forward in the Face of Challenges

What is your relationship with failure? Do you think of it as something to avoid at all costs or something to embrace and hope for?

You probably said that it is something to avoid because that is what we have been conditioned to think. But I want to invite you to look at failing in a different light. 

I believe that if you have not failed, it simply means that you have not tried enough times. That is because failing is inevitable, and the more you put yourself out there -  the more times you try, the more failures you are going to have. And isn’t that a good thing?

I love this quote by Michael Jordan:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Your life is built on a pile of failures.  Each time you make a mistake or fail at something, it moves you closer to reaching your goal. After each failure, you grow a bit, just like a broken bone grows back stronger. 

To put it in terms that kids will understand, each time you fail, you level up. 

As long as kids practice believing in their future selves and the things they want to achieve, when they fall down, they won't make it mean that it's never going to work.

Instead, they can use the failure as intel, helping them learn from their mistake and possibly figure out a better way of doing something. They need to ask the questions: What can I learn from this? How can I use this to keep moving forward?

For kids, leveling up means gaining additional skills, or possibly special powers. They can think of failing in the same way. Each time they fail, they have learned a new skill because knowing how NOT to do something certainly can be considered a skill. 

The brain knows only two things: the words you speak and the images you hold.  

If your child is speaking about their failure in a negative way and creating the image in their head that they are a failure, it is like they are telling their brain, “more of this, please.” 

But if they reframe their failure in a productive way and create images of how they have learned from the experience and what they will do in the future, they are telling their brain to look for solutions and new ways of doing things. 

We need to teach our kids to turn their failure fable into a success story - figure out what story they are telling themselves about their failure and help them reframe it in a productive and empowering way. Another quote I love is by Benjamin Franklin:

I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong,

It is all about the way you tell the story of your failures. . 

Every mistake is there to grow you, every obstacle is there to show you a better way. 

Teaching our kids that failure is simply a part of life is so important. We need to equip them with the tools they need to deal with failure and keep moving forward - fail forward. This is the way to build resiliency in our children. 

One of these tools is believing that they will eventually succeed and that failure is just part of the process. Believing is not easy. If you truly believed something, you would have it in your life. But there are ways to learn to believe in things that you currently do not. You need to take incremental belief steps and pick up evidence along the way. 

For example, each time your child tries something and fails, point out to them that they have now learned one way that does not work and as a result, they are that much closer to finding the way that does work. 

As long as they are doing, they are either succeeding or learning. The only way to truly fail is to give up. Giving up is failing on purpose. 

The process to helping kids become resilient is to normalize failure. 

We need to teach kids that it’s safe to take a risk because that is the way they grow themselves. When you try something you risk failing at it. But when you don't try it, you guarantee failing at it. 

I like asking my kids at the dinner table how they failed that day. Because I have asked it enough times, it seems normal to them. They expect to fail at something and seem to always have something to share (as do I!) I then like to point out that they probably won’t make the same mistake again.

When they think failure is normal, something magical happens; they keep going despite setbacks. I always think of my son, Connor, when I think of what it means to keep going despite setbacks. Last year, his 3D printer broke. It would have been very easy for him to bring it to a professional to have it fixed. But instead, he decided he wanted to fix it on his own. I watched him try different fixes day in and day out to see if it would solve the problem. He ordered many (unneeded) new parts (I probably spent more money than had he brought it to a professional). But that is ok because in the end, he figured it out. He found the problem and fixed the printer. After many failed attempts, he succeeded.

The whole idea of failing forward is that each failure gives you a boost towards success. We don’t want our children to make their failures mean that they can’t do something or that they are not good at something. We want them to see failure as a normal part of the process of life and part of the path towards success. 

The worst case scenario is not that your child fails, but that they think they’re a failure. Let’s not let that happen. Let’s equip them to face life’s challenges head on!

Challenge:  This week, each night at dinner or sometime in the evening, ask your child to tell you something that they failed at that day. Then celebrate it. They are one step closer to success.