My experience of failing had previously been the experience of creating disappointment: disappointment with myself; disappointment in my abilities and disappointment of my sense of who I was in the eyes of other people. Seen from this vantage point, failing, that is, of being a disappointment, is something to be avoided.
For most of us failure is associated with school and performance reviews and so both failure and its opposite, success are viewed primarily as how I appear in the eyes of other people. Success and failure are judgements of worth from this viewpoint. Which is a shame because as long as succeeding or failing is a judgement of personal worth or worthiness, the ability to explore new learning and live creatively is severely curtailed.
If you look in the dictionary there are two distinct definitions of fail: to not succeed at intent and to disappoint; to reveal as lacking. For most of us, as we grow and develop early in life, our attempts at learning are normally 'graded' that is we either get a letter assigned to us: A, we're terrific or we receive the praise and/or approval of authority figures, and a failing grade generally indicated not only that we failed in out intent (learning) but that we were also revealed as lacking and were therefore a disappointment. For some of us, the experience of being a disappointment to people we either looked up to, or cared deeply about, was one of overwhelming shame. Shame is a nasty feeling that virtually all people will go to great lengths to avoid. Therefore, if shame is attached to attempts at learning, our survival instinct tends to kick in and we quickly figure out that the safest road through life is to keep doing things that we either already know or are naturally adept at doing in order to not be revealed as lacking.
The problem is that truly new learning will always reveal where I am lacking because new learning means that whatever process I am putting myself through is unknown. Which of course is the point of learning: to discover what is unknown. Near as I can tell, the whole point of living is to creatively engage life. Creatively engaging life means to bring forth new, and in order to bring forth something new, most likely I am going to need to engage experiences that I am unfamiliar with and know little about the mechanics of doing. Every time I make the decision to birth something new into life I am making the choice to be a beginner.
Every watch a beginner swimmer? Except for those people we describe as 'fish', most beginning swimmers are funny: they hold themselves rigidly which is an excellent posture for sinking and exactly opposite to the posture desired for swimming. If they are not rigid then most often they begin to 'thrash' about with arms and legs each going in a different direction which delays the sinking a bit but still isn't the posture needed to float. Teaching a beginning swimmer to relax - just relax and do not do anything else, is the very first, and ultimately the most important skill, needed to float. Once floating is achieved, swimming is actually fairly simple and just requires lots of practice in order to become decently good.
Ah, achieving the posture needed to "become decently good." That is the attitude required to engage new learning and to become creative in living. You see, most of us adults long ago stopped doing anything we couldn't get an "A" in; we'd try something new and look at it and decide that we were never going to be Picasso or Shakespeare or an Tony award winning actor or the one receiving an Emmy or a Pulitzer so forget it. Many of us by the time we get to mid-life have a long string of tiny fish we could name began it - stopped it. No one gave us permission to just be decently good and take delight in our decently good creation.
Accepting the possibility of learning a new skill and becoming decently good is akin to learning how to float in order to learn how to swim. Decently good is the relaxed posture needed in order to being open enough to actually discover new skills and then go through the process of learning how to use them. What if I don't need to be Picasso or Robert Frost but can simply enjoy seeing what Mary is able to become if she opens herself to new learning? I discovered this nifty attitude when even as bad as that image sitting on my bookcase is, and it is bad, I wanted to learn how to draw anyway. This desire for learning something that my attempts at doing, had given every indication that I was truly lacking in skill, was how I learned to redefine failure.
Failing in an attempt at learning is now simply the opportunity to change my context for judgement so I may succeed at being decently good. How does one change the context for judgement? In my experience, the first thing needed is to make the parameters of what we're attempting smaller. If you begin painting with the idea that you will be the next Matisse or Picasso most likely you will be severely disappointed in yourself. If you take an introduction to Spanish course with the idea that in a few weeks you will be fluent enough to be understood by people who speak Spanish as their native language you will most likely be laughed at. If however, you pick up art materials with the idea that you might create something attractive while enjoying the process or begin a Spanish course with the attitude that with a dictionary and patience you might be able to ask for directions to the bathroom, you may well find enough natural encouragement to continue learning.
One means of creating 'natural encouragement' is to make the context for a new learning a reasonable size for engagement. Context is the parts that surround or the structure containing. A beginners context is a small structure. A beginners structure is usually composed of very basic tools and the practices needed to learn how to use the tools. To be a decently good beginning learner in any capacity, all that is needed is regular practice with some basic tools. Oh yes, that and the willingness to just be a beginner. That is the attitude that is essential to new learning: the willingness to be a beginner because without this attitude, the willingness needed to engage in practice: repeated actions needed to create skill, will not happen. Very simply, without the willingness to engage the humility of being a beginner, you will not acquire the basic skills needed for building a path to regular experience of success.
I use the 'oomph' of curiosity and wonder for learning new skills. When I saw what I had created in my first attempt at illustrating a concept I did not throw it away. I put it on the bottom shelf of my living room bookcase where I would see it and in seeing it I could wonder about what I thought was lacking. By keeping it visible I was owning that it was lacking. By owning that my skills were lacking I was able to admit that there were skills I needed to acquire. By keeping the image visible I was telling myself that I was not going to give up yet: I was willing to be a beginner.
I engaged my curiosity when I saw the image: what did I learn from this attempt? Eventually I figured out that I had not enjoyed using the materials I employed in creating it. Ah-ha!! Major insight. Now I could wonder about what other materials might be tried. I experimented with several other options and discovered delight when using colored pencils. I became a 'beginner' at exploring different brands of pencils and discovered that if I had four different manufactures version of basic blue, generally I had four different tones of blue. This was exciting because tones create shades and shades define form. I played and played, practiced and practiced and slowly learned the beginning skills of how different tools worked, how the colors laid down, how to use my hands and fingers for achieving different shades and how different shadings of color create form. It has taken a year of this to get to the point of hanging two creations on my wall, and although the relatives of Picasso have no worries about his name being equated with mine, I am thrilled with the progress I have made.
Most of all, I will always treasure my colored pencil images for it was in working with them that I learned how to discover potential success contained in failing. Working with colored pencils taught me how to be patient with the steps of learning. Working with colored pencils opened my eyes to the joy of discovering how to look at something that did not 'work' and ask myself both questions of what did work and what I needed yet to learn. My images taught me that by 'seeing' with an eye toward discovery, a 'failure' was usually just an beginning step and I could start over and almost always, the next would be better.
And so I keep that truly dreadful beginning piece as a reminder that the ability to ask 'what succeeded here and what do I still need to learn' is the real key to success. I now define success as the capacity to creatively live by acquiring new learning and new ways of being more completely who I was created to become and share with the world. Which is actually, the only kind of true success anyone can have.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Love to hear your thoughts ....