How can you change when you can't tolerate failure?
I have a theory that educators suffer from “failure avoidance syndrome” [1] more than other professionals do.
When you’re a subject matter expert, and your expertise is the basis of your authority over children—which you exercise by assigning grades that include “failure”—it’s dangerous for you as the “expert” to be wrong.
But…
If you can’t be wrong, then you always have to be right.
And to be right all the time, you have to do things the way you’ve always done them.
Which means that you’ll always get the results you’ve always gotten. [2]
In that context, how can you possibly grow?
On the other hand…
If it is safe for your students to fail, because failure is a necessary step on the path to learning, then it can be safe for you to fail.
And if it is safe for you to fail, then it is safe to do things you’ve never done before.
And when you try things you’ve never done before, you can get results you’ve never gotten before.
So if thriving in a post-COVID world means you’ll need to change, to grow, start by asking:
Can I tolerate failure?
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[1] From ”Why are CEOs failing software engineers?” by Gene Bond:
“What is failure avoidance syndrome? Failure avoidance syndrome is a common and even normal sociophysiological condition that causes us to associate productivity and value to the completion of known tasks, while avoiding attempts that will likely lead to failure. Failure avoidance is, straight-up, a combination of success conditioning and brain chemistry, and it leads to us feeling that starting from a known good place is more valuable. This phenomenon is due, in no small part, to how our brains, in response to the thrill of successfully completing a rewarded task, releases euphoric chemicals that strongly reinforce the behavior that led to success. Conversely, the disappointment and menace often associated with failure results in our brains releasing a different set of chemicals that act to dissuade us from making additional mistakes (even, and especially, new value attempts) that might threaten our safety, social acceptance, and well-being.
“The net effect of our success-based conditioning and our natural brain chemistry is failure avoidance. In other words, discovery of new value is actually safe guarded by a sociophysiological curse that most commonly manifests as a natural, strong aversion to failure. However, when doing creative work, we must find positive ways of pushing past the chemically reinforced sense of waste and failure avoidance.
“This necessarily means that the journey of discovering life changing value requires us to endure large amounts of failure.”
[2] Software companies are fond of referring to this as the “local maxima” of a company’s efforts.
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