The greatest teacher

I have a secret I want to tell you, it's something I don't share a lot or with many people but it somehow felt appropriate to tell, I have a fear of failure. How many of us can say our greatest teachable moments came from our biggest failures?

We are born with only 2 innate fears; the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling yet even so, when a child learns to walk they fall so many times but they never think "this isn't for me" because the determination to walk far exceeds the fear of falling, so failing is no option. We develop the fear of failure as we grow up and if my memory serves me right; for me the fear of failing started at school. As most children I was excited to go to school, to learn, to make friends but I quickly came to realize that I had been sold a dream. School wasn't at all as I imagined, school was a battle field. Where you have to get good grades and get things correct, take tests on your own because school does not condone collaboration it condones competition.

Teachers never spoke about failing in a positive light, they all preached study hard and get good grades. In school I got pre-occupied with perfectionism that I missed out of the deep learning that accompanies failure. Don't get me wrong success is the goal but how many times do we allow ourselves to go through the crisis and to allow ourselves to fail so we can learn that success is built on failure. In a pressure cooker that is school we were incubated in, we lost perspective to give ourselves permission to go through the natural and highly valuable learning process that comes from not doing everything perfectly.

My entire childhood was spent with my grandmother and so my fondest memories are of her wisdom, I viewed her as a griot and so the joy of my day was coming home to my grandmother to tell her all about my good grades and things I had achieved at school and very often she would quickly burst my bubble and ask me a peculiar question; but what did u fail at? I was taken back, she never gave up asking me and I never understood her point. I held her in high regard so I had to find something I could fail at and make her day and she lit up, gave me a big high five and this got me thinking; I need to find or do more things that are hard for me or that I will fail at so I have something to tell her. Of course she was always excited to hear about my fails but that taught me to look at failure in a positive light. She said to me if you get used to always getting things right then you are not learning. She was always happy to send me back to school with homework that had wrong answers instead of giving me the correct answers because she wanted to instill in me that failing means your learning and learning means you are growing at every step. She encouraged failing and that really taught me that failure is a great opportunity to build self awareness. From all my failures I learned my weaknesses. The fear of failing is the result of so many untold stories, so many unachieved dreams and so many unhappy and depressed young people.

Imagine if on social media we had failure week, where all week long people shared their failures and the lessons. It would change someone's perspective if we all saw the failing and getting up and trying again that comes with life, that in between the success line and the starting line what carries you through is the failing but failing forward.

Failure reveals our weaknesses and how great that we get to realize them and get the opportunity to learn therefore turning them into strength.

Without failure life would be boring, creating stifled so let's embrace it and look forward to a life with lots of twists, turns and tumbles.

Nomathemba Lephoto