Ask the Children, “Where Did You Fail Today?”
In elite colleges, professors have noticed a problem. Many students, while impressive on paper, seem unable to cope with the simple challenges of getting an assignment to a dorm room they don’t like, getting under an A in the middle of the semester, or not being on a school team. … The lack of resilience has become so obvious that Smith College now offers an entire course on how to fail . (One awkward class project: displaying your worst failures on a big screen in the middle of a campus. Oops.)
There are all sorts of tirades and reports on how to babysit with care , trophies for participation and upbringing from a helicopter ruins everything, or at least makes children unable to do the hard things, but moms and dads find it difficult to break the cycle if they were raised that way. I will raise my hand as someone who falls into this category. The simple words “Stop indulging” will not help much. But family discussions can welcome failure in your home.
And it starts by changing the conversation about failure. Sarah Blakely, the woman who created Spanx and became a billionaire, attributes her success to one question her father asked her every night: Where did you fail today?
From 99U :
Some parents are content with asking their children, “Did you have a good day?” or “What did you study in school?” Not at Blakely’s house. The question Sarah and her brother had to answer night after night was, “Where did you fail today?”
When there was no rejection of the report, Blakely’s father expressed frustration: “What he did was redefine failure for me and my brother,” Blakely told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And instead of failure, the result was failure, not attempt. And it made me want to step out of my comfort zone even more at a young age. “
The discussion can be awkward at first – as a parent, you may have to share a lot of your own failures before your kids start opening up – but it shows that you have to fail in order to grow up . And you can do it better. Before you know it, failure will seem like a sign of honor.