The saying “Life is a journey” is often used when talking about our experiences and our learning. In order to make some understanding about this statement, we need to figure out what each word means. As I mentioned in the December 1 blog post, as parents, we have a difficult but rewarding job of nurturing our children so they will develop into responsible, contributing members of the society they will be a part of. That nurturing that takes place up to the age of 18 (when children become adults), and is crucial in helping them navigate their world in the remaining years of their lives. As our parents provided those nurturing years for us, we are now doing the same for our children.

If we are lucky, we will live to be in our 80s, 90s, or even 100s, which is a long time! Keeping in mind that throughout those 80, 90, or 100 years, we will have experienced many things. However, if we take each experience for granted, what is the point of encountering each of those experiences? This includes the people we meet along the way, the places we go, and the opportunities that arise, even if they are negative. Each moment has something to offer and if we take them for granted, we will miss out on potentially wonderful experiences. This includes how we approach learning new things.

To embrace each experience, we need to consider that learning is like a never-ending staircase. Please note that for every skill we develop we have a separate staircase for each skill. The concept of the staircase helps to visualize the individual steps, and therefore if we become good at a skill we improve and climb up the steps in the staircase. However, if we need more time and practice, we can move back a step or two to strengthen our skills. This staircase is parallel to the concept of Growth Mindset, created by Carol Dweck [Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets (fs.blog) ]. This never-ending staircase of learning allows us to go back a step or two to retrace where we have come from, and then proceed upwards to demonstrate what we have learned.  Without making “mistakes”, we cannot learn and become better than where we were before we made our mistake.  They are the glitches that are needed for learning to occur and to improve what we are doing.  The most important part, however, is the learning we take from those glitches.  By looking more closely at where we went wrong, we can then figure out what we can do differently.  IF we do this step, it means we are truly learning, and will not repeat the same mistake over and over again.

Encouraging a growth mindset begins with how we phrase comments. When making comments to children, it is important to validate them and their efforts with comments that will encourage them to keep trying and persevering, even when things get difficult or result in unexpected ways. Comments such as ‘You’re smart’ stifle the motivation to try as the child may feel that they are already smart and do not need to go beyond what they are already doing. For further examples, you can click on the following link. Growth Mindset For Parents | Growth Mindset Parenting (mindsetworks.com)