The Freedom to Fall

One of the beauties of modern technology
is the freedom that it can afford us. Today
I am taking advantage of that freedom; it is
a sun-filled Sunday and I am writing this month's column on my little laptop on
a bench in my local park.

Around me are the young and the old, friends, lovers, families. The sun is smiling and children are playing. One little girl has just fallen and grazed her knee. She is crying and mum is there soothing and comforting. Soon she will get back into the swing of things and that little fall will be all but forgotten.

Why is it that children are able to make such wonderful progress, to move with such apparent rapidity from being helpless babies to becoming capable young people?

Well, one of the reasons is that they are not so very afraid of making mistakes. They simply learn as they go, naturally developing the most complex of abilities -- from the motor skills required in order to balance,
to the intricacies of language patterns and communication.

Despite this little girl's tears, children care much less about falling: they stumble and fall, they make mistakes and through these things they naturally progress, they learn and they grow.

As adults we have a tendency to be a bit more protective of our mistakes. We just don't like to make them - or to admit them - and so we spend
so much of our time and energy in trying to avoid them.

Yet the simple truth is that when we focus only on avoiding mistakes we set ourselves up to avoid achievement. By allowing ourselves to be consistently worried about getting it wrong, we can so easily prevent ourselves from getting it right.

Life really does want us to succeed. It does everything needed in order that we do this. It gives us the learnings and the means to access those learnings and, yes, that means that sometimes life's teachings will come
in the guise of the mistakes we make.

One thing is certain: we will make mistakes, we will stumble and sometimes we will fall. But in so doing we will also live, because inherent in those mistakes and falls is the learning each one of us needs in order to move forward with our life.

In getting it wrong we somehow learn how to get it right.

Each time you stumble, learn the lesson - and then get back up again.

Be grateful for the learning; see it as an opportunity to grow and to make life better and before you know it you will find yourself stumbling no more.

" The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing "
John Powell