Perfectionism Continued

When I was in school for Music Education, my professor in my "Social Context & Politics in Education" made us follow this education blog called "Mindshift". I typically delete them, as I have a lot on my plate and sift through the ones I would actually like to read....one of those popped into my inbox this morning and goes perfectly along with our topic of perfectionism/how we deal with failure. I highly suggest reading it, as it talks about what a parent can do to encourage a growth mindset, rather than the negative perfectionism. "Growth Mindset" is becoming a huge trend in education, and boy does that make an ADHD graduate of high school and college smile! I didn't learn this skill until my Junior Year of college at 27 and yet, I still didn't really get a hold of it until this year at 29! If we can get little kids to stop beating themselves up, and stop learning confidence via perfectionism, but rather a growth mindset...wow...what a blessing in their lives and they won't even realize how much emotional pain, self-doubt, failures, self-loathing, and insecurities they will have thrown away and their confidence towards learning and mastering ANYTHING they want to, will become powerful! They will train success to bend to their will, not the other way around. 

       There are two common analogies teachers often use to encourage a growth mindset over perfectionism...the first one involves Thomas Edison and his trial and error period of attempting to make a lightbulb. It took him roughly 10,000 tries to finally get it right..,but look at what all his failures brought to the future! He would not have succeeded if he let his failures dictate his motivation.

        The second analogy is of course, Albert Einstein. He failed math in school, and YET, refused to let that failure dictate his future and changed mathematics drastically!! 

         We all struggle greatly with our egos. Our egos and perfectionism, are not always a bad thing. They can motivate us to better ourselves short-term when we need a little extra push. But if you use them as tools for success for too long...you're bound to get stuck somewhere along the line and those attributes can no longer help you. You have two choices at that point. You can either say "Well...I gave it my best effort and it's just not my cup of tea..." Or you can use your growth mindset to really figure out and analyze where your weaknesses lie, which involves putting your ego away for the time being and target those areas for improvement! Wow! What a powerful lesson to learn at a young age! I am currently 29 and just now starting to really shift towards this mindset. Perhaps if I had understood this in my teen years, I would not have gone down the dark path I did and wasted so much precious time in my life. But you know what, without those years of failing, I guess I probably wouldn't appreciate my hard work towards success as much, as it did not come so easily to me in my own perfectionist mentality. Cheers to many more years of growth! 

Here's the link to the article "Talking About Failure: What Parents Can Do to Motivate Your Kids in School", if you would like to read it:  

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/05/08/talking-about-failure-what-parents-can-do-to-motivate-kids-in-school/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29