I had a high school math teacher that had an interesting way of forcing me to confront my fear of failure.
Every Friday we’d take a test covering whatever we’d learned that week. We’d get the test back on Monday and our homework would be to review our incorrect answers. And then correct them.
It didn’t matter how high your grade was, unless you got a 100, you had homework. The homework assignment forced me to deal with a couple of things: 1) I wasn’t perfect, even if I was doing really well in the class, and 2) Mistakes are our friends as long as you learn from them.
Even as a teenager I knew that Ms. Barbee was teaching me something that was much more valuable than just the Pythagorean Theorem. She was teaching me how to deal with failure.
She reframed failure from something to avoid to something to learn from. Seeing incorrect answers on a returned test no longer filled me with dread over how I screwed up, instead I was curious about how I screwed up and wondered if I’d be able to figure out where things went wrong. I was also able to get a clearer picture of the mathematical concepts I was truly getting and had simply made a silly mistake, and which concepts were still way over my head.
Where has your relationship or marriage been tested?
How did you guys do?
How did you do things right? How did you fail?
Did you confront the failure?
How do you normally deal with failure? Your partner?
How is your normal failure approach different when it comes to your relationship?
What would you have liked to have done differently?
What makes your relationship still valuable, even in light of its weaknesses?
Learning to love is just as much about learning to fail.
