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Failure is Required!
If any of the following is true about you, you are in danger:
- Your parents worried a lot about your self-image when you were growing up, so you got lots of encouragement
- Your parents helped you with homework and projects so you could get a better grade or win the grand prize (and you often did!)
- Everyone on your sports teams got a trophy for something (best helper, trying the hardest, etc.) so nobody would feel left out at awards banquets
- Your parents set you up in your first business(es) and made all the tough decisions for you so you wouldn’t fail
These actions by loving, caring parents and coaches and teachers throughout the 80s and 90s have inadvertently helped create a generation of emotionally-dependent Generation-Y people (aka Gen-Yers or “Millennials”). If you grew up during this time, you are likely affected. But the condition can be corrected and no surgery is needed. You just have to fail at a few things and you’ll be OK. But you need to carefully choose the things at which you might fail (sounds bizarre, doesn’t it?).
In his outstanding book “Outliers” Malcolm Gladwell talks about his discovery that seasoned professionals (airline pilots, doctors, etc.) don’t really get good at their craft until they have accumulated roughly 10,000 hours doing it! That is the equivalent of 5 years of five-day weeks, 8 hours each day. And you can bet that, hidden in those hours are many successes and many failures. Let’s look at just one profession, aircraft pilot, and talk about the training possibilities and we’ll look at two types of students: those allowed to make mistakes and those prevented from making mistakes. We’ll then compare the training they get with the way YOU have been treated by your teachers, coaches and parents and show you why that puts you in danger of being a failure in life!
When you learn to fly, your instructor’s technique is absolutely crucial in preparing you for the real world of safely flying an aircraft around the sky, navigating from place to place and talking to controllers and other pilots. Most flight instructors, military and civilian, use a combination of teaching techniques, pushing students when their proficiency permits, allowing students to make small mistakes and learn from them, etc. But unfortunately there are also two extreme teaching styles that we should avoid:
- The “Nanny Instructor” who intervenes constantly and prevents the student from making any mistakes
- The “Deep End Instructor” who teaches flying like some people teach swimming: throw the student in the deep end of the pool and don’t intervene unless they are about to die.
We will leave the “Deep End Instructor” discussion for another day. But a quick examination of the “Nanny Instructor” and a comparison to some parents and teachers and coaches, is interesting. First, what do we see when students trained by Nanny Instructors finish their training?
- They are not Prepared. Since they have not been allowed to make many mistakes and have a tiny mistake insidiously multiply into bigger mistakes, they are not prepared when that happens to them when flying alone. So they are not prepared for many things that can go wrong in the air but more importantly they are not mentally prepared with the confidence they will need to think through the completely unexpected problems they will sometimes face. If all mistakes are preceded by the instructor saying “now be careful – – – your airspeed is dropping” or “now the needle is moving so let’s start our turn to the runway” then the student will never hear the stall horn on approach (scaring the crap out of you as it warns of an impending, possibly deadly approach stall). And the student will never have the scary experience of flying through the course to the runway and having to then figure out exactly where he is and then remember that he hasn’t started his descent on time and then overflying the runway and having to call the controller and embarrassingly ask for another approach.
- They Panic: These students are more likely to panic when a series of problems hits them in rapid-fire succession because they have not been allowed to see those big problems develop in training because the instructor always intervened. Unfortunately, panic can cause the brain to almost shut down, often leading to fatal mistakes (the aircraft crash of Robert Kennedy Jr. comes to mind).
In the next post we will show how YOU may be like my pilot friend John, who could have killed himself had it not been for the excellent training he had received. We’ll also see if YOU are in danger because people have NOT let you fail sufficiently as you grew up and why you now may be perfectly set-up to fail big-time in your life. It is like an earthquake: experts don’t worry about the geologic fault zones that rumble and shake frequently because those faults are releasing energy all the time. Instead they worry about the quiet fault lines, where pent-up energy is increasing and could let go with catastrophic effect. Are YOU that pending earthquake? Are you being unknowingly set-up, by well-meaning family and friends, for a major failure? And if you are, what can you do about it? We’ll show you in the next post.
Copyright: Solid Thinking Corporation
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