The learning key on failure that my classmates presented this past week was inspiring! Many people feel as though failure is the end of the road. When things don't go our way, or we "fail" at something, we often feel embarrassed and discouraged. I know that I have definitely felt this way when I feel like I failed at something.
There were many times in my undergraduate journey where I felt as though I had failed at things. I have struggled with academic validation since elementary school, something many people experience. I always put pressure on myself to get good grades and interestingly I was the only person contributing to this pressure. My parents never hounded me about my grades, in fact they always told me they didn't care what the grade was as long as I tried my best. But for some reason I carried this stress to get good grades with me all the way through to university. Especially in first and second year, I would freak out over getting a bad grade. It wasn't until I was nearing the end of my undergrad that I stopped putting so much pressure on myself and realized that grades are not everything. While I still strive to always do my best of course, I am not so hard on myself when I don't do perfectly (since we cannot be perfect all the time!).
Similarly to what my peers talked about in their learning key, I now see failure as a redirection. When I "fail" at something I take it as a learning opportunity, I ask myself "where did I go wrong?, "how can I improve next time?". Redirecting failure into learning builds resilience and confidence! Failing never erased the effort I put into anything, it simply made me stronger and better the next time I attempted it. For example, if I didn't do well on an exam, I always went back to look at where I made mistakes, and 100% of the time I ended up actually learning and understanding that content after the exam was done. Seeing where I went wrong always allowed me to understand the topics more clearly and then actually retain that information instead of just passively learning it.
In many ways, failure acts as a path to success. That path may be different every time, sometimes long, but as we learned in class, when you fail!
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