Making Mistakes Are Proof You Are Trying

A month and a half ago my daughter and I created a bucket list together.

I am calling our bucket list activities adventures because so far that is exactly what it has been. Our first adventure was taking a hand lettering class. It was so much fun and we loved it so much.

We had the best time but before that happened my daughter learned a great lesson from taking this class. A lesson I was NOT expecting to happen!

Yes, of course, she learned the basic skills of hand lettering but something even greater came out of taking this class.

My daughter learned that it’s OK to make mistakes.

As we started the class and got into the lessons my daughter became very hard on herself to make each letter perfect. She completely shut down and started crying saying she couldn’t do it.

I tried reassuring her that it’s not going to be perfect the first time and that it was ok to make mistakes. It was literally the first time she ever tried doing anything like this.

It didn’t help, she gave up…..

We had to stop the class for the evening…..

I was devastated and I began to question this entire thing.

How could she be this hard on herself? Are we ever going to be able to get through this class?

As I reflected on what happened that night I immediately thought back to when I was younger. I was the exact same way!

This is the exact reason I never tried out for a sport, why I never thought I was good at anything because I wasn’t perfect at it the first time. I ask myself now… Why didn’t I try again? Why didn’t I know it was OK to fail or make mistakes? Why did I think I had to be perfect?

I didn’t know how to fail and get back up. I didn’t know that it’s OK to not be the best the first time.

When she calmed down that evening Grace and I had a tough conversation about making mistakes. We talked about that feeling of failing. Most importantly we talked about how to pick herself back up even when she gets frustrated and has those limiting beliefs about herself and her ability.

She struggles with this in everything she does. She is not afraid of hard work but she has a tendency to be hard on herself at first and shut down. This is something we work on. As her mom, I will be by her side every step of the way to show her how to get back up.

A few days later we picked back up from where we left off and started our hand lettering class again. We made so many mistakes that night! I made sure to have tons of extra paper so that we could make those mistakes. We even laughed together every time we messed up miserably.

Now my daughter doodles and practices her hand lettering all the time. She is getting better and better each time she does it! She even practices on her homework. I’m not too sure what her teachers think of this. 🙂

What I do know is that it’s my job to teach her HOW to get back up after failing or feeling discouraged. It’s my job to keep pushing her outside her comfort zone and to try new things. I know this will build resilience inside of her. It will instill confidence and positive self-esteem in her. She will learn that she can overcome obstacles even when it gets hard. It may not be an easy obstacle to overcome but the HOPE she will have inside of her to overcome is what’s most important.

I hope this gives you some hope for your kids and to know that we are all in this together as moms. You may have seen that we have been taking fun classes together but the obstacle we went through to get there was real life. Real life lessons and memories made that I am so grateful for!

I would love for you to Follow me on Instagram because I will be sharing all our adventures together!

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I would love to hear if you ever had a situation like this with your child! Please comment below and tell me all about it!