My struggle to find value in mistakes (and why fourth grade sucked)

Fourth grade. My dad, mom, sister and I are sitting at the kitchen table, eating supper. The phone rings. Mom goes into the other room to answer, and comes back after about ten minutes. She says to dad, “That was Jennifer’s teacher. She is concerned about Jennifer because she gets so upset every time she makes a mistake or doesn’t understand something. She thinks she is worrying too much.”

I spontaneously burst into tears. Any call from the teacher must mean I’ve done something wrong and am going to get into trouble.

My dad says to me, “No, it’s good. It’s good you are worried about this. That’s how you are SUPPOSED to be.”

32 Years Later

I’m sitting in a classroom with my son and his fourth grade teacher. She is meeting with all the parents and students before the holidays, to go over grades and behaviors. I was hyper-organized as a child, checking that all my assignments were in the proper folders before I went to bed at night, and double-checking in the morning, before going to school. My son’s desk is an explosion of crumpled papers.

My son’s grades are okay, but they are not representing what we all know that he knows. His response is, “I’m getting most things right. Sometimes, I just get stressed and don’t feel like doing the work anymore.”

The Measure of My Mistakes

I’ve spent 23 years of my life (I’ll be 42 next month) in school – kindergarten, first through twelfth grade, college, grad school. And, I always measured myself by the grades I received – which usually translated to measuring myself by my mistakes. I was lenient about mistakes, as long as they kept me in the range of an “A.” Beyond that, the mistakes were all I saw.  It was difficult to adjust from school to jobs because I did not have such an easy reference point for how I was doing. I’d meticulously keep up with every mistake, in fear that just one could mean termination. One boss once joked with me that I might as well get myself a hairshirt and beat myself on the back. Other bosses were almost as much of a perfectionist as I was.  I’ve learned that hyper-perfectionists don’t work so well together. (And I’m sure they brought up parental issues with me!)

Last week, a friend was drawing oracle cards, and the one she drew for me had this message, “When you focus on what isn’t working, you create even more challenging situations.” My question for her was, “What about when I obsessively focus on the fact that I focus on this?”

My dad still buys into the “worry plan.” I mean, I did make good grades. I did well on all my performance reviews. I got raises. But, I also had stomach aches, anxiety, frequent headaches, and difficulty sleeping.  (My dad started having heart problems in his 50s and has had them consistently for almost 20 years now.)

Also, I was STARVING for creativity. It seemed to have abandoned me. I had organized and planned and worried it into a tiny corner, and it was scared to come out of hiding! As a result, there was no joy in my life. What’s the use in good grades or raises if you are miserable?

I recently studied the intuitive “vision board” that I made last spring, when the New Moon was in Aries. I had cut out pictures that appealed to me, without any forethought. Most were of flowers or fruit. Lots of sunny spaces and bright blue. It occurred to me that I picked these images as a way to focus on the bright side of life, and all things blooming and beautiful. I did this to counteract my tendency to dwell on mistakes. To remind myself to look for JOY.

Finding Value

As I learned from dealing with my son, there is some value in looking at mistakes as a way to “problem solve.” Because he was not concerned about his grades at all, he didn’t bother to come up with alternatives to “shutting down” for dealing with his stress.  The results of his work were important because he was starting to convince himself that he did not know the material and that he was not good at certain subjects.  Instead, he just needed a different coping strategy.

We discussed his stress during tests and suggested he take a break while working. The teacher was okay with him leaving to walk up and down the hallway for a few minutes.  This suggestion made me nervous, however, because I am so careful not to emphasize “perfection” with him. I do not want him to repeat the anxiety that I experienced. What I realized, though, is that suggesting that someone “take a break,” is a way to demonstrate that breaks are useful! In a very tangible way, we were able to communicate that it’s okay to step back and get some perspective. (His test scores have now gone WAY up, too.)

Psychotherapist Mel Schwartz writes, in his article The Problem with Perfection, “to perpetually strive suggests that you may not be at peace and that actually impedes your forward progress. In other words, the balance that is derived from pausing from the inexorable improvement permits intuitive growth. When we experience being present in the moment, our personal evolution may vault forward. However, if we are ceaselessly pushing ourselves forward, we may actually impinge the very progress we seek.”

The Perfection in Mistakes

I haven’t quoted from Conversations with God for a while but would like to end with a quote from Book 3:

The person who hits a thumb with a hammer could not be said to have “wanted” the experience. It was not desired, sought, consciously chosen. Yet all objective phenomena are drawn to you subconsciously; all events are created by you unconsciously; every person, place or thing in your life was drawn to you by you –was Self-created, if you will – to provide you with the exact and perfect opportunity, to experience what you next wish to experience as you go about the business of evolving.

Nothing can happen – I say to you, nothing can occur – in your life which is not a precisely perfect opportunity for you to heal something, create something, or experience something that you wish to heal, create, or experience in order to be Who You Really Are.

Now WE can work together in this co-creative process consciously or unconsciously. You can move through life aware, or unaware. You can walk your path asleep, or awake.

You choose.