February 22, 2021
If it was easy everyone would do it. I think most have heard this phrase, or variants of it. What is comfortable? How do we achieve this state of ‘comfort’? The answers to these questions are things I have sought after my entire personal, and professional, life.
When we are infants, and then toddlers, we are helpless and fearless. We may cry during tummy time or when we are hungry. Our cries for help portray a level of discomfort. We eventually learn that our displays of discomfort yield actions of comfort. Crying for food…gets us food. We eventually learn to crawl instead of staying on our stomachs aimlessly squirming around. When it is time to learn how to walk toddlers are generally unafraid to F.A.I.L. (failed attempts in learning). Young children are generally unafraid of being uncomfortable.
Fast forward a few years and walking seems comfortable. I can even feed myself easily; and I ultimately become a pretty good cook. Except for the time when I put vanilla extract on my barbeque ribs! I never made that mistake twice. In hindsight, or subconsciously, there seems to be a significant correlation with comfort and discomfort.
As a process trainer I remind myself the value of making mistakes as I try to tap into that youthful fearlessness of the trainees. Unfortunately, most people seem to be afraid to make mistakes. The irony of all of this is that making mistakes is how we learn. There is no such thing as common sense; only learned behavior. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood many of us lose sight of the importance of failure. The greatest baseball player of all time will only successfully hit the ball three times for ever ten attempts. Electricity was discovered after many failed experiments. At times, things are created by happenstance as a result of repeated failures in trying to solve a separate problem.
History has no shortage of examples on the importance of failure. I am sure any person in any trade would find comfort in never failing, but that is not reality. Therefore, I believe there are three important steps in being comfortable with being uncomfortable in learning:
1) Encourage people (yourself) to make mistakes
2) Create a safe environment in order to fail
3) Try not to make the same error twice
We learned how to walk with encouragement from someone. We fell and we kept trying to walk. Falling might have been uncomfortable, but it was part of the process. Infants need a safe environment to fall, which is why we don’t learn how to walk for the first time on stairs or on concrete.
As we age our expectation to repeat mistakes may decrease. So, I may have fallen quite a bit learning how to walk, but I never put vanilla extract on barbeque ribs more than once. I believe we should be more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Failure is part of the learning process; and that is ok.