Listening to the Voices

Many children when they are learning are taught that mistakes are bad or even that children who make mistakes are bad. Sometimes adults try to force children to learn in a way that makes learning scary and negative. They may say things like:

Messages like these make people afraid of making mistakes and then it is very hard to try difficult things. When you have been told things like this as a child, you often keep on telling the same thing to yourself when you grow up. For example, a learner told me, "The old messages that mistakes are bad keep ringing in my ears and my whole body tenses up whenever I'm asked a question or try to learn something. It makes no sense but I sometimes even feel sick, I'm so panicky and scared."

But we learn from our mistakes. When we are learning we have to take risks, and that means we often make mistakes. This can feel scary and even dangerous. It takes courage to take risks in learning. When we take risks, it can remind of us past painful experiences that turned us off learning and make us feel like a kid again.

Another learner said, "The adult-me knows that learning involves making mistakes. But the child-me still believes the old lies that I shouldn't make mistakes - I should avoid them. And if I make mistakes, then I'm stupid, or lazy, or bad. It feels crazy, but sometimes I feel like a little kid again and I just want to run away and avoid the risks of learning altogether."

It takes great courage to stay with difficult learning problems, especially when we carry "cops in our heads" that jump on us whenever we make a mistake. When we are paying attention to these voices, it is hard to believe anything good about ourselves. After all, didn't those messages and put-downs originally come from people who ought to know, like teachers and parents?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could turn off those blaming voices in our head, like turning off a water tap? Or change the negative messages about ourselves as learners to positive, encouraging messages, like changing tapes in a tape recorder? Many times we are told to just "think positive," and we'll feel better about ourselves. But this doesn't always get to the root of the problem.

More realistically, we have to work hard to notice what we tell ourselves that stops us learning and work on what we can do to find a little "space" from those messages, so that we can learn. Sometimes remembering where those messages came from in the first place can help us to believe that they are lies and can start us saying more helpful things to ourselves. If we tell ourselves put-downs and listen to the negative messages, it is very hard to learn. If we learn to tell ourselves encouraging things, it makes it much easier to learn.

- Jenny Horsman
and Moon Joyce