When I was six years old and wrapping up kindergarten, I announced to my mother that I intended to drop of school. As soon as the year was over. Elementary school was for other kids—I was going to be a first-grade dropout.

So you may be thinking, “Oh, poor kid, kindergarten was rough for her. She wasn’t ready. Too bad they didn’t have developmental first grade back in the seventies.”

But you’d be missing the point. I didn’t want to quit because I was discouraged—I wanted to drop out because I had been too successful in kindergarten. I figured that by being an early reader and having the special privilege of checking out books from the kindergarten library (only teachers were allowed to do that), I had peaked too early, and it would all be downhill from there.

I looked at the homework my three older brothers—two, four, and six years older than I—were bringing home. Strange, curvy letters that seemed impossible to decipher. Sentence diagramming. Multiplication and division.

I watched them as they toiled through their lessons, writing math problems and parsing sentences on the big green chalkboard that hung in our kitchen, and I thought, “I can’t go to first grade—I don’t know cursive yet!”

I was ready to pack up my little successes from kindergarten and set off for a life less challenged. If everyone thought that I was “smart” because I had done well in my first year of school, I certainly didn’t want to prove them wrong by struggling to learn the things my big brothers were learning.

The story I had made up in my head was that other people thought I was special, and I had to preserve the image of “specialness.” The best way to do that, I reasoned in my six-year-old mind, was not to try anything new. If I never risked, I’d never fail. Never fail, never disappoint. I’d sit on the laurels of my early successes for the rest of my life.

This is what Carol S. Dweck* calls a “fixed mindset,” as opposed to a “growth mindset,” and it’s typical in children who are praised for their innate intelligence or talent instead of being praised for their effort. The child hears the well-intentioned adults in her life going on about how wonderful she is, and she thinks, “Whoa! My story is that I have to be wonderful, and if I do anything un-wonderful, I’m a failure.”

That thinking stifles healthy risk-taking (like going on to first grade), and it paralyzes us.

My mother was amused at my pronouncement, but also concerned. She took time to point out that I was comparing myself to my siblings who had more years of schooling than I had. I wouldn’t be expected to write in cursive until third grade, she explained, and there would be many, many tiny steps between now and then. When I got there, I’d be ready.

It took some convincing, but I did to go on to first grade, of course. I loved school, and with the right kind of encouragement—the kind that praised my effort instead of my ability—I began to enjoy greater and greater challenges. “Failure” became an opportunity for growth; I learned for myself what Brené Brown says: “There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.”

The trouble is, if we continue to believe that story from childhood, if fear of failure takes root and we believe that we can’t bear having others see us as less-than, or worse, seeing ourselves as less-than, then we can never get started with anything new. We continue to do the things we’ve always done, even when those patterns no longer serve, just to avoid the possibility of falling down or making a mistake.

But as Mary Pickford says, “If you have made mistakes, even serious mistakes, you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

So today, dear reader, I ask: Is fear of failure keeping you from getting started? What if you faced falling down as inevitable? What if you went into your new endeavor looking forward to falling down, learning from it, and becoming stronger? What would that look like? Join the conversation on our Facebook page.

Until next time,