I am a perfectionist. I have impossibly high standards for myself. All my life I have been highly skilled and incredibly good at what I do whether it was school, babysitting, being a camp counselor, working at an ice cream shop, or working in a lab. I have always prided myself on the care I took and quality of work I produced no matter what I was doing.
This presents a challenge to me as I wade through my first year of teaching. Teaching is definitely not something you are great at right away, but I wasn't expecting to be this bad. I can count on one hand the number of days where I have felt that the lesson met my standards of quality. Not that my lessons aren't good, but they aren't often great (and admittedly, some are just downright flops). I know I can't expect to be perfect now, or ever, but I didn't think I would leave work every day feeling like a failure.
We tell our scholars to fail forward, that failing isn't bad but is actually a necessary part of growth. However, adopting this mindset is so much harder than we make it out to be. Failure takes a toll on your emotions whether you see it as a growth opportunity or as a permanent setback. I look at my failures as a chance to learn from my mistakes, but that voice in the back of my head saying "you could have done better" is harder to silence than we make it out to be. And perhaps that's not a bad thing.
This presents a challenge to me as I wade through my first year of teaching. Teaching is definitely not something you are great at right away, but I wasn't expecting to be this bad. I can count on one hand the number of days where I have felt that the lesson met my standards of quality. Not that my lessons aren't good, but they aren't often great (and admittedly, some are just downright flops). I know I can't expect to be perfect now, or ever, but I didn't think I would leave work every day feeling like a failure.
We tell our scholars to fail forward, that failing isn't bad but is actually a necessary part of growth. However, adopting this mindset is so much harder than we make it out to be. Failure takes a toll on your emotions whether you see it as a growth opportunity or as a permanent setback. I look at my failures as a chance to learn from my mistakes, but that voice in the back of my head saying "you could have done better" is harder to silence than we make it out to be. And perhaps that's not a bad thing.