Indomitable Spirit is a really hard word for our students to say and it sure as hell is hard work achieving it. I really do think that kids now expect things immediately, we all do to a large extent. So much is easy come, easy go and so it can be quite a shock for children when they don’t manage to perfect a technique straight away. Children often lack indomitable spirit and I think that as parents, we are contributors to this. Children need to fail. I am always telling our students that their failures will ultimately lead to their greatest successes, because they will learn from them. However, as parents we don’t want to see our children fail and so we rescue them. By doing this, we are taking away the opportunity for them to build on that all important indomitable spirit.
In class, we often find that a child is scared to try something new, in case they can’t do it. They are scared to take that risk. As instructors we ask these children: what is the worst thing that will happen if you fail? We explain to them that they are here to make mistakes. We tell them that mistakes are actually a positive, because every time they make a mistake we can correct them and every correction means that they are learning something.
We need to get kids to focus on the process rather than the end result. This requires them to develop excellent listening skills, so that they hear what we are saying and can put it into practice. We want our children to develop positive thinking, so that they begin to realise that you can succeed, even when you fail.
Kids need resilience to overcome failure. They build-up their resilience by failing, realising that the world hasn’t actually ended and trying again and again and again. We mustn’t take away that opportunity to try again.