Are you Limiting your Ability to Improve your Skills?

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As a teacher I spend lots of time planning classes and working out how best to share information and skills with students. 

 

I found myself fascinated with this post from  Scott H Young. I teach adults and I'm very aware of how often they become intimidated in workshops when learning new skills.

 

In the blog post Scott says "when you’re young it’s okay to be bad at something and keep doing it." I'd never thought of this as an age related problem. He also points out "Kids enjoy many pursuits, simply because they’re given heavy praise for work that wouldn’t meet scrutiny if an adult produced it." 

 

I have read Carol Dweck's book Mindset and that book had a big impact on my teaching. It made me see how much of it is really about encouragement and reassurance. This however is a paradigm changer for me, mindset is all about internal process but the age shift may be about cultural expectations placed on us by others making anything less than perfection unacceptable. 

You can read my post about Mindset here.