……Or Just Give Up?
“I failed!”, “that’s wrong!”, and “that didn’t work!” are all potentially negative ways of perceiving an experience – but they are frequently heard terms when people are learning new canoe and kayak skills.
‘Failure’ can be repackaged as another way to describe learning what not to do. ‘Failing’ and making mistakes provide valuable information.
‘Failure’ is another word for understanding and gaining knowledge about what did not work on this occasion. And by a process of elimination, the more mistakes we make the closer we must be to a solution – so we never really fail until we give up, we just find lots of ways of not doing something yet!
