Learning Through Embracing Errors
I’ve been reading Brené Brown’s Strong Ground for a while now. I love Brené, and so much of her work aligns with who I am becoming. And yet this book hasn’t been one I can’t put down in the same way as her others.
That might be the cold I seem to have had for the last eight weeks, which is becoming quite tiring, honestly. It might be the long break I took while my mum was ill. Christmas probably didn’t help either. Or it might simply be that I lost my rhythm.
Over the last few days, as I picked up Brene’s book again, I realised just how out of sync I’ve been. What surprised me most was how long it took me to notice.
Let me explain….
I love early mornings. They feel like a gift I give myself, and something I protect. I get up at least an hour before everyone else, drink loads of water, have a cold shower, meditate, yoga, journal… and then, hello world!
That cold shower matters more than it probably should. It’s the first action in the chain. When it happens, everything else follows more easily.
Four weeks ago, that chain broke.
Our shower was, erm, “fixed”. The dripping tap was replaced, but the result was that I could no longer have cold showers. There is no cold. Only warm.
I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. And I also told myself I didn’t want to use the other shower because it would wake the kids if I did.
Lies.
Without that cold shower, my mornings lost their anchor. Meditation became optional. Exercise slipped. Journalling happened when it happened. What had once been a steady rhythm became hit and miss, and I didn’t realise how much that mattered until weeks later.
As I returned to Brené’s work, funnily enough as I began to get my morning structure back on track (!), I found myself drawn again to her writing on staying humble and staying a learner. She references Dr Donella Meadows, a pioneering environmental scientist and systems thinker, and her words landed with uncomfortable accuracy.
In her paper Dancing with Systems, Dr Meadows writes:
“Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my ‘figuring out’ rationality less. To lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems on the computer, in nature, on people, in organisations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are. How complex the world is and how much I don’t know. The thing to do when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze - but to learn.
The way you learn is by experiment, and by trial and error error error.
In a world of complex systems, it’s not appropriate to charge forward with rigid undeviating directive. Staying the course is only a good idea if you are sure you are on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you are learning is small steps, constant monitoring and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it is leading.
That’s hard. It means making mistakes, and worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Dr Don Michael calls error embracing.
It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors.”
Reading this, I could see my own mornings for what they are… a system. One small change in my environment had disrupted it, and instead of experimenting and adjusting, I got stuck. I stayed loyal to a version of my routine that no longer existed, telling myself I was fine while quietly feeling the impact.
The mistake wasn’t losing the cold shower. The mistake was ignoring the signal it gave me.
Learning required noticing what had changed, questioning the story I was telling myself, and being willing to try something different rather than staying stuck.
Sometimes learning comes from paying attention to the small things that knock us off course, and having the courage to admit that something needs to change.
That’s error embracing in real life. And it turns out it can start with something as simple as a shower.
