You’re practicing some Bach or your tennis serve or a purl stitch…and then you hit a wrong note, whiff the ball, or drop a stitch off of the needle.

At this moment, you have a choice! Do you:

a) Tell yourself, “It’s okay! You got this.” or

b) Tsk yourself?

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A classroom isn't a factory, churning out the product of educated humans. We can't just go through the motions of something and assume that someone can learn. The process is highly collaborative and highly dependent on getting into the right emotional state. In order to learn, there needs to be trust.

It's easy to understand why children might have a hard time trusting adults. We, as a society (and sometimes teachers and parents in particular) are constantly telling children things that aren't true in an effort to manipulate them. It's "for their own good" sometimes, and sometimes it's "for our own convenience."

Is it any wonder that, after awhile, they become wary?

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It's really pretty simple. If you want to succeed at something, whether it's learning an instrument or mastering fractions or running a marathon, you've got to just not quit.

Simple, but not easy, right? Here's what I've noticed in working as a teacher and coach across subject areas: 

When we think we are pretty good at something, we'll keep going until we have completed our objective.

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So much of the vast array of self-help literature boils down to this:

If the story you’re telling yourself is making you unhappy, tell yourself a different story.

Our stories come from many places: Family, church, school, and that all-purpose scapegoat, society. Some stories seem to be our own creations. Believe it or not, even very young children already have a narrative that is helping them (or perhaps not helping them) to make sense of the world.

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It’s simple: Don’t give them too much, too soon.

Simple, but not easy.

My friend sent me a couple of adorable videos of her four-year-old daughter at the piano, singing passionately while tenderly pressing the keys to create a bit of avant garde atonal accompaniment. The lyrics were surprisingly sophisticated — kind of a Nick Cave meets Tori Amos vaguely-confessional-but-abstract vibe. In short, pretty good for a four-year-old.

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