If we don’t reflect on our failures, we squander the chance to learn from them and improve.
If you thought listening back to your voice lessons was hard, try looking back at your failures and being honest about how you failed. Painful is the word.
But without that pain, you’ll just keep making the same mistakes.
Early in this past school year, my group had a rehearsal that was a perfect combination of two failures on their part. 1, they hadn’t prepared the music I asked them to; 2, they were distracted and unfocused – not “in” rehearsal.
My failure was much bigger than theirs. My reaction was to try a strategy that had worked like a charm in my college singing group – the director left and said, “Come get me when you’re ready to rehearse.” By the time he got back, we were all on fire to make progress and perform at a higher level.
That’s not what happened for me, and it’s obvious in retrospect why: I’m not that kind of conductor. I believe strongly that love should be at the core of our music-making, and this aggressive tactic betrayed that core. I only learned how deeply it had affected my choir’s year a few weeks ago, when one student almost didn’t re-audition for the group, in part because he was afraid of me. I believe that much of his fear can be traced back to that precise moment.
That’s a big failure.
I am owning up to it, and reflecting on it and other failures, because I think that’s the only way I can get better at what I do. I apply the same logic to my successes and failures as a parent, as a husband, as a colleague, as a volunteer. (The bonus, at least for me, is that if you carve out time to reflect on your failure, you’re unlikely to lose sleep to regret.)
I often tell my students and my children, “A mistake is only bad if you don’t learn something from it.” As we grow older, the mistakes seem to get rarer but also bigger, so we have to focus more energy on learning from them.