Even though your teen or tween may try to avoid it, risking failure is necessary for young creative artists to succeed in their art. It is an inevitable part of learning new skills, pushing boundaries and taking risks, which are all parts of a creative journey.
In order to grow, achieve successes and reach their highest potential, adolescent learning to risk and tolerate failure is essential. Here are four reasons to encourage young creative artists to risk failure.
Failure helps build resilience and persistence
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, keep going when faced with challenges and the focus on a positive outlook in difficult situations. Being a young artist inevitably brings up situations where they may be discouraged or experience setbacks when learning, growing and sharing their art.
Learning how to cope with these situations will be essential to skill development. The ability to look back at what went wrong, identify areas for improvement and not experience shame related to the failure will develop resilience that allows them to continue to enjoy and flourish in their art.
Persistence is the ability to stick with a task even when it is difficult or challenging. Failure allows young artists the chance to develop persistence when working towards a new skill or goal.
This can be very valuable in the creative arts where success may require long hours of skill development, hard work and progress that at times may feel difficult or slow. By risking and experiencing failure, young creative artists can build their persistence muscle and build a foundation for long-term success in both their art and other areas in their lives.
Failure encourages risk taking and creative innovation
Experiencing failure and recognizing that it is survivable it chips away at the fear of risk-taking. Teen and tween artists are able to discover that failure is a natural part of the creative process. Innovation is a direct result of trying new things without a clear-cut outcome, thus, in order to innovate, creative artists must be willing to face potential failure.
By trying new and unproven things, creative artists are able to develop a deeper understanding of their craft and develop higher level skills over time. Having previously experienced failure, they are able to look back and see where in previous failure they were able to reflect on their work, identify what went wrong and develop strategies for improvement.
This willingness to try new things encourages experimentation and may lead to new perspectives and insight. This type of thinking encourages a growth mindset that feeds innovation.
Failure can lead to new and unexpected opportunities
Though it may feel counterintuitive to young creative artists, failure may lead to unexpected opportunities.
Creative breakthroughs may come from failure as artists are force to rethink what happened, the outcome and how to change the approach in the future. There are also many examples of a failure – an outcome different that the one pursued – turns out to be better than the original desired goal.
Experiencing errors may also push a young artist to seek out new teachers, partners, collaborators, and studios. This can help them develop both the skill set they are struggling with and new ones. These new connections may lead to new perspectives, building of additional new strengths and expertise, and exposure to new audiences via the new connections. By engaging in these experiences creative horizons may open up new and unexpected avenues for growth and success found.
Failure helps build empathy and compassion
By making blunders, young creative artists can learn to develop increased empathy and compassion for both themselves and others.
Failure teaches artists to acknowledge and address their own limitations and weaknesses. By accepting that we all have things we are still learning, and that failing in these areas is a natural part of the process, a sense of empathy for both themselves and others facing their own limitations and struggles may emerge.
As young artists become more aware of the complexities of growing and developing skills in their art, the inevitable failures that will come with the process allows development of compassion for their efforts. It also invites them to acknowledge, respect and support others going through a similar process. This compassion for others helps build connection and community, and encourages teamwork as they find common ground around managing and working through challenges and obstacles.
Failure is essential for young creative artists to succeed, grow and expand their skill set. Though failure may be difficult and humbling at times, it also fuels personal and professional growth in their art. By learning to embrace, reflect up and learn from their missteps they learn to work through these setbacks and turn weaknesses into strengths.
These failure experiences ultimately. lead young creative artists to become more reliant, adaptable and confident in their art.
