Mistakes. Learning.

I had a mentor who would greet weavers with the question “What mistakes have you made recently?”

Somehow I could never make myself take that approach. There are too many people who are ‘afraid’ of making mistakes, even though that is the ‘best’ way to learn anything. Mess it up. Fix it. Record Note To Self.

Over the years I realized that some people could not admit they made mistakes. Or they were so afraid of making mistakes they could never quite manage to make it to the loom. Even when they produced perfectly lovely textiles. They were never satisfied. Something was always ‘wrong’ with them.

They seemed to get stuck on the ‘mistake’ and never get to the ‘lesson’.

Recently I thought of my mentor, how much I’d learned from her and the rest of group, how much I missed the group. Three are gone to…wherever we go when we shuffle off this mortal coil. The other two of us each have health issues and going out for lunch once a month or whenever stopped when Covid arrived.

Then I started thinking about other weavers I learned valuable lessons from. Not always by making a mistake myself, but learning from the mistakes they learned from.

In the end I realized that the reason I could not adopt my mentor’s greeting was because I wanted to focus on the learning. Not the making of the mistake. Of course most of my most valuable lessons came from making a ‘mistake’ – wrong density, wrong yarn to use for that purpose, wrong weave structure. Etc.

But I’m much more interested in the lesson learned, not the making of the mistake.

I’ve chaired a few conferences over the years, and one of them I really should not have been trying to squeeze that into my schedule on top of every other thing I had going on.

When I opened the meeting for our first business meeting of the conference committee, I remember saying at the end that when they had problems, paused and looked at each one in turn, then said “And there WILL be problems – I don’t want you to come to say there is a problem. I want you to bring a solution.”

Apparently that direction to the room of grown ups wasn’t taken very well by some. But every single person who had a problem came to the meeting with a solution. And we managed to run a pretty good conference, I think. Yes, there were glitches, as there always will be, but most of the people seemed happy. In the end, that was all that mattered.

I am trying to change my focus to be more accepting when things go ‘wrong’, and keep the lesson learned front and centre.

Because there will ALWAYS be problems.