About Failure – an Honest Double-Sided Perspective

“In order to progress, one needs to reassess their stance towards mistakes, especially in learning.” – Miriam Mircea

Miria Mircea is a language teacher at inlingua Dessau and Halle as well as founder of Fort Knox PR. She has been giving motivational speeches and coaching people since many years. Today, she shares her personal experience about failure with you.

Tackling the Topic of Failure

This is a tough one. How does one tackle the topic without dwelling into negativity and even depression? I will try to answer my own questions but I cannot promise a Happy End…

Can we truly see failure as an engine to push us forward and to make us learn a valuable life lesson?

Well, I can say this: failure impacts everyone differently. It is such a variable that it becomes a defined notion and moreover a stable one in our lives. For who has not failed at least once?

Life is a continuous learning process. Those who wish to grow mentally, emotionally and even financially never stop educating themselves.

My Very Own Experience With Failure

Some 10 years ago, I took a life changing decision: to move to a foreign country, that I didn’t know much about and most certainly didn’t speak the language of. I was not crazy. Just brave enough to try my chance at a better life with a really good person next to me.

Fast forward: having known from the get-go the amazing life changing advantage that speaking a foreign language gives you, I had decided on my second day in Germany to take German lessons. So we went right away to the only school whose name I would see everywhere: inlingua.

Yes, that is right. I became a student at the very school I am working for. And that is precisely why I know exactly how our clients and participants feel as they sit down behind a desk to learn a language new to them.

I have never had issues with learning and – being a student over and over again – to me age is really nothing but a number. Thanks to my parents, I have learned to appreciate education and the elegance it offers. Taking part in private German classes, having come after 26 years of school and academic learning, I knew very well what I was looking for in a teacher. And I was not afraid to express my needs and wishes so that those hours spent in the classroom would be successful.

But little did I know that German, to me at least, was a tough nut to crack. I had stupidly underestimated its complexity and depth. Failure number one: not taking the first steps in learning it seriously.

How to Deal With Difficulties

Dwelling into learning German has been such an eye-opener, quite a humbling experience and most importantly, a self-discovery one.

Prior to moving here, I had become a self-didactic person, taking about 5 years to learn how to read, understand and speak Greek, for the sake of family. Even earlier in my timeline, I had loved studying grammar, some Latin and generally literature. So I can safely state that I was prone to developing a talent for foreign languages and it helped me on my self-discovery journey as well as disciplining myself to seriously learn German.

Notable failure as a student: I’m a procrastinator, for I work best under pressure and deadlines. The closer the deadline, the faster and better I perform. That’s my structure and it wasn’t about to change at the impeding approach of every German exam I had to take. By the way, I took and successfully passed 4 German language levels, currently sitting comfortably at C1, which is the academic level.

Going back in time a little bit, I have to give due credit to my parents for always encouraging me to move forward, do my best so that when I would look back, I would never say that I had not done enough. Hence, my stance towards any kind of learning or academic “stress”: I do not have it.

Now, ever since I have become a teacher here in Germany, I have always tried to install this mentality into my students’ minds: do not be a people-pleaser, because that is crippling. Everyone is so unique that there literally is no fixed ideal formula for learning something new.

As a teacher, an educator, a life coach, a motivator, one must be flexible and especially able to adapt fast to someone’s needs and goals. I know it all looks great on paper, but it does not always work like that, at least it did not for me.

I had to train myself first in order to become a trainer and that took a lot of experiments that have not functioned. I received really disappointing feedback that would have set people back but I chose to go home and “digest” it and see what I could learn from how others saw my teaching style.

Minor Failures Equal Great Lessons

Our minds need to readjust at how we see a small negative event.

On the daily, I meet and talk to people from all walks of life. Based on my almost 8- year experience, I had a chance to become a speaker at an online event („I love Failure“ series) and try to convey a message of positivity, in spite of what some see as downfalls. Learning is never a straight line. Good days are followed by bad days and then good days come again.

I believe that the failure mentality and approach are both cemented in the collective consciousness for years, if not centuries. Perfection has always been sought after, even if not openly expressed. In order to progress, one needs to reassess their stance towards mistakes, especially in learning.

The feeling of making mistakes is crippling for some. I witness it regularly and its effects on the human mind: it is paralyzing and it robes people of their moments of joy. When we decide that we want or need to dive into learning a new language, we should be ready to accept the apparition of mistakes.

Shedding a new light on errors brings more self acceptance and it is in a way therapeutical.

Tips on How to Learn From Failure

My colleagues and I always say that teachers are part-time therapists, of course, on a half-jokingly note.

I would not want the readers to be left with a negative impression, therefore I would conclude by including a few tips that my colleague, Muhammad Ali, and I have put together to motivate and shed some light on learning.

Trying has no price, to paraphrase a Romanian saying. As in, test the language that seems interesting or sexy sounding enough to make you want to take some classes or purchase a book, e-book and so on. Remember that if you must learn a language out of purely private interest, you can switch to another one anytime, no pressure there. Find out which glove suits you best.

If you have to learn a new language for professional reasons, do not see it as a burden, but as an unforeseen chance to develop and grow. If your company or employer covers the costs of learning, even better. As teachers, we are aware that breaking the ice when it comes to a different language can be cumbersome, especially if you don’t have many good memories or experiences related to school or learning by heart, under pressure.

A new foreign language is a passport and a key to unlocking fresh opportunities. At times, it does mean more cash flow, a better reach, more networking and all the good stuff that these generations are chasing, particularly during these strange and somewhat confusing times of the newly- adored `Home office”.

When learning a language which is a very memory-intensive task, using visualizations helps develop a much better understanding of words. We, as human beings, take our majority of information visually and using this mean of data gathering isn’t easily forgotten. When the next time you see that thing the words will simply pop in your head.

Find something that you absolutely love to do, be it a sport or a hobby and try to find info about that using the language you want to learn. Because you’ll be able to pick vocabulary faster this way knowing something about that hobby already and the more you practice the stronger the connections between the two get.

Given the blessing that is the internet today, we can find communities of people around the world who speak the language of interest natively and asking them for help, picking up tips and quips will not only give you a faster mean of picking up the language but boost your confidence in speaking the language.

By Miriam Mircea

Would you like to read more about the topic? Read our most recent blog about setting goals here. We also have a series of blog articles on motivation. You can find them here.