This is a fantastic talk by 12 year old Adora Svitak about what adults should learn from children.
Key points for me:
- Children think of possibilities and dream about perfection.
- Learning between teachers and students should be reciprocal but the reality is not that because of trust or rather the lack of it.
- Children love challenges. Adults must learn to trust them and have high expectations from them.
Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes. At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.
When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”
