Instead of being worried about perfectionism and getting everything right, what if you could learn to approach everything with curiosity. Each action you take can just be a little experiment where you are out in the world, gathering data, analyzing outcomes, making interpretations, and readjusting.
What do I mean by this?
Well, so many of us are afraid to fail. So we don’t take action. It’s too risky. Too scary. We ask what if I fail? Fear of failure is one of the biggest things holding us back.
What if there is no failure and you either get the result you want or the lesson you need?
Struggles are common in science, exploration, and discovery.
Scientists review the literature, make purposeful observations, begin from an informed background, come up with a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis. The outcome is unknown. Yet they move forward. They can’t know whether it will go the way the think it will or not, until they take action and actually conduct the experiment. Once the scientist has run the experiment, they gather the data, analyze it, and interpret it. They can then share the knowledge with others and plan to move ahead again better informed.
Science teachers have discovered that if they simply teach students about the scientific method and ask them do conduct an experiment they may still get frustrated if things don’t work out as the students initially planned. A more traditional approach to teaching science may teach that great scientists have exceptional talent, intellect, or ability.
However, when science teachers introduce stories about great scientists (such as Einstein or Marie Curie), how they struggled, how they failed, then had to start over, persisted, never gave up, and eventually overcame challenges, then made important discoveries children were much more likely to persist in their own scientific experiments in the classroom.
If you can apply the scientific method to your life, purposefully stepping back, and become somewhat more objective about the background data, hypothesis, testing, data gathering, and analysis, this skill can serve you greatly. You don’t have to make the outcome mean anything about you as a human being. If you don’t get the result you wanted, you simply start over better informed.
Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed 10,000 times, I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
Buckminster Fuller said, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment, there are only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”
Start with yourself. You don’t need a randomized controlled trial. A simple pre / post study design in your own life will do.
For more information on the scientific method and applying it to your own life, download my free guide at https://empoweringwomenphysicians.com/guide/