I attribute this post to a client who deeply inspired me during one of our sessions. He spoke about the attributes of being an apprentice. Afterwards as I was unpacking the session on paper it hit me that an apprenticeship mindset could be a great strategy to deal with failure and frustration on the job but not only on the job.
Think about this for a minute; what does it mean to have an apprenticeship mindset? What happens when we are an apprentice? We're in training to learn to become skilled at something. We're open to learning and growth yet also allowing ourselves to make mistakes because your mindset is one of learning a skill that we don't know as opposed to a professional. We tend to be less judgmental of our results because we understand that we're on a learning curve and our self expectations are lowered.
What happens when we become a professional at something? We're skilled and are supposed to know right? We have a natural tendency to think we should have known when we make a mistake and when mistakes occur we take it to a more severe degree of self judgment don't we? Our self expectations benchmark is automatically raised when we have a professional mindset.
If we could adopt the apprenticeship mindset of life learning and growth yet be a skilled professional at what we do there would be a significant paradigm shift towards a more learning and growth orientated type of mindset, less self judgment and more flexibility with the expectations we set for ourselves; yet with all the professional skills at hand.
Churchill once said: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm".
Maybe if we tried to adopt an apprentice mindset where mistakes are part of the process we could live this quote through to reach the goals and success we strive so hard to achieve?
Sharon Almougy M.A, bilingual Hebrew English Organizational, Group and Certified Life Positive Psychology Coach, member of the Israel Coaching Community and part of the professional coaching team at Gome, "The Israeli Center of Mediation and Coaching".
