I recently listed to a Freakonomics podcast about the growing understanding that failure can be an extremely useful step towards success.  There are now college classes devoted to this – Failure 101 so to speak – and even a traveling Museum of Failure!

You can listen to the podcast at the bottom of the page. Much of it is devoted to failure in the business world, medicine and military decisions. An example familiar to all school children in America is Thomas Edison’s many unsuccessful attempts to create a useful electric light bulb before he found a way that worked.

It seems to me that there is also a lot of useful failure going on in the Alexander Technique world.

Marjorie Barstow used to say the most important parts of Use of the Self , F. M. Alexander’s third book, are the many, many failed  experiments he went through before he could solve his voice problem. Those failures ultimately led to the process we now know as the Alexander Technique, a way for anyone to learn how to move with less strain and greater ease.

Margaret Goldie, one of first teachers trained by Alexander, noticed that students often worried about failure and were obsessed with doing the “right” thing – “right” movement,” “right position” and the like.  She came up with a twisty and brilliant quote:  “If I ask you not to do something, there is no way you can do it right.”

Encapsulated in this quote is the idea of letting go of worrying about failure and the desire to be “right”, something that Alexander Technique teachers today have to address all the time with students.

There are different ways to accomplish this. One of my strategies when, for example, teaching students how to effectively self-direct, is to worn them that they will almost certainly forget the direction many times, often within a few seconds. And that they can be thankful when they notice this, because it gives them a chance to gently return to the direction.

I would love to hear how other teachers approach failure, and the “getting it right” challenge.

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 How to Succeed at Failing can be found here.