STORIES
We asked a few participants in the Scuola’s activities to leave feedback on their experience: you’ll find their stories here.
We all, undeniably, need to tell our story and, at the same time, we are attracted to listening to other people’s stories.
Success stories and stories of victories, real-life stories or just fictional stories.
Personal narratives have transformative effects, and they provide us with a feeling of enrichment, growth and security.
It is through stories that we make sense of our experiences, that we get to know ourselves better, that we ask ourselves questions about who we are and who we would like to be, where we are at and where we are going.
And also thanks to other people’s experiences, we find inspiration for improving our personal or professional life.
The idea that all stories are success stories, but that success is free from setbacks and disappointments is far from reality.
Also in books and films the protagonists have to overcome obstacles, setbacks and unexpected events before finding the happy ending: it is the failures and trials that make the stories work also from a storytelling standpoint.
If, however, talking about our mistakes is a difficult exercise, it is even more difficult to tell others about our failures and the reason for our fiascos.
We try to be successful and gain social recognition, building our identity around the judgements and approval of other people because we are afraid of appearing as losers.
Talking about our failures – also using irony – the willingness to take risks and to challenge conventions helps create empathy with our listeners and better convey the things that motivate us.
Talking about ourselves without the fear of being perceived as a loser or incompetent is also an excellent therapy for not thinking that if you have failed, that you are a failure and, if you have lost, that you are a loser.
Listening and talking about our mistakes is a way to start to change our mindsets, by focussing on the incriminating act and not the person that committed it.
Sharing our story, the story of our failures and our emotions could also help other people, too. By listening to our stories of mistakes, our stumbles, and how we have turned mistakes into opportunities, others can draw inspiration to avoid them or to use them as a springboard to go further. Just as Serena told us.
One of the many messages we received came from Serena who wrote to us:
“Good evening Francesca, first of all thanks for the link-up, but the real reason and meaning of this message is not to say thank you, but to convey my upmost healthiest envy because you’ve made the story of MY life YOUR core-business! I wanted to let you know because I – who define myself as a black belt of confusion with a certain pride – have understood that only when chaos has been fully experienced, looked at straight in the eyes and listened to attentively, can it give rise to the famous “dancing star”, otherwise the star will become a meteorite crashing down on the earth causing death and destruction. I graduated in law and then in psychology and I work mainly with young people struggling with their first important choices, but also adults who find themselves in the midst of mayhem and chaos because they thought only teens had the monopoly. Effort and work are all about making the most of the time for choosing, so that it is not just an appointment with an anxious and paralysing destiny, but an active time of exploration and discovery of who we are and who we want to become, before asking what we have to do to get there. I wanted to continue the envy thing, but I’ll focus on gratitude because thanks to your creative view of failure and work at enhancing our stumbles, I’ve found additional tools to help my clients along their journeys”.
Our job is also to tell stories: ours, stories of people who saw failure as an opportunity to reinvent themselves, and stories about people who have drawn inspiration from our mistakes as a way to learn and assimilate. These are their stories.
Innovation is no longer an option. For this reason I considered it essential, for the entire MICROSOFT Digital Advisor Team, to undertake a learning course on error and failure that has cast the foundations for gaining greater awareness of our own biases and for discussing how to prevent avoidable ones, while transforming others into opportunities.
It is not easy to sum up in a few lines what I learned from Francesca at one of her courses, but I would say that there are two phrases that have stuck in my mind: “better oops than if I had only” and “better done than perfect”. Instead, we learned that error is reflection, it’s opportunity, it’s perseverance and it’s innovation.
Avrei gradito approfondimenti con maggior esercizi….più tempo per analisi post errore.
The Scuola di Fallimento course gives you ways to tackle a taboo that has haunted us since primary school creatively and freely.
I contacted Scuola di Fallimento at an incredibly stressful period in my life, due mainly to university exams. During that period, I was very unfamiliar with the world around me.
The Cycle of Choice course helped me focus on the moment. It was divided into two parts.
In the first part, I was asked to look at myself and try to understand what the main source of my stress could be and work on it. This action was accompanied by several exercises – I remember one in particular, where I had to evaluate some important aspects of my life at that time and establish where I wanted to go.
The second – which seemed obvious – but I have to admit, it has revolutionised the way I deal with high-stress situations – was the mindfulness part. I learned to “breathe”. And I still use the techniques I learned.
I am very satisfied with my decision to undertake this journey of discovery at Scuola di Fallimento, not only because it opened the door to a world that was unfamiliar to me before, but also because it facilitated a choice that I should have made long ago.