One of the most rewarding parts of my life right now with younger kids is having a front row seat to their growth. Whether it’s their love for math, sports, reading, dancing, singing – to see their personality blossom is fascinating to me. But as we all know, with growth comes those frustrating times of learning from failures and the obstacles life loves to throw our way.

One morning I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my son next to me working on a fun math workbook (I’m sure I’ll get eye rolls combining fun and math) and he slams down his pencil in frustration. We can all relate to frustration building up when we come across something more difficult that we haven’t seen before. I looked over his way and mentioned he has an eraser for a reason. The lightbulb came on – I can erase this and then try again.

Life doesn’t work this way – we can’t just erase past mistakes. But life is full of moments of failure that present opportunities to learn. While we can’t erase the past, we can erase the way we approach the situation to create a new approach moving forward in a more effective and successful way. When we approach life written with a pencil, we acknowledge failures will happen. What comes with the failures are lessons we can learn to then develop a better game plan moving forward.

Writing our life story in pen locks us in. What we have in the past is what we have for the future. “It is what it is” mentality with lack of openness to the future holding a better path forward. Putting down the pen and crafting your story in pencil creates space for lessons to be learned, growth to become an everyday occurrence, and a sense of adaptability for the constant changes we see. The pencil normalizes making failures to learn and grow from to create a better future.

Take your step: for your next moment of failure, regardless of magnitude, take time to analyze what went wrong and acknowledge to yourself this failure has a short timetable. If you’re a learner that benefits from more of a visual or physical representations, write down in pencil the failure and the attributes that made it a failure. Then erase it. Next, brainstorm, based on what you learned from that failure, the attributes of the situation that would create a more successful path the next time.