Is it possible to fail forward as a Kids Life Coach?

What does the word fail mean to you? It has taken me many years to truly understand the concept of what it means to fail forward. I have always told my coachees  that there is no such thing as failure but perhaps I have got it all wrong?

When a teen came into a coaching session crying about the fact that she had failed her Maths test, I felt it was time to come clean. When at University doing my Masters Degree in Clinical Child Psychology, I was forced to do statistics for quantitative research. I explained that I was a qualitative researcher and that I wouldn’t need the skills, but nonetheless to pass my module our entire class needed to do the assignments. On my first assignment our class average was 30% and my mark was well below this average….in fact I got 16%.

I remember how I felt and how disappointed I was at failing the assignment since it pulled down my overall average score which up until that stage had been straight A’s. As a high achiever, this was completely unfamiliar to me and the way I handled it was to withdraw and retreat. Telling myself I was stupid. I couldn’t do Maths. A story I had told myself since school. A story a teacher had once told me. Yet with a class average of 30%, there was something seriously wrong with the quality of the assignment and the quality of our lecturer. With so many of us failing, the decision was made to lift our scores by 25% and I eventually got 41% just above the pass mark in the UK. In South Africa for my undergraduate degrees the pass mark had always been 50%.

All of this I explained to my coachee. Focusing less on the details of the event and more about my feelings. This became a coachable moment because I explained that this was the first time I truly understood what it meant to fail forward. Failure is not about getting things wrong, it is about an opportunity to learn yet so many young people fear making mistakes. They put enormous pressure on themselves to achieve and this is compounded by parents who may demand excellence.

This is why I dress my Play Based Coaching System up as leadership for families. It traditionally targets families with children below the age of 12 who are at the cusp of learning what it means to make mistakes. Targeting younger children is a deliberate and strategic choice, since many interventions traditionally focus on teenagers only once challenges have already emerged. However, middle childhood represents a critical developmental window in which children are actively developing their executive functioning and problem-solving abilities along with an understanding of themselves and others.      

Between the ages of around 5 - 12 years old, children are increasingly able to reflect and communicate their experiences. This means they can participate meaningfully in contributing towards their own healthier patterns because their cognitive and emotional flexibility remains highly responsive to learning and support.

I believe that by engaging children before adolescence in what it means to fail is not simply about addressing problems after they appear, but to strengthen protective factors early. Supporting both parent and child during this formative stage creates an opportunity to interrupt negative patterns before they become more deeply established. This allows resilience building to become a shared family endeavour, rather than an individual responsibility. This allows failure to be reframed as learning instead of creating a feeling of ‘less than’.  To influence a child’s brain blueprint, we should intervene before the teenage years yet play based coaching is equally suitable for the teen that felt upset at his Maths score.

What was more important to this teen was a need to look beyond her individual outcomes and understand the interconnected world around her. The relationships, environments, inequalities, and experiences that shaped her brain from the earliest moments of her life. By deepening her understanding of brain behaviour, brain building, and brain balancing she felt more empowered to tackle her Maths tests in a different way in future.Failing forward is about coaching children to accept the learning opportunity and to move forward in a way that shows growth.

This is why I continue to advocate for life coaching for children. Our global network of coaches support children not only to score well academically through a shift in mindset, but to understand that their true worth is not measured by a test score. Eventually I achieved my distinction in my final Masters Degree but only by 1%. That became symbolic to me because the first time I felt failure and my score was lifted, it was all about being 1% above pass that mattered. In life, it is never about perfection but about progress and I know that young people need us to advocate for them on those days that may feel heavier because they perceive they have failed. Sharing my own story with the coachee helped her to reframe the conversation she was having with herself.

This starts with the conversations we have with ourselves as coaches. When we make peace with the fact that children don’t need us to show up as perfect, this gives our coaching a whole new meaning. Authentic coaching connects on a heart to heart level and the lessons are always much more powerful than simply telling a child to learn from their mistakes.

So I ask you again. What does failure mean to you as a coach and how will you embody this when you next have a coachee who doesn’t yet understand what it means to fail forward.