Why is it when people go ice skating, so many of them judge their proficiency by how many times they fall down? For instance; "How did you do today?" "Great! I only fell once?"

Does falling down once really tell us whether that person can skate? How do we know he or she didn't spend their whole time hanging on to the rail? Or, maybe they skate by taking baby steps. Olympic skaters fall; NHL hockey players fall; why? Because they're not afraid to let go of the proverbial "railing." They're more concerned with succeeding than with "not falling down."

The point is, in skating as in life, falling down is no measuring stick for either success or failure, mostly because "not falling down" is not the same as success and "falling down" is not the same as failure.

It is very easy to never fall down: just don't ever do anything. Never take a risk; never try anything you're not 100% certain you'll succeed at and never go beyond your own self-imposed limitations. Once again, in life and ice skating, fear of falling down (notice I didn't say "fear of failure." You'll find out why soon.) is the biggest obstacle to success.

I will say this before and I will say it again, "Falling down is not failing." Not getting up is failing. We are so conditioned to equate falling down with failing that many people have become almost nonchalant about it.

For example, many people don't pass the road test when trying for their driver's license. What do they do? They take it again until they pass. Yet, even year's later when asked how they did on the road test they say, "I failed it the first time." WRONG!!! You didn't fail it, you just didn't pass it the first time. The proof is; you succeeded in getting a license. The only way you could have failed the road test would be if you didn't take it again after the first try.

This attitude filters right down to our schools. When a child fails to pass a grade the system claims they failed. However, instead of asking the child to repeat the grade, most school systems will just pass that child on to the next grade claiming; "we don't feel it's good for the child's self-esteem to leave them back." Right: but it's good for the child's self-esteem to promote them into an even harder grade when they couldn't do the work in the previous grade.

The child will run into the same problems in the next grade and this will just reinforce in the child's mind that he or she is not capable of doing the work. Eventually this child will get frustrated, not see the point in going on and drop out. It is then, when that child has stopped trying, that they truly fail.

A child doesn't fail a grade if they don't pass the first time, take it over and succeed. How can we call that failure? And by getting up after falling down, trying again and succeeding, isn't that child building real, long lasting self-esteem?

Of course, you might ask: "How can you expect a child to keep getting up and trying after falling down? How many adults would do that?" To that I can answer, "Only the successful ones."