Embracing ambiguity has developed been a habit I have tried to develop and has played a big role in my life. I am the type of person who always likes to know what is happening, when it is happening, and every detail I can possibly find. Before this class, I was not very comfortable with the unknown. The way this class is structured has really helped me be okay with not being certain, especially when it comes to grading. I am the type of person who is always checking my grades, and checking every box on a list of what I can do to get a good grade. This class does not allow for that, and at first that made me really uncomfortable and anxious. As time went on I began to accept the fact that I was not going to know my grade in this class until the end, and that I just needed to try my best and apply myself and trust that it would all work out. Practicing this habit for MIDE actually made me feel a lot less anxious than I normally do about grades in other classes, even when these classes did regularly post grades. Getting myself into the mindset of trying my best and trusting that that would do me well was a really important outcome of embracing ambiguity for me.
In respect to failing forward, I have learned that I am really afraid of failure and that I haven’t really faced a lot of it. When we were creating our failure resumes, I realized that often I don’t face failure. I learned that this is definitely one of my faults, because I have recently been encountering failure a lot more and I honestly don’t know how to deal with it. I have always been the type of person who succeeds in school and gets good grades, and this has especially been the case since college. Remote learning, though, has been extremely challenging for me and I have not been able to apply myself nearly as well. I have received some not so great grades in a few of my classes. By not so great, I mean so Bs. I was so upset when I received these grades, and now that I am reflecting on it I realize it is because I am truly afraid of failure especially when it comes to school. This is something I really want to work on. Not to say that I am going to try and fail, but when I do I want to learn from it rather than just be really upset. Remote learning has been difficult, but has taught me a lot about how I deal with failure and is definitely a unique learning experience I might not have gotten if not for COVID19.
I feel as though creative confidence comes naturally to me. I am someone who really loves art and design, but is not the best at it. I am pursuing an art minor with total knowledge than I am really not that great of an artist, but I love being creative and expressing myself through art and it doesn’t matter to me that I am not the best at it. Creativity is one of the few things I am really confident about in life, but I have realized it is because it is something I really enjoy and am passionate about. I feel like a lot of people decide they are not creative and just avoid any opportunity to be creative, but I have learned that really anyone can be creative whether that is in art or just ideas. You don’t have to be the best at something to be passionate about it and want to practice is as much as possible.
I would say, connecting to what I have learned about myself, I would like to work on failing forward and being able to accept failure and use it as a learning experience. To be totally honest, I have really been feeling like a failure lately. After handing in lot of mediocre work due to a lack of focus in quarantine, as well as losing my internship I feel like I have been facing a lot of challenges. Naturally, all I want to do about it is sulk and feel sorry for myself. What I am going to try to do is accept that, yes, this summer is going to be full of failures and disappointments but there are ways to spin these things in a positive light. I have already made steps to practice failing forward, such as looking for alternate solutions to my problems. I think some other steps I can take to embrace this habit is to really reflect on my failures. Often, when we fail we like to forget about it and never bring it up again. I never like to look back on things that I might have done a really bad job on, but I feel like this could be a really helpful step for me in using my failures to better myself. Other thing I think I really need to do is own up to my own failures. A lot of the time I don’t want to accept the fact that I have failed, so I put the blame on the professor or the circumstances I was in. What I really need to do is accept that I might have made a mistake, and recognize those mistakes in order to do better next time.
Overall, looking back, I feel like this class has subtly made a huge change in my life. I feel more confident in myself as a creative thinker as well as someone who is okay with accepting ambiguity. During this time, I think these are two of the most important skills I could have learned in a class and I am very thankful for that.
Leave a Reply