THIS post is for my Villanova students currently in the beginning phases of a consulting engagement . . . .
Colleague Linda DeLuca and I identified a repeating phenomenon whenever co-creating something brilliant, and noticed it occurred during individual project work too: that feeling of frustration whenever something isn’t perfect yet. You know it too, right? We call it “creative chaos.”
Reading The Feeling of Learning about how emotions help you learn (from, of all things, The Brilliant Blog!) yields supporting evidence, which the author refers to as “cognitive disequilibrium:”
Researchers “find that deep learning must always involve a fair amount of negative emotion, concentrated in the phase in which students are struggling mightily to grasp new ways of thinking. In fact, students show the lowest levels of enjoyment during learning under the conditions in which they learn the most, and the feeling of confusion turns out to be the best predictor of learning.”
Don’t you feel better knowing this? Keep walking on the edge – it’s where the most personal and intellectual growth happens.
