In his last month of college, Tom Hicks failed student teaching. He called off his wedding to his high school sweetheart. Then his dad was diagnosed with dementia.
“I felt like a failure,” said Hicks during a presentation at ENTREFest, an annual conference celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation. “I didn’t want to do anything. I wasn’t open to engagement, innovation or anything like that.”
Then his grandmother, Granny Mae, gave him a gift that would change his life.
A set of juggling balls.
“I was intrigued,” said Hicks, who resides in Cedar Rapids. “The best part of this gift was the booklet that came with it. … This was titled ‘A Short Course in Life Enhancement,’ and it literally changed my life that day. I learned how to juggle that day in her living room, and it reconnected me with this idea of growth mindset, continuous improvement and seeing failure as something that you can embrace and encourage and celebrate.”
The growth mindset is described by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset.” Dweck writes that the growth mindset is “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies and help from others.” Everyone, “can change and grow through application and experience,” she writes.
Hicks holds workshops where he uses juggling to coach people on the growth mindset, his occupation for the last 18 months. Before that, he worked at colleges and universities, including as dean of students at Coe College in Cedar Rapids for more than five years.
Hicks posed the question to the audience: What problem is he trying to solve with juggling?
“We know that fear of failure is something that 40% or more of our employees experience,” he said. “They are afraid to fail, which prevents them from being as innovative and engaged and retained as well as they could or should be. We also know that close to 40% actively resist change, so if we can open up people’s minds to change a little bit, we can accomplish a bunch more.”
He developed the workshop ultimately to help college students realize that their first B, or D or F was a temporary bump in the road.
“When I’m talking with entrepreneurs, we often come across this innovator’s dilemma, and this is where, as you are growing a business, you find and refine all of the revenue streams and the businesses that help you continue to grow, and you end up focusing on those instead of finding a new path forward or a new avenue in order to continue that growth,” he said. “I saw this with the college students I work with. They were confident in their abilities. They were successful in high school. They got to their first semester of college, and they relied on those same tactics. They didn’t innovate, and what happened? They got their first B’s and C’s and D’s ever, and they chose to leave college. They thought they were failures.”
He said that if you can learn or relearn to embrace failure and success, you could develop a growth mindset.
“What if you didn’t have to worry about failing, and you felt comfortable sharing your truly authentic self?” he said.
Oftentimes, failure feels like a high-stakes phenomenon, he said.
By juggling, “we’re going to make it low stakes and have some fun with it,” he said.
“Learning how to juggle takes that focus. We need to build one ball, and then two, and then three. We can’t just skip to the third. It’s also a fun and embodied example of iterative, resilient learning, and it unlocks this continuous improvement mindset that reconnects us with innovation and allows us to be more engaged.”
Hicks compared the learning process in juggling to to graduating from training wheels when learning to ride a bike.
“When we have new variables like new bikes, or another juggling ball, or new staff, or new processes, or we get acquired by somebody else — that fear, that failure, those mistakes start to mount. They’re more likely to happen, and what we’ve been taught with fear is to literally pull inside to be afraid and to not be open to innovation and engagement,” he said.
In his workshop, Hicks shared a clip from Dr. Benjamin Zander, the founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, talking about students who were afraid of failure.
“Now, I believe the exact opposite, which is, you cannot learn anything unless you make a mistake,” Zander said in the clip. “So, I tell my students, when you make a mistake, celebrate, and the way to celebrate is [to say] ‘How fascinating.’”
Hicks instructed participants to shout those words after dropping a juggling ball.
“Everybody is starting from a different spot,” he said. “Everybody has a chance to embrace this process and make progress.”
Hicks brought people up on stage to juggle and others juggled in the audience. Some caught on right away. Some dropped the balls in quick succession and threw up their hands and yelled, “How fascinating.”
Hicks made it through that rough patch during his last semester of college. He found his path in higher education, married his wife of 18 years and they have a 15-year-old daughter.
“Going forward, I want you to play, celebrate and be curious, continue to be curious,” he said.