“Oh I can’t do it!” she wailed.

Throwing her pencil across the table with vehemence, Ella folded her arms and slumped back in her chair, frowning crossly at the exercise book sitting innocuously on the kitchen table in front of her.

“Try again” I coaxed.  “Sometimes you have to try things a few times before you get them right”.

“But I can’t do it Mummy, I know I can’t.  I’ll never get it right”.  Her eyes brimmed with tears of frustration and she scowled at the page once more.

“Well, if you think like that then you probably won’t be able to do it.  But if you keep on trying I think you’ll find you can do it.  Go on, have another go”

This was a conversation I had with my eldest daughter (age 7) earlier on this afternoon.  Let’s backtrack a little bit so I can explain the situation…

Ella goes to Writing Club on a Thursday lunchtime at school and she loves it.  Usually she leaves her writing book in her tray at school, but this week she bought it home because she’s writing a story about Easter to read to the Reception class children and she wanted to get it finished.  Most of the time when she writes she just gets on with it, writing as and when inspiration and imagination strikes – sometimes just a couple of lines, sometimes a couple of pages.

Today, Ella was tired.  She wakes early every morning and instantly has her nose in a book, and she reads under her duvet long after I’ve put her to bed. (I’ve given up asking her to go straight to sleep because I used to do the very same thing and I figured that wanting to read as much as possible is no bad thing!).  She’s had a busy week of learning at school and we’d been to a birthday party and a play-date today.  I’d already seen the warning signs of an impending meltdown and suggested that perhaps she needed to do something that required a little bit less concentration, to give her brain a bit of a rest, but she was absolutely adamant that she wanted to write.

What she was stuck on was how to spell the word ‘temperature’.  I know one hundred percent that if she hadn’t have been so tired she would have been able to spell it with ease.  But in this moment, she knew one hundred percent that she couldn’t.

“It’s ok to make mistakes Ella.  That’s how we learn.  By getting things wrong it helps us to figure out how we can do it differently so we can get it right”.

She gave me a stern disbelieving look.

“But I don’t make mistakes Mummy.  I never have and I never want to”.

My heart broke a little inside, her words echoing the feelings I’d had as I grew up, wanting everything to be perfect because anything less than perfect meant that I wasn’t good enough.

I pulled her onto my lap and hugged her close.  I felt her relax a little and begin to calm down, and as she did I realised how I might be able to help.

My whole life I’ve loved taking photos.  Every single photo I’ve taken has been shot in automatic mode.  I have never, ever been brave enough to put the camera into fully manual mode.

Why?

Because I’m afraid that my photos won’t be any good and they are too important to me to be anything less than perfect.

There, I’ve said it.  I’ve never said that to anyone before.

Last week I was lucky enough to be able to spend an hour with a photographer that I have admired for some time.  He gave up part of his afternoon to teach me more about the technical side of things (just because I asked if he would) and I am hugely appreciative of being given that opportunity.  I knew even before I walked in the door that his parting words at the end of our session would be “Leave it on manual and go out and play”.

I was right.

And, because of another long-standing issue of mine of not wanting to let anybody down, I have unwaveringly done as he suggested.

I was terrified when I took my first shot.  Yes, terrified.  I know – it’s a strong word in relation to the subject matter we’re talking about here.  But I really was.  It’s silly – there wasn’t even anyone else in the room and I knew I could delete the picture if it didn’t turn out how I wanted it to.  I took the shot.  It was pretty rubbish.  But I tried again, tweaking the shutter speed a bit.  Still rubbish.  I tried again, adjusting the settings once more.  Better, but not quite right.  This went on for about half an hour, with me completely oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the house.  Eventually I got a picture I was happy with, gave a triumphant smile and punched the air in silent celebration.

The next day I felt a bit braver so I tried some other subjects.  All rubbish.  Back to square one.  “I’ll never be able to do this!” I wailed to my partner, my voice wavering dangerously.  “I’m never going to be any good at this.  I should just give up my ideas and stick to doing what I’ve always done”.  “Don’t be silly”, he replied.  “Keep trying, you’ll get there”.

So I kept on trying.  Four days later I’m beginning to see a bit of an improvement and I’m starting to feel a touch more confident.

In learning a new skill there is a model called ‘the four stages of competence’.  First there is unconscious incompetence – you are completely unaware of what you don’t know.  Then comes conscious incompetence – you are very aware of how much you don’t know/can’t do.  Stage three is conscious competence – you can do the thing you’re trying to do, but you have to consciously think about it to do it.  Finally (eventually!) you arrive at unconscious competence, where the thing you’re doing flows effortlessly and naturally.  You don’t have to think about what you’re doing because you just do it.

At the moment, with my photography, I’m somewhere between stages 2 and 3.  It’s uncomfortable.  Clunky.  I’m not liking it at all.  But I know that eventually (with time, and practice, and making mistakes, and learning from them, and persevering…) I will get to unconscious competence.  I’m not sure how I know.  I just… know.

I told Ella the same story I’ve just told you, about me trying to learn how to do better photography.  She sat quietly for a minute, absorbing and processing it all in the way that she does, then picked up her pencil and very carefully wrote ‘t-e-m-p-u-r-t-u-r-e’.  She looked at me and I shook my head ever-so-slightly.  “Not quite sweetie.  You’re very nearly there – have one more go”.

I watched her lips move imperceptibly as she sounded it out in her head.

She tried again: ‘t-e-m-p-e-r-a-t-u-r-e’.

She smiled because she knew she’d got it right.

I smiled because I knew we’d both learned an important lesson.

She closed the book and went to play with her sisters.

I punched the air in silent celebration.