From her book ‘Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness’, Kathy K. Clayton wrote:
Mercifully, Heavenly Father included in His perfect plan of happiness the gift of agency, which allows us to taste the bitter in order to know the sweet. It also includes the gift of repentance, which allows us to conquer the bitter through Christ. Neither we nor our students need to go through life alienated from the Spirit because we have made poor choices. Because it is the only way we can be eligible to come unto Christ, and because there is no deep or lasting happiness without peace of conscience, we must teach repentance and then teach it again. Too often teachers assume that those well-dressed students who come to church every Sunday are as perfectly dressed inside as they are outside. We do them a terrible disservice if we assume too much and neglect to arm them with a motivating understanding of the miracle of forgiveness and its inevitable, essential relevance to their happiness.
As have we, they have made and will continue to make mistakes. Heavenly Father knew that. He made a generous provision to counteract that fact if we would exercise our agency to access the great promise of Christ’s Atonement. They must understand the promise and experience the miracle of its application to rid themselves of crippling feelings of guilt and inadequacy.
Errors can actually be powerful teaching opportunities if they are coupled with subsequent thoughtful repentance. Even secular scientists with a limited frame of reference have discovered that the “brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error. There are no shortcuts through to this painstaking process; becoming an expert [even an expert at exercising agency worthily, I might add] just takes time and practice. . . . it is feelings, after all [which we might recognize as the voice of the Spirit] and not the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience.”7
And yet, if experience alone bred wisdom, all the world would be wise. The experience must be coupled with understanding, repentance, and change in order to move a person closer to wisdom and worthiness. Those who have confidence in the power of the principle of repentance and the possibility of change are better equipped to learn from their mistakes. Again, even science confirms that eternal fact. Researchers at Michigan State University conducted a study that determined that students were better able to learn from mistakes if they believed they could affect their learning and personal growth for good. If the students felt that they were primarily subject to their natural dispositions or inclinations, they struggled to retain the confidence necessary to turn mistakes into learning opportunities. They were much more adept at correcting errors and pressing affirmatively with an exam than were those who had little confidence in their capacity to make amends. Those students who were “growth-minded” and focused on the process of learning from errors learned much more from their mistakes than those who had less confidence in their personal ability to influence their progress.8
Additionally, people with sufficient self-confidence—that is, a strong sense of their eternal identity—are better able to admit error and learn from it than those who struggle with issues of self-esteem. Again, science reaffirms what gospel principles teach us. A psychologist in Edmonton, Canada, has found that people with low self-esteem are less inclined to apologize after a wrongdoing even though they feel regret. He says, “‘People who are sure of themselves have the capacity to confess a wrong doing and address it.'”9 ~Kathy K. Clayton, Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012) 80-81
