S3E10: “This is a break”

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Friday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project. It’s the end of the week and as we go into the weekend, I would love to invite us today to reflect on what our breaks actually look like.

With all the conversations around boundaries and quiet quitting at the moment, I am finding that as a society we are talking more and more about being firm with other people about what time they can have access to, and what time is your own. 

We are talking more about bringing joy and joyful things into our lives, about recongising what makes us happy and doing more of it.

But in practice, what I found was that I would schedule in time to do the things that brought me joy, I would go for the walks, I would play the games, I would listen to music and all these other things, but it wasn’t making me any happier. I didn’t feel any more relaxed. If anything, I was getting more stressed.

And then I realised, just having those things planned into my day wasn’t enough. Just having my body sat in the right place wasn’t enough. The trouble was, my brain was always  somewhere else. It was worrying about something I needed to do tomorrow, replaying and replaying some kind of injustice, or trying to dive into a comprehensive analysis of where I’d gone wrong in my life.

That wasn’t a break.  I was contaminating my leisure time with all this worry, and then wondering why the things I loved weren’t making me happy any more.

And if this is you too, I just wanted to offer a really useful phrase that is super simple but it is making a huge difference to how I approach my free time. 

“This is a break”

Far too often, I wasn’t recognising my own breaks. I wasn’t giving my brain permission to rest. So now, I have learned that I really do have to be deliberate about it. So if I’m awake in bed ten minutes before my alarm goes off, if a meeting ends ten minutes early, I tell myself “this is a break”. Because what it isn’t, is ten minutes of extra existential crisis I can work into my day. And every time I catch myself going back to thinking about work or deadlines, I bring it back, with “this is a break”. On a break, we don’t do planning. We don’t do mental resistance to stuff we have to do later. We let ourselves play a song, and intentionally set ourselves happy things to think about.

When I have five minutes between calls

When I have an evening to do whatever I want,

I tell myself

This is a break

Because if I don’t tell myself, I might miss it.

So if there is one message I would love to share with you before we go into the weekend, language learners, it’s this. Worrying in front of a movie, ruminating while listening to music or planning your whole life on a walk... isn't a break.  Being in those spaces, surrounding youself with those people, scheduling in that time, is half the battle. But being there with your whole self is the other half.

So let’s get deliberate about really recognising our free time for what it is, even if it’s just a couple of minutes here and there. It's a chance to reset and to let the tension go.

And before I go, just a reminder that I’ve just started my 100 Conversations project, where I would love to speak to 100 listeners of the Language Confidence Project, to meet you, to hear about how your language journey is going, and to find out what carving your own path means to you. It’s a really informal 30 minute Skype chat over tea or coffee or whatever beverage you should like to bring, it’s completely free, nobody’s going to try and sell you anything, it really is just a chat, where we can just hang out and chat about languages. If you would like to book a call, I have a Calendly link in the shownotes, and it’s also in my Instagram bio at @teawithemily. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Have a wonderful weekend, look after yourselves, and I will see you back here on Monday.