S3E13: Stop waiting to feel successful
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Wednesday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway.
Today I am just popping in with a quick reminder that if you’re waiting to feel successful, you are making your life way harder than it needs to be. And that’s not because being successful is really far off. It’s because there’s a real risk that you’re not going to recognise when you get there.
If you’ve ever tried to follow Google maps when the signal is patchy, you’ll know how frustrating it can be. Every time you think you’re heading in the right direction, the whole map rotates and shows you’ve been walking the exact opposite way to where you wanted to go.
And the same is true of letting the feeling of success guide you.
It will send you in all directions, and it will tell you you’re almost at your destination one minute, only to change its mind the next and send you right back where you came from.
And this is episode is not about saying, don’t trust your feelings. Because I truly believe that your feelings about situations are normally an excellent compass to guide you on your way, but rather, I think feeling successful isn’t one feeling but many. It’s feeling popular, it’s feeling intelligent, it’s feeling well-read, it’s feeling socially literate, it’s ties up in status and money and qualifications so it’s not as much one fickle emotion as too many competing emotions that can’t present one united front and agree on where you should go next.
And this, right here, is why goals matter so much. Because if you have a vague notion of wanting to be fluent in your language, there are so many ways to be successful at that and so many definitions of what that could look like that you will be vulnerable to every external pressure there is. Someone’s got a better accent than you, you stop feeling successful. Someone’s just passed an exam that you’re not even taking, you stop feeling successful. But if you have a clear goal, and you’ve reverse engineered that goal to give you small, manageable activities each day, you know what success looks like for you. And then you’re less distracted by everything and everybody else, and feel less pulled by all the alternative paths you could be taking.
So for the rest of this week, I’d like to invite you to be really intentional as you plan your day to work out what kind of successful you’d like to feel at the end of each evening. And not just, what have you studied, because that’s too generic, but what have you learnt? What have you made? What have you practised? What have you thought about or talked about?
And the aim here is that you don’t want to let feelings of success or failure run the show, with you asking yourself “do I feel successful?” along the way. We want the reverse – you set the compass, you tell yourself what your goals are, you make sure you know how to tell that you’ve finished them, you back away. You’re done. And then you give yourself that permission to feel successful because you did what you set out to do, and that takes courage, and that’s amazing.
I’ve just launched my first project of the year which is to have 100 conversations with listeners of the Language Confidence Project in the next few months, 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, there won’t be any sales pitches or anything like that, and the hope is that we can chat about the hard bits of learning a language but also to celebrate your wins. 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!