S3E16: If you’re terrified to get started, listen to this

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday 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. And as we go into a brand new week, if you are feeling stuck or overwhelmed at the prospect of starting something new or moving up a level towards your goals, today, I want to share something with you that’s really helping me in my own life at the moment.

It was the realisation that when I feel frozen by fear, it usually means I’m guessing

-       About how hard it is

-       About how long it’s going to take

-       About how expensive it’s going to be

-       About how much I’m going to struggle

-       About how few resources/ how little support there’s going to be

-       About how much a certain obstacle will actually get in my way

And then, when I actually manage to start the thing, the reality is almost always that it is much more straightforward than I thought it was going to be. That even if there are infinite ways to complicate the thing, there is at least one manageable way in.

But I always find that out after so much worrying.  I’d build that thing up to be huge in my head. And that meant that when I finally did get started, did find that doorway in, I was already depleted. And I associated new things with huge stress, huge anxiety. And it didn’t have to be like that at all.

So today, if there’s something you’re struggling with, and it all feels like it’s either so cloudy you can’t find a way in, or so impossible you should just give up now, I want to ask you: Are you guessing?

Do you definitely have enough solid information to be panicking or is all of this being informed by feelings, maybe even other people’s feelings? Do you know it’s hard or do you think it might be hard? Do you know that the only way to get to your goal is going to be super expensive, or did someone somewhere tell you it was for them? Do you know for sure that everyone in that country is impatient with language learners, or was that someone else’s experience?

What if we told our brains very firmly that we are not going blow these things up into giants in our heads but instead, we were going to find the smallest possible thing we could do, that we are going to choose the loudest or most urgent doubt in our head and we’re going to find the most obvious or the least intimidating solution to it, and that we were just going to do that? And then we can move to the next one. One doubt or one fear at a time.

We don’t need all the answers at once, and we don’t need the optimal solution right now, we just need one that’s good enough to start.

So be brave today, language learners. You can do this, and you don’t have to have all the answers by the end of today or the end of this week. Remember, every tiny thing you achieve today counts, and every word matters.