S3E19: Mindset isn’t the whole picture… but it is everything

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Thursday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the podcast for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. All this week, I’ve been sharing the lessons I’ve learned that have most helped me to start new things, and especially things where I feel completely daunted or out of my depth.

And the message I want to share with you today is this.

When you’re starting something new, all the inner work you’re doing will make the journey easier. But we can’t fall into the trap of expecting it to make it easy. 

When we’ve been doing lots of work on the way we approach problems, our self talk, and we are about to take on a brand new challenge, I don’t know about you, but I imagine I’m going ace them this time. After all, I feel so prepared to face these challenges and to dive into the unknown with curiosity instead of resistance and I have all these problem-solving tricks up my sleeve now and so, surely, it won’t be like last time, and I’ll be able to navigate all the obstacles with ease.

And then I do it.

And then it’s still hard.

And I might still spend hours or days stuck on something.

And that’s the thing, when we’re doing something new.

We still spend hours researching, and the answers are rarely just a quick Google search. Sometimes it takes quite a while to research your way into just being able to formulate the questions you need to ask, and then you set about looking for answers. 

We might still make the mistakes, and some of those mistakes might be expensive or take up a lot of time, or be embarrassing in some way. We might still get frustrated and impatient.

And it can be easy to wonder if it was worth the effort. If any of that was time well spent.

Yes, it was, language learners.  

Because all those tricks didn’t stop the thing you were trying to do being hard. They didn’t stop you being a beginner. But they stopped you being hard on yourself. They meant that you recognised the thing was hard and you gave yourself the space to figure it out rather than assuming it was impossible or beyond your capabilities. It meant you didn’t go straight to blaming yourself and comparing where you are to where you thought you’d be. It meant you didn’t issue yourself ultimatums about not doing nice things til you’d solved the problem. It meant you appreciated yourself for sticking at it. And it meant you celebrated your wins once you solved it.

Mindset isn’t the whole picture when you’re in unfamiliar territory, language learners. But in some ways it’s everything. Because it’s not there to remove all the obstacles from your path. It’s the difference between empowering or disempowering yourself in the face of difficulty.

The thing is hard. And you are tough. 

And you can do this.

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you back here tomorrow.