S3E21: Do you need to 100% this?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project. I’m your host, Emily Richardson, I’m a tiny and colourful polyglot with a background in language teaching, and language, mind and brain. I’m here every weekday morning to help you get the most out of your language learning, whether you love languages, or you really don’t, but have to learn one anyway.

And today, I just wanted to ask you a quick question,

Do you need to 100% this? Why?

Are you telling yourself that you need perfection on something that really doesn’t matter?

Are you forcing yourself to stick with something until completion, when actually, you’ve got everything you needed to get out of it right now?

We all know about the rule of diminishing returns. Quite often, we know that it’s not the best use of our time or energy to keep aiming for that final little bit when we could move on and be making huge progress somewhere else, covering more ground, getting more practice. But how many of us get stuck there anyway because we hear so many voices in our heads telling us that we need to do our best, we need to give 110%, and we need to go that extra mile on everything we do?

So today, and for all this week, I want to invite you to look at every task you set yourself, figure out what you want to get out of it, in terms of results, not just items ticked off the list, and work to that. Set your own pass rate. It absolutely might be 100% on some things. But it doesn’t need to be 100% on everything. Set your own goals and make sure you know when you’re willing to call them done and let them go. Let yourself build momentum.

If you’re working through a textbook, it’s okay to skip exercises. You don’t have to complete every page, just so that you’ve completed every page. And you don’t have to stop yourself moving onto a new unit of vocabulary until you can reliably get 100% either. 

Work out what you need, and do that.

And before I go, just a reminder that the doors are open for 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.

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