S3E32: Your skills still count
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Tuesday 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, in honour of the What’s In Your Inventory Workshop next Monday, all this week, we are talking about recognising the gifts that we have that can help us with our language learning, the skills, personality traits, and what I’m calling “silent helpers” that work with us and guide us on our path, even if we’ve never learned a language before. And today, I’m continuing with the message that you don’t have to be a world leading expert for your gifts to be worth something.
So in this episode, I have three reminders for you.
It’s still a skill, even if you haven’t mastered it.
It’s still a skill if you personally know someone who’s better at it than you.
It’s still a skill if you make mistakes from time to time.
And that doesn’t just go for skills like speaking a language or art or web design. It’s personality traits too. Perfectionism has so many weird and wonderful ways of making our life difficult and one of those ways is telling us that we can’t call ourselves patient or organised or hardworking unless we are the perfect specimen of it.
It’s so easy to minimise what we’re good at, telling ourselves that if we aren’t the best person we know at something, it probably doesn’t really count. Or that if we can think of one recent incidence where we let that skill or trait slip, then we don’t really have the right to assume that identity. Or we have to caveat it somehow. But it isn’t true, language learners.
You can be a patient person without needing to have a 100% track record for patience. You can be organised and still have that drawer of chaos. You can be a detail-oriented person that makes typos. Look how many kinds of detail there are in the world to process. You can’t be on top of all of them.
And most importantly, your unique combination of interests, skills and personality traits is so, so valuable, at whatever level or to whatever degree you have them. They have so much power to do good in the world, to bring you good, and to make this journey easier.
So look at who you are and what you can do compassionately, language learners.
And just a reminder that tickets are now on sale for the What’s In Your Inventory Workshop, which is a two hour, super relaxed and informal online workshop where we mix journaling and discussion to really dive into how our personality, experiences and current life circumstances can work for us in our language learning. It’s taking place next Monday, so Monday 27th February, at 7pm GMT, which is 8pm Central Europe and 2pm Eastern Standard Time on Zoom, there are ten paces available, and Tickets cost £28. All language levels are welcome, even if you haven’t quite started yet or you’re taking a break. You can find more details about the workshop and how to sign up in the shownotes, or check my bio on Instagram at @teawithemily and I would love to see you there. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you back here tomorrow.