S3E4: Meet yourself where you are right now

Full transcript:

Good morning 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. This whole week we are looking at how we can make joyful, optimisitic plans for this year, dream big, while also being fair to ourselves and setting ourselves up to succeed every step of the way. 

And today, I just wanted to pop in and remind you that if we are going to build a truly sustainable journey for ourselves, in language or in anything else, we need to make sure that the plans that we build to get there are actually going to work for us. When we set about making those plans and goals and targets, we have to meet ourselves where we’re at right now.

Because so many of us when we embark on a new journey we start by thinking about where we want to be, whatever our goal is, and we think we have to contort ourself into some ideal version of ourselves who would be worthy of that goal. But the reality, the vast majority of the time, is that that doesn’t work. Because it’s like trying to force your brain to run on an incompatible software. Even if we started from the assumption that this shiny new system that you’d found from some expert was perfect, once you tried to run it on your machine, you’d find it starts to stutter. Why? Because old patterns. Because self-limitij g believfs. Because there’d be all these popups in the form of whatever you do to distract yourself. Because you’d shut it off all the time so you could run other software.

So if you are starting a new language, or coming back to one after a break, even if that break is just a few weeks, take some time to really evaluate where you are in your life right now. 

I often think of this process as like making an inventory, just like in a video game. And look at what you have in your inventory, but be really careful here just to observe it, not to judge it. In a video game, we’re really used to our inventories being in a state of constant flux, our swords break, we upgrade our armour, we have different amounts of food or potions or health points at different times and it’s okay. We don’t spend days mourning the loss of our perfect bow and arrow, because we know that other things probably work just as well, and if not, we might find another one later.

And the same is true of your language learning inventory. It doesn’t matter that you were a powerhouse of vocabulary learning efficiency ten years ago at university. It doesn’t matter what you could do last year or before you had children. But, we have to take those things into account because your methods and your goals are going to be different in your current circumstances. If you notice that you have less money to dedicate to your language learning  than the last time you were studying, note it down. Plainly, unemotionally, as simply as you can. If you have more responsibilities this time round than last time, so you have less headspace, write that down. But this is not all about accounting for your losses. a lot of the time, I worry that people’s first thought when they hear “meet yourself where you’re at” is to look at what’s going on for them right now and think “how am I less equipped now to deal with it than before, what concessions am I going to need to make and what new obstacles are standing in my way?”

But that’s only half the story. Because the next thing to look at is “but what’s better than before”? And it could be all sorts of things. Maybe you have a quiet workspace now whereas before you didn’t. Maybe it’s about the self-knowledge about how you study best. Maybe it’s simply a case that the last time you studied a language, you were doing it under duress, whereas now, you have a real interest in it. More time? A better understanding of how you learn? A better idea of what you’re trying to achieve in your language? A better language learning community? Apps that actually suit you?  

In short, “meet yourself where you are right now” is not a euphemism for “embrace your sh*tness” or “accept and tolerate the fact that this will be worse than last time”. It means, observe, with an open mind at what is different from last time. Look at the changes in your health, your wellbeing, environment but don’t judge them. Look at your time energy constarints. But then look at all the skills and exoeperience you can bring this time that you didn’t have before. Look at your support network, your community, and all the resources that are available right now that you’re excited to try that maybe didn’t exist or you didn’t know about before. Think about all the interests you’ve discovered and the things that make you happy that you can bring into your language learning.

And one final reminder, know this isn’t fixed, it’s just a snapshot of your life right now, but once you’ve laid out a map of the landscape you’re working in right now, the whole process becomes so much easier. Because you won’t make plans that with the best will in the world, you’ll be too tired to keep. You won’t sign up to programs that promise the world but deep down, you know that they recreate past learning experiences that you hated. And even if you wish things were the way they were before, you’ll also remember what’s come in its place.

So meet yourself where you’re at, language learners. You can do this.

Happy Thursday, be kind to yourselves, and I’ll see you back here at 7am UK time tomorrow.