S3E6:It’s okay to learn from experience

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. If you feel like you can’t get started until you have researched, planned, and fully understand the whole process, this is the episode for you. Because today, as we start our week, I’m just popping in with a reminder that it’s okay to learn from experience.

 In fact, it’s not just okay. It’s 100% necessary.

Now, I know a lot of us around here are definitely over-researchers and over-planners, and we want to have every tiny detail mapped out before we start and I wonder if that’s because a lot of us are actually doing that as a way of resisting learning from experience. Because learning from experience means what we did first wasn’t optimal. There was room for improvement. There were changes to be made. So it wasn’t good enough.

And you know, that makes sense. We don’t want to waste our own time. We don’t want to do things we’re going to have to redo later. And we don’t want to look back with regret or even worse, embarrassment, at our earlier efforts.

Except, we’re lying to ourselves by telling ourselves we have a choice.

The thing is, no amount of reading or researching or planning means we start at perfect. You cannot use more research to catapult yourself over this stage of separating theory from practice or separating reviews from reality and figuring out what actually works for you. And the funny thing about mistakes in the language learning world, is that quite often, they end up being more detours than mistakes anyway. Things you wind up regretting, thinking you’ve massively slowed yourself down or you’ve wasted your time or money on, might well turn out to be useful down the line. Things that don’t work now, if a few circumstances change, it’s worth having them in the back of your mind for later.   

So this week, make a promise to yourself to just give yourself permission to get going. Get doing. You are not setting yourself up to fail by starting earlier and doing earlier. You’re giving yourself the chance to try things out. To overlay different habits and systems and apps onto your own life and see for yourself what aligns with your daily routine and your personality and what doesn’t.

It’s the first time I’ve said it this year, language learners, but you don’t have to aim for perfect. Remember, every tiny thing you achieve today counts, and every word matters. I will see you tomorrow.