S3E8: Are you struggling, or is this hard?

Full transcript:

Good morning and a very warm welcome to the Language Confidence Project. I’m your host, Emily Richardson, and I’m here every weekday to walk with you while you learn your language. I truly believe that one of the biggest difficulties that language learners face isn’t that they don’t know what to do or what resources to use, it’s that they don’t fully believe it’s ever going to happen for them. So, the Language Confidence Project is here to keep you company, and share some tips and reflections from my own journey and my own experiences helping language learners with motivation, productivity, fear and dealing with uncertainty.

And today, if there’s something that you’re finding really difficult or stressful or frustrating, I just wanted to pop in and ask you a quick question.

Is that you’re struggling, or is it that this is hard?

And this has been a really important distinction for me to make in my own life recently, because as I’m sure you can imagine or a lot of you will probably have experienced yourselves, putting yourself out there in the world… it’s not easy. And a lot of it is many miles out of my comfort zone. And I noticed a real shift when I moved from saying

I’m struggling

I’m stressed

I don’t get this

To

“this is difficult”

and “this is stressful”

and “this is out of my comfort zone”.

Because the first examples kind of suggested that there was something wrong with me. That I lacked the skills, the resilience, the emotional strength I needed to cope with the thing, to sit with the thing, let alone to actually do the thing to completion. And your body and your mind react to that. All the barriers come up, all the resistance sets in and it makes spiraling way more likely. You shut down, because it’s not fair. And also, it’s not true. You’re not lacking, you’re learning, and there’s a difference.

In the second examples, it just acknowledged the challenge. That whatever I was doing was new or demanding and, it isn’t unusual to find new or demanding things daunting. And it makes it general rather than personal, if a thing is hard, chances are lots of other people, all around the world, are probably finding it tough too. Not impossible, not beyond their capabilities, not, completely out of reach for people like us, but just, hard. And as the wonderful author and speaker Glennon Doyle says, we can do hard things. 

It is so much easier to do hard things when we take the time to recognise that they’re hard, and don’t immediately jump to questioning what’s wrong with us. If you want, I find it helpful to create categories of difficulty in the tasks ahead of me, so that when I’m just feeling that really crawly, foggy, uncomfortable feeling of being in treacle, naming it and recognising its species is my first victory. Things like

This makes me feel really vulnerable

This is a new way of thinking

I don’t know the procedure

I’m daunted by the buttons

And to me, the difference between “I’m really struggling” and “I’m daunted by the buttons” feels huge. I can work with the second one. And it unblocks my path and then I can get on with things again.

Learning a language is hard. Not all of it is hard, none of it is impossible, but finding bits of it difficult and if you’ve reached one of the trickier things, you are not alone. You aren’t lacking, you aren’t broken, and you will get it eventually. 

And as I mentioned yesterday, I’ve just launched my first project of the year which is to have 100 conversations with listeners of the Language Confidence Project in the next few months, 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, there won’t be any sales pitches or anything like that, and the hope is that we can chat about the hard bits of learning a language but also to celebrate your wins. 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. I can’t wait to hear from you!