S4E11: Have you lost motivation, or have you lost the vision?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome to the LCP, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And today, if you have lost motivation and productivity hacks aren’t really working, I have a question for you.

Did you lose your motivation, or can you just not see your end goal right now? Have you lost focus on what you’re doing this all for? Is the problem, not your discipline, but that the bigger picture is fading away?

And the reason I ask that is that when we’re learning something, especially for a specific purpose and under a specific time frame, it can be really easy to lose sight of the actual goal and just see a neverending stretch of deadlines, expectations, and stumbling blocks. We can reduce our whole journey into to-do lists. When you lose that clarity on what you’re trying to do and why,

1)    It’s so much easier to procrastinate. Because, after all, it’s all miles off, it might never even happen, what’s the hurry?

2)    It’s easier to make excuses, and the excuses feel more real. When that end goal is flimsy, literally anything and everything can be used to knock it down.

3)    It’s easier to get lost in the fog and overthink whether any of your plans will work out. Because as we all know, it is so much easier to come up with reasons why something would fail than reasons it could succeed. But that doesn’t make the reasons it could succeed any less true.

4)    It gets harder to push through discomfort. Because, again, what’s the point?

It really is hard to keep going when it feels like your goal is so far away that nothing you’ll do today will make the slightest bit of real difference.

And when that’s where we are, I think a lot of us, we see that our productivity is low and we assume that what we need is help getting through the to-do lists and by extension, the deadlines and exoectations and stumbling blocks. But what we actually need is to expand our journey back out. We need reminding of why we’re putting all that effort in in the first place.

So if your motivation is waning, maybe the solution isn’t another productivity hack today. Maybe it’s strengthening that vision.

That might look like really fortifying the image of your end goal. We talked about this in detail in S3E3, called, what’s the dream, where I invited you to bring all your senses in to visualise you at the peak of your mountain, to make your goal feel as real as possible and almost simulate the success that you’re working towards.

It might look like reconnecting with native content or aspects of the country or culture. Sometimes, languages become kind of theorietical in our heads and we reduce them to to-do lists and curricula and what we need more than anything is just to make them 3D and real again.

It might look like taking a few steps back from the language world altogether and getting that fire relit a different way. Go and follow someone’s journey getting their book published, or breaking into the music scene, or whatever it is that can bring that promise back of joy, and progress, and satisfaction, without awakening the self-comparison monkey.

I know the journey is long and it is normal to get tired, to get discouraged, and to have peaks and troughs in your motivation. But as we go into this week, I just want to remind you that what you’re doing is so much more than the next to-do list. So don’t let it be reduced to jobs and obligations. Keep reminding yourself what you’re doing it all for.

And if you like what I do, please support me! The Language Confidence project is growing and all sorts of exciting things are happening in the next few months, and I need your help to make all of this happen. There are so many ways that you could lend a hand right now. If you know someone who would benefit from listening to this podcast, send them a quick message with the episode attached. If you work in or know someone in a language school or a university language department, please suggest this podcast for both them and their students. If you can and you want to, support me on Patreon, because I have a Patreon now, and the link is in my bio! And finally, if you’re new around here or I haven’t met you yet, or come and talk to me! Leave a comment on today’s episode on a positit on Instagram, send me a DM, or even better, book a call as part of the 100 Conversations Project with me! The link to that is also in my Instagram bio at @teawithemily. I would love to hear from you.

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