S4E26: What decisions are you *not* making?

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, I have a really important question for you. It’s quite a big question and it’s quite a heavy question, so prepare yourselves, but when I realised I hadn’t been asking it, it brought me so much clarity, and I really want to share that with you too.

And the question is this.

What are you not making decisions about? What are you hoping will take care of itself?

So many of us hyperfocus on one part of our language learning, and we forget that if we put all our resources into one thing, it means that we’re leaving all the other aspects of our language learning on autopilot and just kind of hoping that the impacts of the things we’re focusing on with trickle down and take care of everything else.

And what that might look like is a person who is so, so intentional about academically studying their language. They are so diligent with their grammar exercises. They’ve got a timetable, they have a syllabus that they’ve created for themselves because all the ones they found in textbooks or online weren’t aligned with their goals, they do all this self-care and they’ve made all these sensible decisions about their office setup and they realise one day when they meet a native speaker that they are just no further ahead in their conversation skills than they felt like they were a few months ago and they’re like “I just don’t get it. I have spent so much time learning, studying, I did everything I said I was going to do, I showed up, I was consistent, how much more do I need to do to start seeing improvement???”

But that’s the thing, they don’t need to do more. They need to do different. They need to realise that this whole time, while they were making all these active decisions about their formal language training, speaking was completely outside of their sphere of decision making at all. It just wasn’t even in their mind to look for people to talk to and to train the conversations that they wanted to have with real people. They were focusing on all this other stuff. 

And so what I want to ask you today is, if there’s something that feels like it’s lacking in your language learning, if there’s a space where you feel really stuck or like things are not moving at the rate they should be, I want to ask you, what decisions have you actively made about that thing recently?

So to give you some more examples, if the place where you feel stuck is that you keep making the same grammar mistakes over and over again, what deliberate decisions have you made recently to target those particular grammar points? Because if just reading over the paragraph about it in the textbook didn’t really help the next time to sat down to write or you tried to speak to someone, what else could you do? Could you make it your mission over the next few weeks to use this certain grammar point in everything you write or at least once in every conversation you have? Can you put it on a postit note in every room of your house? It doesn’t need to be big actions or dramatic pivots. It can be as tiny a correcting step as a postit note.

Or if the problem is that you just feel really unfocused and stuck in a rut with you language learning at the moment, what active decisions have you made about your routine recently? Have you looked really carefully at what’s working and what isn’t? Are there any decisions you can make about your timings, or your learning environment, or seen if there are any distractions you can eliminate or fears you can work on to get yourself unstuck?

The thing is, there are just so many plates to spin in learning something as big as a language. You can’t concentrate on everything all the time. But when we start to notice those signs, big or small, that we aren’t quite on the pathway we want to be on, that’s when it’s time to start re-evaluating where we’re putting our energy. Deciding that certain things don’t matter right now and putting them on the back-burner is a 100% necessary part of the process. But what matters is that you deliberately made that choice and that you’re okay with it. You’re not going to come back and use those things that you’ve decided to let rest for a while as a yardstick for how well you’re doing.

So as you go into this week, look out for the areas that you’ve put on autopilot, and just check that you definitely want to keep them there. The answer might be yes, and that’s fine, and that’s good. But knowing you’ve done it on purpose will help you feel like you’re in control of this process, and that you understand where your progress is coming from. Because this is your journey, You are in control of it. And you’re doing a great job.

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