S4E28: Stop hanging back

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Wednesday 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.

And today’s episode is the hugest permission slip to stop hanging back, stop watching everyone else, and to go out and learn your language for you.

Because in the day and age of so much language learning content, it can be really easy to dive into youtube and podcasts and all these social media platforms looking for tips and tricks that will make our own journey easier, only to find that slowly, gradually, we get so involved watching everyone else and putting them on a pedestal, that we forget that this is our journey too. We stop rooting for us and start rooting for them. We stop investing in our language journey because we feel like theirs is somehow more credible, more real, more likely to succeed.

In the face of all these people who look impressive to us, we start hanging back.

 And we tell ourselves we’re still being productive because we spend so much time talking about language learning, listening to all these interviews and podcasts, watching other people their videos, their content, their progress videos but no. We’re letting ourselves get intimidated by these people. We’re pushing ourselves further and further out into the sidelines.

You have to stop standing in your own way.

Language learning doesn’t need to be something other people do. Those people might look like they’re on another level to you now but that’s probably because they’ve been doing it longer than you and they have more experience than you. Maybe they have skills you don’t, at the moment. Maybe they have opportunities that you don’t. In fact, not maybe, probably. Maybe they are just all round great people. But none of those things mean that you can’t get to where you want to be in your language.

And the moment everything changes is when you realise that you’ve been looking at these people like they’re better than you. That you’ve been looking at your goal as something that happens to other people, but not you. Because the thing is every time you think those thoughts, consciously or not, you invest in your dreams a little bit less or with a bit less fervour. You believe in your dreams a little bit less.

You have what it takes, language learners. Your journey will look different to theirs, you will have different things to bring to it and meet different obstacles along the way but you can make this work. This is just as possible for you as it is for them. So don’t lose sight of the fact that you can do this.

Have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you tomorrow!