S4E38: Your goal doesn’t have to be “realistic”
Full transcript:
Good morning and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the only daily podcast to cheer you on in your language learning and offer tips, tricks and encouragement for making this journey your own. And today, I just want to pop in with a reminder that learning a language is absolutely a realistic goal, for the vast majority of people, far more than would think it’s possible for them, even if you cam’t see how it’s possible yet.
Because so many people that I’ve met treat being truly conversational in their language, fluent, upper intermediate, advanced or whatever they dream of in their language as a kind of pipe dream. They put it in that same box as winning the lottery, running in the Olympics or becoming a millionaire, the sort of thing that happens to one person in millions, and it almost seems embarrassing for them to admit that that’s what they want. They sheepishly say they want to get fluent and then quickly add that as long as they can order a coffee or a beer on holiday next year they’ll be quite happy really.
And if your goals are genuinely to be able to order a coffee or a beer on holiday next year, then that’s fine, that works, it aligns with what you want.
Because here’s the thing. When we tell ourselves we’re being realistic, that can quite often be a euphemism or a justification for playing small. For diminishing our goals purely out of fear that unless we make them smaller, we might not be able to reach them. In so many ways, realistic goals are being set or at least cowritten by our inner critic.
They’re based on us looking at what we know or what we can do right now, and then trying to extrapolate across what our future selves might be capable of in a month, a year, ten years down the line. They’re based on our current skill set, our current comfort zone and routines, and they ignore the fact that we’re going to be really different people at different points of our journey. And Daniel Gilbert did a fantastic seven minute TED talk on this called the Psychology of Your Future Self, where he talks about the phenomenon of the end of history illusion. When we look back, we can see that we’ve changed so much throughout time up until this point, in everything, our worldview, our preferences, our skillsets, our circumstances, but then because we can’t predict, we struggle even to just imagine any more changes, we assume that all our future goals are going to have to be based on what we have at our disposal right now. We vastly underestimate how much we and our lives are going to change from the present moment into the future. And he sums this up by saying "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished."
Your language learning journey is not all going to be predicated on you making do with what you have now. There is so much in front of you that you can’t forecast yet, but that will make certain decisions easier. There are so many discoveries that lie in front of you that will make your learning easier and quicker, and you’ll find techniques and routines that suit you better than what you’re doing now. Because so much of learning a language is about learning how to learn, how to think, what questions to ask, and Future You will be so much further down the line in those things.
So if there’s one takeaway from this episode, language learners, it’s that It’s okay to want to learn a language and get really good at it, and it’s also okay to say all those things even if you don’t have the slightest idea how to get there yet. Whatever you do, don’t make your end goal smaller just because you can’t imagine the path yet… you really don’t need to. All you need to be able to do right now is set your next short term goal, your one next step, and if you can see further than that, that’s a bonus. Just keep going one step at a time, keep focusing on your goals, and don’t be afraid to let your end goals be big.
And just a reminder, The LCP Monday co-studying and co-creating space for Patreon supporters is opening the first Monday of July! Having people around you while you work is a fantastic way to dive into the stuff that’s new or daunting, or maybe that you want a bit more accountability for, to ringfence dedicated time for your studies and projects every week where you know you can’t get distracted with other things, and I love the feeling of community it brings, and I’m so looking forward to it.So if you would like to join me and other members of the Language Confidence Project every Monday on Zoom, for three hours in the morning New York time, afternoon UK or Central European time, check out my Patreon and look for Out of the Fog. I hope to see you there!