S5E1: Why you have to be your own best teacher

Full transcript:

Good morning and welcome to the first episode of season 5 of the LCP, the daily podcast for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway! I have so much news, it’s actually ridiculous, and I am so excited to tell you what’s been happening behind the scenes over the last three months. Go and get a pen and write it down, okay, cos I don’t want you to forget and I don’t want you to miss this!

Okay, first big news is, Tea With Me is officially rebranding as The Language Confidence Project, and as of next week, it will have a shiny new website! We have been working on this website for months, it looks so colourful, so us and I can’t wait to unveil it next Monday! This is a huge huge step for the Language Confidence Project, and to celebrate, I am holding the biggest launch for all of you! I would love to invite you to a two week Welcome-to-September celebration to kick off the academic year (even if you're not in formal study any more!) to help you start the Autumn/Fall in a really compassionate way that suits your personality, your circumstances, and what you’re actually trying to do with your language.

The theme is "Be Your Own Best Teacher", and we'll be mixing workshops, journaling, coworking and group accountability calls to help us detangle our present-day language learning from our schooldays, sift through our experiences, and make sure we’re bringing all the good stuff along, and leaving the less useful stuff behind. It starts next Monday, that is Monday 11th September, it’s going to be completely free, and it’s only open to listeners of the podcast, members of the LCP community, and people that you decide to invite because you think they’ll love it too. I’m not advertising this on Facebook or Instagram, this is just for the people who have supported me and their likeminded language learning friends, so please spread the word to all the other creative, mission-driven linguists out there who want to make this process as meaningful and fulfilling as possible.

More details will be coming all this week on the podcast, so listen out, and if you’re interested, send me an email at emily@languageconfidenceproject.com or send me at DM on Instagram at @teawithemily, both of those are in the shownotes!

And in honour of the Be Your Own Best Teacher kickoff, for the next two weeks, we’re going to be looking at how our past experiences of learning a language and the messages we internalise about what learning and studying should look like can throw us off when we’re trying to carve our own path as adults.

And this whole week, I want to open this discussion by telling you why this is so so important to me. Why does it matter? In a world of you know… actual teachers, why do I need to be my own best teacher?

 Even if you’re enrolled in a course or studying this language at university, you’re not with your teacher all the time. When you go home to do your assignments or to the library to memorise all your vocabulary for the week, your teacher isn’t there.

But you’re with yourself all the time.

So even if you have the nicest, most encouraging, most motivating teacher you could possibly find, if you’re only in class for a few hours a week, what happens in your mind the rest of the time will make all the difference to your relationship to your language and how to learn it.

If your teacher makes you feel good about yourself for an hour a day and you spend the other 17 waking hours telling yourself you’re stupid and this is impossible, it’s not going to work.

If you leave your lessons feeling overinspired, ready to do ALL THE THINGS and try everything, but then you can’t make yourself start anything because the inner critic gets loud before you’ve even sat down in your seat? It’s not going to work.

If it all feels fine in a classroom, but as soon as you leave, it feels impossible to get anything done? It’s just not going to happen.

You have to learn how to coach yourself through your language learning because you can leave classes and you can switch courses and you can find new tutors but you can’t walk away from you.

Learning is not always a straightforward or predictable process. You have to be ready for that. You have to be able to navigate feeling confused or lost or things just not going to plan. You have to be able to trust that you’ll speak to yourself fairly, even when you’re really frustrated with yourself.

Language learners, you have to be your number one most dedicated coach, and your absolute biggest cheerleader in your language learning. But becoming that for yourself is a process, and I don’t think any of us do it naturally right from the start, especially when people around us couldn’t model it for us.

So I have a little challenge for you. Make it your mission to support yourself just 1% more today, language learners. Commit to bringing one phrase of encouragement in or banishing one harsh, critical or punishing phrase from your lexicon for yourself. Maybe both. And just see what a difference it makes.

Have a wonderful day, I’m so glad to be back, and I’ll see you tomorrow.