S5E11: Keep your stakes in perspective
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday 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, as we start our week, I just want to pop in with a quick reminder to keep the pressure at a comfortable level this week.
In lots of the stories we read and the movies we watch, the situations our favourite characters find themselves in have really serious repercussions. The consequences of them not achieving their goals are huge, maybe even life-or-death. If they don’t escape the serial killer, they die. If they don’t fight the monster, it’s the end of civilisation. If they don’t get this opportunity, they might lose their house. The external stakes are huge. And also the internal stakes: If they don’t get recognised for their talent, their whole life up until this point will be meaningless. They might lose their well-earned reputation or miss that one chance at true love.
And that’s the shadow that hangs over the movie: what if the main character fails? What if in this succession of obstacles, one of them actually trips them up, irredeemably? What if the main character does make a bad decision, with no going back? And these elements are partly there to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. We get so wrapped up with WHAT THE GOAL MEANS for this character and it’s always about safety or mortality or connection.
But we can also carry the ideas into our own lives. We load and load our projects with meaning. We weave ourselves stories about what they might mean for our safety, our connections, our future.
In a high speed-car chase, this is probably helpful. It’s also very helpful when it’s about getting the audience invested in someone else’s story, fictional or real. But is it helpful right now?
Imagine this. You want to be able to speak Spanish better because it’ll make it easier to communicate with your child’s teachers, and help you to make friends with other parents, and you only moved to Spain a year ago. That’s very motivating. So you start doing some gramma, or trying to make some headway on your most recent Spanish assignment. But then you get stuck. And then you get wound up. And then you start mounting the stakes … if you can’t do this, you won’t be able to talk to your children’s teacher at parents’ evenings. You won’t be able to help them any homework at all and they’ll fall behind at school. They won’t make any friends. You’ll be setting a bad example as a parent. And all of a sudden, every aspect of your child’s education and wellbeing, and your identity as an expat and a parent is at stake.
So my question today for you is, Is it helpful for you to be even more emotionally invested in the tasks ahead of you, or actually, does it make everything feel too heavy?
Because even storytellers and screenwriters need to do some tweaking to get that balance right, when fiction writers are writing these stories, they have to play with the internal and external stakes. They have to do a bit of trial and error to get the balance right…they want the audience to care, they want the audience to understand how the characters will see certain events and they want to make sure it resonates with the readers and get all that onto the paper or the screen in the right way. But you get to do that tweaking for your own life too.
You get to decide, when you start any task for the day, or even when you start thinking about doing a tsk fr the day, whether raising the stakes is going to make things run better or worse. Is bringing those stakes to sit at your desk with you going to motivate you, or is it going to just add pressure?
And if it’s the second one, let’s just turn the volume down on that meaning.
What are the real stakes here, today, right now, on this one thing I have to do?
What hangs in the balance here?
People say that big changes come from the little changes done over and over again and it is so much easier to show up and do those little things every day when they aren’t all loaded with pressure. You don’t have to make this heavy. Do what you can, as often as you can, and let the story unfold over time. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow!