S5E2: What got you here won’t get you there

Full transcript:

Good morning and welcome to the second episode of season 5 of the Language Confidence Project, the daily podcast for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway!

And before we start, if you missed it yesterday, there is a lot changing around here! Tea With Me is officially rebranding as The Language Confidence Project, and my web designer and I are putting the final touches on our brand new and shiny new website!  I cannot wait to show it to you all 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 and free taster of my Be Your Own Best Teacher group programme 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.

As I said, 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, there’s no pressure at all to join the full programme afterwards, it’s just a way for you to see what it’s all about and for me to thank you for all your support over the past year. 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 widely on Facebook or Instagram, this is just for the people who have supported me and the project 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!

So to celebrate the launch of the Be our Own Best teacher sprint, all this week on the podcast, we’re going to be reflecting on how our schoolday experiences of language learning are affecting our present day routines and practices, so that we can intentionally hold onto  what’s still useful to us now, and leave all the rest behind. 

And today, I just want to start with a quote from someone whose work is hugely influential in my own life, and that’s Dr Benjamin Hardy, organizational psychologist, youtuber, co-author of 10x is Easier Than 2X.

 And one of his almost mantras, which I really wanted to share with you today, is “what got you here won’t get you there”… what got you to this point, even if it was the best and most efficient thing you could have done, if you repeat it forever, might not get you to where you want to be in the future.

What worked for you at school might not be the key to what you’re trying to do right now.

 Because then, you were operating within the school system,

as a child,

in a classroom,

working to an exam board’s specifications,

As an adult operating under completely different constraints and within completely different circumstances, you might need to be taking completely different approaches to what you’re used to in order to see the same results.

Even if you’ve had previous experiences learning your language as an adult, the same is true.

When your circumstances change

When your own physical or mental wellbeing changes

When your goals change

When your language level changes

When your schedule changes

Even when the season changes

what worked for you before might not get you the results you want right now.

And so learning anything is this constant process of evaluating what’s working right now, both in the sense of getting you the results you want and feeling manageable in the life you’re currently in, and adapting accordingly.

And those adaptations might be about anything. It might be your routine. It might be the way you learn vocabulary or the way you give yourself scores and grades. It might be that trying to set yourself up a little classroom in the corner of your living room isn’t what you need, and you’d be better off working away from a desk.

So over this week and next week, we’re going to be looking at those things in more detail, but I just want to ask you to start thinking about this. Is there anything in your language learning life right now that might be getting a bit stale? Is there anything that just doesn’t feel right any more? Is there anything that you’re doing because you feel like you should, but you can’t really remember why? Is there anything you’re doing, just because you’ve started so you should finish? Or because this is the way you’ve always done it?

What got you here won’t always get you there, language learners. So don’t be afraid to leave things behind and pick up new things as you go.

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