S5E20: If you struggle to forgive your mistakes

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Friday 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 a super quick reminder that you’re going to make mistakes. 

Of course you are. It’s normal.

But none of those mistakes mean you have to be unkind to yourself. Even the most basic ones, even the ones you thought you’d eliminated last year, or even the ones that got a strong reaction from your teacher or that neighbour you were talking to, none of them, are a reason to be mean to yourself.

None of them deserve punishment. None of them deserve shame.

I know you want to get everything right. I know you want to be able to reassure yourself, week in, week out, that you’re making really clear progress. And I also know that you really want to be able to tell yourself that when you’ve learned a thing, when you’ve learned the right way to say something, you’ll never make that mistake again, but it’s just not the case. When you write and especially when you’re speaking, you’re doing so many things at the same time, you’re processing sometimes really complex ideas, you’re figuring out what the other person said along with all the other body language you’re decoding, you’re figuring out what you want to say in response, and you’re putting all that together in a matter of seconds! Of course stubborn mistakes get through. Of course your brain, in that moment of panic, overlays regular patterns on top of irregular verbs, or muddles tenses up, or combines similar sounding words to create some weird and cringey mashup. It’s all normal and it’s all part of the process.

You are learning something difficult, and you need to give yourself the space to practise without judging yourself and your mistakes. Each error is not a verdict on your whole language level, nor a yardstick for how hard you’ve worked. Most of the time, they don’t mean as much very much at all.  

You’re human. You’re doing okay. So go into the weekend proud of what you’ve achieved this week. Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you on Monday.