S5E22: Are we aiming for perfection, connection, or creativity?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Tuesday 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 you go into your work for the day, I want to ask you a quick question.

What are you prioritising today? Play, or perfect?

Are you aiming for experiments, for creativity, for connection, for playing with your language and trying new things? Or are you aiming for safe, for familiar, or for perfect, in the sense of, as grammatically accurate as you can get?

Because the last thing we need, after painstakingly working on grammatically complex and accurate work for the last few hours, is your inner critic popping up and complaining that you’re not really expressing yourself in an original way right now. That you’re falling back on familiar constructions or relying on stories you’ve told before. That your personality has just got a bit lost in this passage and you’re just not coming across as entirely yourself or fully expressed the well-researched, nuanced opinion that you hold about something you really care about.

And the last thing we need when we’ve had a really personally meaningful conversation, engaged in some imaginative storytelling in our new language, or entered into a debate, is for those voices to come up and bemoan the mistakes we made. Because of course we did. Our focus switched from forming our sentences to having a using great ideas. And that’s okay.

So before you start today, be really clear about what your overarching priority is:

Is it accuracy?

Is it play?

Is it connection?

And then, tell your inner committee. You all need to be on the same page on this. I often talk about what I call the inner townspeople, the squabbling committee inside your head who try to steer you in all different and often wildly conflicting directions, and the episode dedicated to them, if you want to go back and explore the idea further, is s1e43 and it’s especially useful if you’re feeling pulled in different directions, dizzied by lots of different advice or possibilities in your language learning, or you’re stuck because every first step feels wrong so you keep coming back to the drawing board. Have you told the Committee inside your head, under no uncertain terms, that those are the parameters for your study today?

It's not to say it’s a complete either-or for precision and accuracy versus creativity, or that you have to choose one and ignore the other. But what I am saying is that there’s no space for perfectionism on both counts. And what I’m also saying is, choose your scoreboard. You can’t work on a project, focused entirely on precision and then score it for creativity and how well it captured you, after the event. And you can’t go into a conversation with connection and being yourself in mind, throw yourself in, and then do a full post-mortem on how your grammar slipped on the walk home.

Knowing what your focus is, and keeping it in mind throughout your task or your project can be so powerful in removing the negative and scattered inner grumbling. So go in today with a clear vision in mind of what you want this thing to look like, and then when you come away, if the doubts start to crowd in, tell yourself and the committee really firmly that you delivered what you set out to do. Because you did.

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