S5E32: Still mode or go mode?
Full transcript:
Good morning 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 and tomorrow, while we’ve been talking a lot about the transition into autumn over the last week, I wanted to share a question from yesterday’s Cosy and Compassionate Productivity workshop and invite you to journal on it if you want to or otherwise just have it in the back of your mind and think it over as you go into this season. So, if you feel like journaling, grab a pen, some paper, and let’s get started.
And so the question I have for you today is
Are you in still mode or go mode this autumn?
So at the two extremes, still mode is like hibernation as far as you practicably can. It’s about gently rounding the year off and reflecting. It means that this autumn for you is a time to lean into a softer, cosier time where you chase much smaller goals or your work is mostly harvesting all the work you’ve done this year. You’re mostly watching and reading and listening to comforting content that feels healing rather than motivating, and you’re prioritising inner work and reflecting.
Go mode is the opposite. It’s seeing the end of the year as the final push to get things done or as the prologue for the 2024 story of your dreams… It’s about increasing your exercise and throwing the windows open and flooding the room with light to get your energy up as much as possible. It’s about finding the content that inspires you and motivates you and music that gets you moving. It’s establishing or re-establishing a productivity-based routine with big goals and to-do lists that you track, maybe embarking on a big or higher pressure project, and maybe increasing your accountability with journaling or accountability buddies or a studygram.
And there really isn’t a right answer here, by the way, and you don’t need to be at either extreme. But I have found it so helpful to listen to my body and what my natural tendency is as it gets darker and colder and it really helps to then bring my work and my expectations in line with that… not necessarily by doing more or less but by doing differently, just like we talked about last Friday in S5E30.
And once you’ve journaled on which one you’re mostly in, how are you going to tailor your work around that this season? And again, I know that life might not be particularly cooperative in this endeavour and there may well still be a lot of obligations and curveballs that are completely at odds with what your natural instincts are saying right now and a whole load of plates you have to keep spinning, but this is just tailoring what we can control, as far as we possibly can. Wherever possible, if you can accept the mode you’re just naturally in rather than fighting it, how can you make the most of this season? What books or content would be the most helpful right now? What tasks are the best fit and how could you go about them to make them an even better fit? What sorts of social or family gatherings do you want to have, what activities do you want to be doing together, and do you want to be seeing more people and attending more events or fewer? Effectively, how can you make your to-do list best fit the intensity that your natural battery can cope with right now?
And I have to ask, have you had a chance to look at my new website yet? If you haven’t, it’s at www.languageconfidenceproject.com, it’s in the shownotes, and you can also read all the transcripts for podcast episodes there too. And if you have had the chance to have a look, I would love to know what you think!
Tomorrow’s episode, is kind of a part two to this one, we are continuing with the theme of still mode and go mode, and how to deal with the issue of being very much in one, but wanting to be in the other. Have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you then.