S5E40: Does this person/content make my goals feel closer or further away?
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, as we round off the week, I want to give you a huge permission slip to walk away from content that’s making you feel bad. Even if it’s educational. Even if on paper, it should be really useful.
And it could be anything. A productivity guru who is full of great ideas, but who also leaves you feeling lazy and behind. An expert or teacher whose videos should be useful, but leave you feeling bad and you don’t really know why. A whole genre of content, so things like, watching videos about other expats which just wake up your self-comparison goblin, or watching speed language learners sprint their way through yet another language while you’re thinking, but I’m still having a hard time with this one!
Because one thing that I’ve found, both for myself and for so many of us around here, is that when something isn’t working for us, we can have a tendency to turn it on ourselves. Is there something wrong with us? Are we jealous? What’s the matter with us?
And we keep watching and keep going back to it, especially if the algorithm keeps feeding it to us anyway, because we feel like it should be a good fit, we should learn a lot from it, other people certainly are, it should kick us into action, or because we’re hoping that if we keep seeing it, maybe we’ll grow into the sort of person that benefits from whatever work they do.
So today, I just wanted to offer one question that you can ask yourself when this kind of situation pops up. That takes away the whys and wherefores and lets you just let that stuff go if it’s not serving you. That just simplifies everything. And that question is:
Does this person/ content make my goal feel closer or further away?
Because it doesn’t matter if it’s useful. It doesn’t matter if there’s a learning opportunity in there somewhere, because there is so much content and so many potential learning opportunities out there. It doesn’t need to come from there. And if you really want, you can always store away that content for later, or just hide it for a while, and come back to it when you’ve got over the current hurdle you’re facing or you’re a bit further down the line. It doesn’t need to be a forever thing.
What matters is that you have the fewest things possible adding friction to the wheel. You have the fewest things possible contributing to the self-doubt and the fear and the uncertainty, and you collect as many things as you can that help you remove the obstacles, build up your confidence, and reassure you that this is possible for you.
Your biggest job right now is to look after you, and look after your own goals. So keep curating your content, keep training the algorithm, keep muting or hiding or scrolling away from the stuff that makes you feel bad about where you are in your own journey and keep actively seeking out the content that encourages you, that teaches you the stuff you want to know and that gets you closer to your current goals.
You can do this, language learners, you really can. So make sure your environment is telling you that too.
And just a quick heads up that if you’re not in the UK or Central European time zones, you will notice that new episodes of the Language Confidence Project podcast will appear an hour earlier from next week, because we are changing the clocks here! So, have a wonderful day, have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you at 7am GMT next Monday!