S5E42: How to develop a thicker skin (really)

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, and all the rest of this week, I wanted to send you all a message to say that if you’re getting feedback that’s getting you down, it’s okay. You’re not the only one, your language learning isn’t broken, and it’s all still going to be okay.

We hear it so often, that message that to succeed, whether it’s in business, in your career, in creative pursuits when you start to share them with the world, or in learning something big, like a language, you need to learn to develop a thick skin.

And it’s one of those teachings where, yet again, it raises a lot more questions than answers… what does it even mean? 

And that vagueness really does play out in real life. How many people do we first meet who we think are so confident, criticism just seems to bounce off them, until we learn later that actually, this stuff hits them hard? They just know how to act like it doesn’t.

And that’s because, who tells us to develop one?

Parents

Teachers

Bosses/ managers

Assigned mentors at work

And what so many of us really hear and really internalise when they say that is “here’s how to behave in the face of setbacks, criticism, mean behaviour, rudeness.” Don’t cry, don’t sulk, don’t get defensive, don’t retaliate, don’t quit.

But what we don’t hear and we don’t internalise is, here’s how to think in the face of those things.

And that’s what a thick skin really is.

Honestly, truly developing a thick skin isn’t about behaviour management.

It doesn’t mean stop caring so none of this stuff hits you

It doesn’t mean manually organising your face into a calm or even grateful arrangement in the face of an insult

It doesn’t mean saying the right things in public then beating yourself up about it in private later

Developing a thick skin isn’t meant to be a lesson in self-governing to the max and tightening your hold on all your body language and facial expressions. Having a thick skin really isn’t about putting it on you to manage how you look or how you act. Those things should be a natural consequence of coming into these conversations from a place that already feels strong. It’s not to say that learning how to respond or act isn’t helpful, and it’s true that tricks and scripts for this can be really helpful, but that that’s not the end of the story. If we only focus on displaying the right façade, on learning how to act like we have one, we can go decades or our whole lives never actually developing the mental strength that would make this journey so much easier and nicer for us. We’d look confident, we’d look professional or whatever we feel we need to be, but this stuff would still hurt us when it could be helping us.

Developing a thick skin means having a whole array of tools in your toolkit that allow you to separate out what’s subjective and what’s objective, what’s useful and what’s not, and how to let go of the stuff that really isn’t helpful or constructive. It means separating your work from your self enough that mistakes in your work don’t feel like huge flaws as a person. And so, for the rest of this week, I’m going to be looking at a few of those tools and helping you to feel stronger when you do go into conversations with native speakers or teachers, and I can’t wait to see you there because it’s going to be so so important.

You are doing an amazing job, you’re doing something hard, and I just want to remind you that everything you get feedback on, even if it’s more negative than you wanted it to be, is a sign that you’ve showed up for yourself and your goal, that you’re letting yourself make mistakes, that you aren’t just sticking with what you know, and that you’re growing, and all of that is something to be so proud of.

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you back here to carry on this conversation tomorrow.