S5E43: Two things to remember in the face of negative comments

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Wednesday 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, we are carrying on the conversation that we started yesterday about a things we can do to genuinely be more resilient in the face of setbacks or negative feedback. And yesterday, we looked at the difference between looking to others like we have a thick skin and actually developing one.

So, in this episode, we’re going to start to look at the self-talk that can help to fortify us when we get feedback that makes us bristle, with two things that you can say to yourself or stick on your wall to make things a bit easier.   

So you’ve psyched yourself up to talk to a native speaker in your new language. Maybe you do it a lot, maybe you don’t, but the person comes back with some comment or observation that just takes the wind out of your sails a bit. Maybe it was pleasantly delivered, and maybe they were really impatient, or maybe somewhere in between, but you, right now, are at risk of leaving that interaction feeling pretty dejected.

In those moments, here are two things to remember:

Just because someone said it, doesn’t mean it’s true

And by this, I mean the subjective stuff. Your accent’s annoying. Your mistakes are annoying. You talk too slowly. Too fast.

The truth is, lots of people find lots of things annoying. And lots of those people, if asked on a different day or at a different time or if they’d had their coffee or not been running late, they’d have found it less annoying.

This person does not represent the entire country or every speaker of your new language, I promise you. And it’s entirely possible that what they’re saying is completely unhelpful and that you absolutely can just ignore it. It’s not your job as a language learner to cater to everyone’s preferences, and some of these things really are just preferences.

So your first question, when you’re faced with any feedback, is simply “is this a fact, or is this an opinion? And if it’s an opinion, is it one I need to or want to listen to?”

Just because it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s abnormal

Okay, you’re making mistakes with tense conjugations or genders or agreements. Of course you are. So is every other learner on the planet. Mistakes aren’t weird, they aren’t a sign that you’re weird, and they are a really normal part of the language learning process. So don’t immediately let mistakes send you into fix-it mode because especially when you’re talking, common slip-of-the-tongue grammar mistakes aren’t something that you can study your way out of, they’re something you practise your way out of. And actually even when you’re writing, it’s often more effective in terms of exam accuracy that you have a great editing technique, of systematically checking, I don’t know, the end of every verb and the agreement of every adjective with its corresponding noun, than it is to hope to get everything flowing out of the pen correct.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it, as soon as people make normal parts of a process feel shameful, or feel unacceptable, whether they mean to or we just take it that way, we move away from working on them in a calm, problem-solving way and into emotion, into blaming ourselves or beating ourselves up about that thing. The mistake or whatever it is stops being a neutral data point that could be really useful to us, and starts being a point of friction and a sign of us not being good enough that can derail our journey. And the only way to get round that is to keep reminding ourselves in all the ways we can that these issues are normal, they are part of the process that almost everyone goes through, and they do have solutions.

You really are doing okay. You’re doing all the normal things that make up all the parts of a normal language process, and I know it’s frustrating, and I know it’s so easy just be so desperate to skip all these stages. But every time you get feedback, every time you make mistakes, it’s a sign that you are still showing up, you’re still trying, you’re still coming out of your comfort zone and all of those are things worth celebrating. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.