S5E48: Name your struggles
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, I want to share the single most crucial piece of advice that I have ever discovered in my journey, both to rebuild my life, to learn literally anything, and to just feel like you’re moving as a person.
And that is: Learn how to name your struggles.
Learn how to really put a magnifying glass to your struggles and then find the words that communicate them to others: to stretch out hard, or frustrated, or stressful into its full spectrum, so that you know not that just something isn’t working, but you can pick it apart and figure out exactly what’s not falling into place. Listen to and read about other people’s difficulties in language learning, and I don’t mean here immerse yourself in the complaining and “why I’m giving up” videos, but I mean where people address the technical and the fiddly stuff related to that one particular language. The motivation issues and the making of to-do lists that people immediately lose, ignore, or actively rebel against. The pressure. The perfectionism in all its forms. Learn what people’s foibles are as they go on their journeys, and learn the stories behind them, wherever you can.
The more you know about other people’s struggles, tendencies, behaviours and thought patterns, the more you recognise your own. Because if there’s one thing I can say about what makes productivity or learning hard, it’s that one symptom can have so many different causes. Are you not working right now because you’re burnt out? Because deep down, you feel like you’re doing completely the wrong things? Because you’re terrified of making a mistake and ruining the glorious, sparkly image that you have in your head? Because you’re running on four hours of sleep? Because you keep building the image of the task up and up and up in your head until it feels like a life’s work?
But it’s more than just about diagnostics. The more you know about what other people are doing and thinking and struggling with in their language journey, the more it normalises it. The more it takes the self-judgment away as you realise that actually, we’re all battling an inner critic, an impatience, a desire to sit on the sofa and scroll through our phones. We’re all scared to put ourselves out there.
Hearing people voice what keeps them going and what brings them to a halt, offhand comment by offhand comment, meme by meme, we build up a much clearer picture of the complexities of what it is to learn a big thing and go after a big dream. Of the catalogue of frustrating, laughable and eye rolling realities of what it looks like to show up every day. Day after day, we feel a tiny bit less lost. A tiny bit less alone. And there is nothing more important than that on our journey.
And before I go, word of mouth is the absolute most powerful way to show your support to a podcast, and so I would love to ask that if you enjoy my work, please share it with someone else you know. Send them episodes that make you think of them, recommend me to language teachers or language students, and help me to grow so that more I can support more language learners. And just in case you haven’t heard, you can now follow the Language Confidence Project on Tiktok to get even shorter, even snappier daily doses of courage. Follow me there at @languageconfidence.
Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.