S5E49: If you can’t get started, ask yourself these questions!

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Thursday 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, if you’re really struggling to get started, or work just feels like a real battle and you’re finding every reason under the sun to avoid it, I have a question for you.

Because so often, when we just can’t make ourselves work, our first thought is that we’re being lazy. Or maybe even, that we are lazy as people. But today, I want to ask you if there’s more to it than that.

Because firstly, I know so many of you around here personally. I’ve met you, I’ve had conversations with you, and I know you’re not lazy. But also, because laziness doesn’t feel this horrible. So many of our resistances are so often mislabelled as lazy, and it’s not true, and more importantly, it gets in the way of finding the real problem, which might well have quite a simple fix.  

And so today, I have a question, which we will then break down into four more questions.

And that question is, what do you actually need?

Because normally when I feel like I just can’t, and it’s been going on a while and nothing is working, there is one of four things that’s missing:

Do you need a change in environment?

Maybe because the environment is wrong, in terms of noise or disruption, or maybe just because you need to get out. Fresh air, fresh perspectives, new energy and new ideas. 

Do you need rest?

Because one thing is for sure, and that’s that not achieving your goals isn’t the same as actively resting. I know that the idea of the seven types of rest has got a lot of attention this year, so I don’t know if it’s worth doing a podcast episode specifically on this, but according to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, we as a society have long confused sleep and rest, and that’s the reason a lot of us are burning out. She argues that there are actually seven types of rest: physical, mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social, and spiritual, and all of them need to be incorporated into our lives regularly in order to truly restore ourselves.

Do you need direction?

Is the problem that you don’t know what you’re doing? Either that you don’t have a set plan for today, or you don’t believe in the plan, or you don’t believe in yourself to carry out the plan? Is what you need today a really clear vision of what you want to have achieved, and a breakdown of how to get there?  

Do you need hope?

There are so many times where you feel like you’re making so much progress but you’re not seeing the results and it’s so frustrating. Is that the thing that’s stopping you today? Is it that you need something really good to look forward to or to set yourself an incentive that you can’t possibly refuse for when you finish, so that it feels like something really great is coming even if your actual, direct results from today’s efforts are months or years away?

So, before you get angry at yourself for being lazy, ask yourself if the desire to procrastinate is actually one of these. Find what your brain is really asking for. It might make all the difference.

You can do this, language learners. One step at a time.

I’ll see you tomorrow.