S6E1: How can we have a great week?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday and welcome back to season 6 of 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. So, before we start, I want to bring you up to date with everything that’s been going on with The Language Confidence Project in the break. First of all, the podcast is now on YouTube, with daily videos of encouragement to help you make language learning a more creative, compassionate and meaningful experience. Moving onto YouTube was a huge, huge deal for me, there were so many mental barriers and so much creative resistance that went into this, the being on video, the editing, and I am so proud to be able to tell you all that I’ve now uploaded more than 50 videos, and I won’t stop until every episode of the Language Confidence Project is represented on there. So please support me by subscribing, either by searching The Language Confidence Project or the link is in the shownotes, by liking my videos or by leaving comments. It makes such a huge difference in helping more people to find my work, and word of mouth is absolutely the best way to get more people to know that The Language Confidence Project exists!

So, onto today’s episode, I have just one question for you.

How can we have a great week?

And I’m thinking about this especially because I always feel an immense pressure when I’m starting a new season of my podcast, like episode one needs to be somehow bigger or better or set the scene for a great season and actually, I think that can get in the way. It adds pressure, it raises the stakes of what this tiny episode needs to do, but what it doesn’t add is any specifications at all. All it’s really telling is “better”. But there are no instructions there. No way for me to know what “better” is or whether I hit it.

And that means for me that at the beginning of any season, before I start writing anything, the first thing I need to do is go back to why The Language Confidence Project exists in the first place. I need to go back to all the problems in the world that the Language Confidence Project was born to address, the pressure, the comparisons, the overadvising, the all-or-nothing thinking and the immediate resurrection of dubious classroom practices that so many of us unwittingly facilitate when we start to teach ourselves. I go back to the why – why do I have a daily podcast? Why isn’t it weekly and an hour long? Well, because I decided that what I wanted the Language Confidence Project to do was to be a really regular companion for you that could walk with you every day through your language learning journey, because loneliness and isolation is just so common when we’re chasing big goals and having someone to check in with you, to be there and face the inner critic with you, is just so important. And because motivation is a cup that needs refilling every day. We use it up really fast, and I wanted the Language Confidence Project to be a tool in your toolkit so you could take a break from whatever you were doing, for just ten minutes, or make it your routine to listen before you start, listen to something that would encourage you, and then you could go straight back to what you were doing. You haven’t taken an hour out in a sort of motivation procrastination.

And Mondays are kind of like episode one. We all want to have a great week. We all, or a lot of us, want to kick off Monday with a bang. But what does that mean for you and your goals?

It’s not just about setting a to-do list and saying “once I’ve done that... I’ll feel great.”  Because so often that’s exactly what we do, and we either drag ourselves through our to-do list and it’s so hard because it just feels like work, or we tick everything off but at the end of the week, we still don’t feel great.

We need to remember how our to do list for today, for tomorrow, for every day this week fits into the really big picture of our goals. Because when we have big goals, so much for the daily stuff is small, is boring, is fiddly, it doesn’t feel like what we imagine a person doing great stuff should be doing. So much of what goes into the pursuit of big goals, aren’t highlight reel moments. So we need to get really clear on what we’re doing the little things for.

So how are you going to have a great week?

How does you to-do list for today fit into what you want to have done by the end of the week?

How does your to-do list for the week fit into the bigger picture? the “why” of your life?

And how can you bolster the importance of the little tasks in your head, not in a way that adds pressure or perfectionism or means you obsess over their tiny details, but that you see them not as drudgery, not as hamster on a wheel stuff, but as the tiny and mighty stepping stones they are?

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow!