S6E3: Call yourself back

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Wednesday, and welcome to The Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for those who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And just a reminder, The Language Confidence Project is now uploading daily videos to YouTube too to give you more colourful and face to face or as close as I can get messages of encouragement and pep. We have more than fifty videos up already and I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe, either by searching The Language Confidence Project on YouTube or the link is in the shownotes (www.youtube.com/@thelangconprojectpodcast), and share with any language learners you know. Getting onto YouTube was a battle and I would love to know that my efforts are reaching as many language learners as I can!

And today, I just want to share a really useful piece of advice that I read in the context of dealing with rumination, but actually, really applies to our language learning as well.

And this comes from Ethan Kross’s internal bestseller and book that I thoroughly recommend to anyone who wants to both tame but also appreciate their inner voices more, and it’s called Chatter: The Voice in our Head (And How To Harness it). 

And he shares so much wisdom in this book that I suspect there will also be more episodes made from it as the season continues, but one thing that really struck me was this.

When you’re spiralling, say your own name. And that doesn’t mean just full mental breakdown or falling into inner torment. It means anything, including the mundane and everyday. Doubts, anxieties, comparisons, getting distracted.

Call yourself back.

Call yourself home from any of the lands you don’t really want to be in.

It doesn’t need to be dramatic. Sometimes we just don’t want to be in the mental space we’re in, because it’s annoying, or making us angry, or it’s not really productive.

It’s not a crisis move. It’s an everyday move.

Don’t call yourself with anger. It’s not a verbal clip round the ear of even a tug on the lash of an overexcited dog. Bring yourself back.

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