S5E56: Find the border for who you want to be
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday 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 wanted to start off the week with a reminder that what you want, and the person you want to be, might not be as far off as you think.
So I know a lot of us around here are very ambitious, and we have internalised the idea that if we’re going to think about our goals, we need to think big. And yet the irony is, so many ambitious people find it so hard to get started or to keep going because their ambitions overpower them and give way to perfectionism, overthinking, or burnout. It’s not a coincidence. So in today’s episode I want to share with you a way to keep thinking big, while not letting that immobilise you.
Most of our ambitions follow one of two patterns:
I want to be the kind of person who…[writes every day/ speaks the language every day/ makes friends easily/ is renowned for…]
I want to be able to [have conversations about…/ publish/ gte my PHD in…]
And then when we try to imagine ourselves actually doing or being those things, one of two things tends to happen. Either we can’t imagine it at all, just like a haze, it seems impossible and a bit embarrassing that we’re even entertaining the notion, or we imagine ourselves in the most extreme version of it that we can, surrounded by hundreds of foreign language friends, world-leading in our academic field, the writer of a lifetime’s work of books, a mission-driven machine that gets up at 4am every morning, and it seems really daunting.
But here’s the interesting thing about all those “kinds of people” we could be, whether it’s a skill, a trait, or a routine.
All of those things, when we think about them carefully, they have a threshold.
They have a point where you’ve crossed the line into the territory of being that person. There is a point where you weren’t that person, and then, suddenly, you were.
What that border looks like, and where exactly it is, is going to be personal to you. So when you commit to being or wanting to grow into that person, the first thing you have to do is give it a really clear definition. And it’s amazing that with that extra clarity, the inner critic has less to say. Less impostor syndrome. Less building goals up into professional-or-nothing, all-or-nothing, top-marks-or-what’s-the-point. Because you’ve realised identities don’t have to be extreme. Skills are valuable long before you’ve mastered them. You can claim a trait long before you show it 100% of the time, in all instances, at every opportunity.
So where is the border for a person who writes every day? How much do they need to write every day? How many words, how much time? How much of their writing do they need to be happy with? How many days off can they have, for illness, for crises, for festivals and holidays, before they stop calling themselves a person who writes every day? And would it matter if they wrote every weekday but took weekends off?
And if you get stuck on all-or-nothing thinking, imagine you’re talking to a friend rather than to yourself. If a friend said, “I write every day, well, last week I had covid so I didn’t write for a few days, but you know, normally I do” would you be the person saying “well, clearly you don’t write every day then!”? Would you accuse them of being an impostor? Of claiming to be something they weren’t? Of course you wouldn’t. If they said they were a person who writes every day, and it turned out they write for twenty minutes a day, would you tell them how disappointed you were that they didn’t write for an hour? I very much doubt it.
So with this exercise, instead of blowing up your standards and creating the best writer-every-day that ever was, you’re looking for the minimum. You’re shrinking it down into the smallest, least scary, most achievable form of the writer-every-day.
If there’s an uncomfortable feeling bubbling up inside you that this is a quest for mediocrity or an erosion of ambition, I want to assure you right now that it’s not. Over the border, there is a vast territory of more writing, better writing, writing with more purpose, more focus, whatever it might be to you. It isn’t necessarily a life plan to cross the border and then set up your forever home right on that line. But the point is, once you’re over the line, you’re over the line, and even if you did decide you wanted to set up camp right next to the line forever, you’d still be in the realm you wanted to be in, a person who can truthfully say they are where they are.
And once you’ve crossed that threshold, it’s so much easier to get to those lofty places much farther over the border. Because you’re already part of the way there. You’\re already immersed. You’re already acclimatising. What’s hard is when you’re sitting over the other side, failing to imagine the landscape right at the other end, over the mountain ranges, over the forests, in a place that already feels so foreign and unknown.
So find the threshold. Work out the minimum point at which you have reached that level, and aim for that first.
And in some more news, as many of you know, last year I did a 100 Conversations project where I invited listeners of the podcast to book a 30 minute call with me, just to meet you, get to know you, and to find out how your language journey is going and what carving your own path means to you. And I would absolutely love to open it up again this year, both to meet new listeners and to hear how the wonderful people I met last year are getting on. Just as last year, these calls are not going to be recorded or used for marketing material, there won’t be any sales pitches, nothing like that, it’s just a chance for us to meet each other. So if you’d like to book a call, either to speak for the first time or to update me on last year, head to my Instagram bio on @teawithemily or my website www.languageconfidenceproject.com, both are in the shownotes, and I hope we chat soon!
Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.