S5E58: How to stop a bad morning from becoming a bad day
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.
So put your hand up right now if this is you:
When things go wrong in the morning, I spill my coffee, there’s loads of traffic, there are train strikes, I expect the whole day is going to be bad
If I find it really hard to get started on work in the morning, I assume the whole day is wasted, often before midday
If any of these apply to you, I would love to tell you a tip that I’ve learned for studying and for life things, which is, learn how to make time containers work for you in your learning.
Normally, when I talk about containers, I talk about them in praise of things like 7-day or 30-day challenges in language learning. Because that’s what containers are, it’s drawing a 7-day or 30-day or one-hour box around a thing you want to do, and saying, by the time we reach the time limit, the thing will be done and concluded. They’re great for being able to try things out, without committing to them for the rest of our lives, for that short time, they become a focus, with a clear goal and a clear end point, and once the time is over, we can choose whether carry them on or let them go without feeling like we’ve compromised our identity for example, a consistent person, a reliable person, as someone who finishes what they start. They’re perfect for experiments.
But today, I want to talk about containers in another way. Because there’s another thing they’re excellent for, and that is, stopping one setback from leaking into the whole day.
So, language learners, no matter what your externally imposed schedule looks like, break up your day. Into four, into six, into two-hour blocks, it doesn’t matter. Personally, mine is six: early morning, late morning, lunch break, early afternoon, late afternoon, evening. And what’s important is, that you see them as separate units of time. You draw lines between them, and you mentally create a tiny gap between them, so they’re not touching.
The more containers we put into our day, the more walls we build up between slices of time, so that whatever happens in one has less of a domino effect on all the others that come after it. It means that we have that extra line of defence that stops disappointment, frustration, perceived failure or even just inconvenience from one session contaminating the rest of our day. Having walls around our time means that one bad morning doesn’t mean one bad day. It means one bad Friday doesn’t mean one bad week. And it means one bad study session doesn’t mean they’ll all be bad.
And the thing with containers is, sometimes, it’s about our actual daily schedule. For some people, especially full-time students whose days might not have much imposed structure, it might be about creating a timetable of activities so that your day doesn’t all run into one long ocean of time that you can get lost in.
But actually, a lot of this doesn’t need to involve a change in your physical timetable at all. It’s not just for people with open and flexible days. It’s a mental shift that says no matter what your schedule is, the day isn’t a lost cause because things went wrong at 10am. Regardless of what else you’re doing, the time to brood over it stops at midday. That way, one bad morning, slow morning, frustrating morning doesn’t feel so much like it’ll inevitably make for one bad, slow or frustrating afternoon.
You have so much to look forward to, language learners. And the more new, frustrating or daunting things you’re doing right now, the more it’s worth fencing off your time. Because there is so much comfort in having a wall come up every few hours throughout the day that says, it doesn’t matter where you came from just now, when you go through this gate, happiness starts here. Success starts here. It makes it so much easier to leave the niggles and disappointments behind.
And as I mentioned yesterday, I am bringing back the 100 Conversations project that I started around this time last year, 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 invite you to join me and have a call, 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 how things have been going for you since we spoke last year, head to my Instagram bio on @teawithemily or my website www.languageconfidenceproject.com and I hope we chat soon!
I will see you tomorrow.