S5E62: This is not where you’ve “ended up”
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Tuesday 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. This is the final week of season five, ending this Friday, and Season 6 will begin on Monday 29th April. I’m taking a slightly longer break than normal because I am working incredibly hard behind the scenes on a book and a YouTube channel to spread as much language courage as possible, so stay tuned this week for updates on where else you can find all the Language Confidence Project pep you need over the podcast break!
And today’s episode is a reminder that I think we so often need, and that is, where you are now is not where you’re going to be forever.
So often, we tell ourselves these stories about how we’ve ended up. And in the language world, that might look like “I did everything right, I poured all my energy into learning the grammar, learning the vocabulary, and I just ended up burnt out and hating all of it and resenting the whole process”. It might also look like “I put myself out there, I pushed myself to have that conversation and I just ended up making a fool of myself”, “I ended up leaving feeling so embarrassed”, or “I just ended up really frustrating someone.”
And the problem with all those narratives is that they assume that where you are now is the final chapter. That what you’re going through right now is the final judgement on all your actions, the denouement from which all the readers of the story of your life are going to derive a moral message.
But that is not true.
This is not how you’ve ended up. This is not you getting your comeuppance, and this is not the cautionary tale that you think it is. The reality of any big project, whether that’s learning a language, starting a business, writing that novel, is that there may well be phases where we do feel frustrated, embarrassed, or lost, we fall out of love with our work, we wonder if it’s ever going to come to anything. There will be times of huge acceleration, times where it feels like everything is stalling, and in-between times where the whole world just feels like a huge question mark. There will be quick successes and slow ones, quick failures, and things that just fizzle out. All of that is perfectly normal.
But none of it is where you’ve ended up. None of it is the overarching narrative to your life story, and none of it is an omen for your future. All of this is still the middle of your journey. You have so much progress, so many breakthroughs, so many moments of inspiration to look forward to. This will happen for you. You just have to keep going, keep chipping away at it one day at a time, and make sure that you stay kind to yourself along the way.
And a super quick reminder that if you listen to the podcast and think “I’d love to say hi to Emily and tell her all about my language journey”, then the time is now! I enjoyed the 100 Conversations project so much last year that I decided to bring it back, and the idea is that I am inviting 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 for you to be a part of this, whether you’re a new listener and or one of the wonderful people I met last year. Just as before, these calls are not going to be recorded or used for content, 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!