S6E2: Beware the warm-up trap
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Tuesday, 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 is just a reminder not to let sneaky warm up tasks hijack your whole timetable. Because when we are doing something big or new or hard, they do that sometimes.
How many times have you needed to do a thing, and it’s big, or it’s complicated, or you’ve built it up in your head, and a voice pops up that says, hey, maybe we should actually research this a bit more? Or maybe what would relaly help right now is this YouTube video about someone else talking about the thing I need to do? Maybe what I need to do is journal this through so it’s clearer in my head? Make another to-do list so it’s fully creystallised on paper? And before you know it, all your allocated time for the thing has been spent on activities which kind of set the scene rather than getting the thing done.
When you’re struggling to work, trying to get into the zone, or feeling daunted by the thing, taking a step back into The Thing-adjacent activities can seem really logical. Because, after all, it’s all useful, right? It’s relevant, it’s exposing you to new ideas, and it might get you unstuck so you can, you know, do the actual thing. It’s not exactly procrastinating. You feel busy. You have engaged with your goal that whole time.
But it’s a hiding place.
It’s another way of walking around the swimming pool rather than jumping in.
And perhaps paradoxically, when you engage in all these activities to help your goal feel closer to you, or to bring yourself closer to it, it can actually make it feel further away. Because then, it’s easy to tell yourself, I’ve been working on this or towards this for x amount of days now, x amount of hours, but I have nothing. I’ve written nothing, I’ve recorded nothing, I haven’t got any closer and I still don’t feel like it. I still feel scared or not ready or foggy about the whole thing.
It's not that any of the activities
Watching language YouTubers
Research
Listening to podcasts
Journaling
Making to-do lists or plans
Going down semi-related rabbit holes
are bad, or a waste of time, or should be avoided. Not at all. It’s that while any one of those activities might be able to get you into the mindset where you can do the work, what you don’t want is a situation where one warm-up activity leads to another warm-up activitity and a day’s gone by and you’ve spent that whole time warming up.
We have to get to the point, and it’s always a judgement call, and it keep changing day to day, where we can recognise what’s genuine preparation, which is led by curiosity and problem solving and a need for information, and what’s overpreparedness being led primarily by fear or dread.
So what are you going to dive into today?
The thing you’re avoiding, you can do it. It’s not beyond you. And so much of the time, the thing feels so much bigger in our heads. Have a wonderful day, good luck, don’t forget to check out the YouTube, it’s in the shownotes, and I’ll see you tomorrow.