S6E41: Giving 100% is about saying ‘no’ too

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the LCP, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. This week is the final week of the season of the Language Confidence Project podcast, but I’ll still be on YouTube every single weekday, and I do also have a surprise for you on Friday that I am so excited to share with you!

And today, is a quick reminder that a lot of what goes into saying ‘yes’, is actually saying ‘no’.

Everyone’s talking about giving 100%.

But that means we have to know, and to be sure, what we’re giving 100% to.

And the world is full of so many fascinating, joyful and worthwhile pursuits. There are so many things we could possibly commit to learning, to doing, to creating. Snd there are so many causes that need our attention, and so many lifestyle choices we could make that could revolutionise our own health and wellbeing in some way. The choice is dizzying.

But just like a world leading chess player can’t also dedicate their whole day to bodybuilding and activism and writing their memoir, you can’t give 100% to everything either. Cultivating expertise is a form of tunnelling, and you simply can’t tunnel in all directions at once. Your time, your resources, your curiosity, your headspace, is all limited. But we live in a world that is always suggesting new ways to be better, do better, live better – everything from being a rounded person with rounded interests, to starting a side hustle, to cooking everything from scratch, to all the plethora of entertainment that’s available to us every day and we’re being told everyone is watching it. It’s incompatible with the desire to go all in.

And so, you have to make deliberate choices and then defend them with your certainty. It’s not even just about what you’re going to do with your time. It’s about what you’re not going to feel guilty about. My time, my energy, my money goes to these places. So I’m not going to feel bad that I don’t do X, that I am not currently in a position to support Y. It’s a choice I’m making, because I can’t be everything to everyone.

And it’s not even just about choosing one discipline and sticking to it. It’s also about how we approach the tasks for the day in front of us within that discipline. 

In both cases, for everything we decide we’re going to dedicate our all to, we have to let something else slide.

You cannot do every single thing on your list as though it were the only thing in your day.

It’s so obvious when we hear it, but then, when we try to put that into practice, why do we still have such high expectations of ourselves, for everything? 

So if you want your work to be really time efficient today, give yourself express permission for it to be a bit less neat than yesterday. If your focus is on creativity and expressing bright new ideas, give yourself leeway on grammatical accuracy. Choose one thing to give your best to, and then let yourself let go of the other things! 

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