S6E42: Act before the doubts derail you
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 six of the podcast, but I do want to tell you that I'll still be uploading videos every weekday to YouTube during the break, so make sure if you need some more language courage that you find me there. The link is in the show notes. And today I just wanted to come in and remind you that the longer you keep ideas in your head, the more vulnerable they are to being attacked by doubt.
We all know that feeling when we first get that flash of inspiration. It’s magical. This bright new, shiny idea, it fills us with rocket fuel. We have the idea, but we also all this confidence in the idea. This idea is great!
And we all know what happens when we decide that now isn’t a good time. When we tell ourselves, let’s return to the idea tomorrow, or after we’ve finished the things on our current to do list. Maybe you jot it down somewhere, maybe you keep it in your head and hope it stays there, and you hope you can hold on to the glowy feeling that surrounds it.
And we cannot ever hold onto that glowy feeling that surrounds it.
Over time, though, the idea diminishes.
Either our faith in the idea itself, or the faith that we can do it justice.
And if we’re not careful, the light goes out so much that we discard that great idea completely. It just goes cold.
But we knew it was good.
So here’s a big question for you today.
How can we keep our ideas alive for as long as it takes to see them through?
The answer in the speed it takes us to go from having the idea to doing doing something about it. To be the person that can bring our ideas into reality, into the world, the key is normally to shorten the time between having the idea, and making the idea happen.
And that doesn’t mean completing a masterpiece in a day. It doesn’t mean diving into things you have no idea about and then getting frustrated when you don’t have any of the requisite skills yet. There’s no need to charge in, go all in, and fugure everything out when I get there.
But it’s so important to take the first steps quickly. Maybe that means writing the idea down in all the detail that you can, so that it feels more 3D than just the initial flash of inspiration. Could be sketching the outline. Could be downloading the requisite software and starting the project, naming the file, as soon as you possibly can.
Just do it before the what ifs get there first.
And you know, I'm a really cautious, risk averse person. And as some of you know, it took me a year between having the idea for the Language Confidence Project podcast and having the first episode out. But the reason that it didn't go cold and the doubts didn't win was that even though it took so much time to get it off the ground, I was working on it, even in a tiny quantity, every single day. I was constantly drafting more episodes, coming up with more episode titles, listening to podcasts or reading or researching things that I thought would be useful for the podcast. So, even when I was struggling with the tech, with the editing, with all the things that were making some parts of it slow, other parts of it were constantly growing and I could still feel the idea. It felt possible and I knew that at some point it would come to fruition. There was not a single moment in that year where I thought, actually, maybe I should just leave this behind, or maybe I should find something else. I had many moments of frustration, of doubt, of worry, of all these things, but none of them were the idea going cold. It worked.
So the next time you have a great idea, I’d love to invite you to ask yourself, how can you implement it really fast, and really simply, before all the doubts start crowding in and scaring you off it?
Your ideas are worth it, language learners. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you back here tomorrow.