S6E45: You are your own force field

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Friday and welcome to the final episode of this season of the Language Confidence Project. And as we go into the summer and the Language Confidence Project takes a break, I wanted to leave you with one final message of encouragement. And that is, you are your own shield. You are your own suit of armour. When it comes to going after your goals, you are so well equipped to protect yourself along the way. But sometimes, we forget that, and we need reminding.

You are built to be amazing at looking after you.

You know how to support yourself, when things are going well, when things are going badly, when it feels like nothing is happening at all. Because you know better than anyone what you most need to hear, what you need more of, what you need less of in your life right now. You know what you need to give to yourself to be and to feel okay.  

But in a world so full of noise, and so many opinions, and against a tide of distractions and obligations and ideas of what it means to be an adult, we lose our confidence that we know what we need. As we grow up, we begin to doubt ourselves, to feel almost embarrassed to even think about what we need. Because it seems self-indulgent, navel-gazing, frivolous.  

In misplaced feelings of obligations to others, we turn off our own forcefields, and then we wonder why bad stuff is getting in.

So language learners, as we go for the break, these are my hopes for you. 

You don’t ration looking after yourself for when you’re already depleted, but you include it as an intrinsic part of the daily process of learning your language. Health, rewards, self-talk. Because, as the old saying goes “all things are difficult before they become easy” and while it’s in the difficult phase, you know you need to be ready. You are the shield that comes up and stops your goal from overpowering you. You are the voice that talks you down when you find something difficult.

You talk to yourself like the best of the people you know, not like the worst of people. That you ramp up the volume of every inspiring, motivating thing that anyone has ever said to you, and that you keep creating and nurturing spaces where people encourage each other. That we manually turn down the volume of every criticism, every dismissive comment about our goals, because if there was ever any value in them, well, we’ve got it, we don’t need to hear them replayed for the thousandth time.

That we literally do act like that forcefield, and we surround ourselves with the content, with the people that show us why it’s worth keeping going, and that keeps driving us forward, and that we do whatever we can to protect ourselves from the rest.

I don’t know yet when the next season of the Language Confidence Project will be. I can confirm there will be one, because I have so many half-written episodes still to share, but my current estimate would be January 2025. Until then, though, there’s something new on the horizon, and I am very excited to share it with you. Lookn out for one more bonus episode later today! And of course, you can still catch me on YouTube every weekday for more language courage – that’s not going away over the summer. If you’re in the UK, episodes are released every day at 2pm, 3pm Central Europe, 9am Eastern Time.

Have a wonderful summer, language learners,  thank you so much for your continued support of the Language Confidence Project, and I’ll see you very soon.