True Friends
"Just wait"
Welcome, aspiring polyglot! Everyone has at least one of these people in their lives and it may not be for your goal of bilingualism either. The often seemingly innocuous comments like “just wait until x” or “how’s your little language project” are not things that only few experience. Most of us have heard these masked discouragements in our lives.
Operating above your level
During my classes the first thing everyone does is pick a book and translate a song. The song is always a full length song with no vocabulary or grammar restrictions. As for the book, people have chosen anything from Don Quixote to The Lord of the Rings to work through during their course. People rarely, if ever, are ready for such a jump when starting from zero.
Due to that, when someone in their life comes along and affirms that hesitation, what the new person is actually doing is sewing doubt. Intent, in this matter, is entirely irrelevant. Whether they intend to demoralize or not, the result is demoralization. So, whenever you hear anyone say, “are you sure you should be doing that?” just smile and nod then move on with your life. They will, too.
The vast majority of the people who you interact with on a day to day basis do not actively want you to fail. While they may not necessarily want you to succeed, the truth is that most people have too much going on in their lives to care what you do with yours. Unless, of course, they have read the things or tried the things you are reading and trying.
In all likelihood, if you are going to hear something it is going to be, “Oh, I tried that, x thing works better” which, for them, might just be true! That does not make it inherently true for you. What works for you may not work for them and vice versa. You can listen, but take everything with a grain of salt. The best of intentions may cause you to stagnate due to shiny object syndrome and no one really needs that in their life.
Finally the most malicious thing you will hear, that comes from people who you may have believed were on your side, “How’s your little language project going?” I have heard this. You have probably heard this. If you haven’t heard it yet, you are probably going to hear it in the future, if you share your goals and plans, that is. This is one of the unexpected challenges for which you need to be prepared.
Unexpected challenges
No one wants to believe that their own friends and family would root against them and, for the most part, they’re right. However, there are a significant number of people who will root against you actively or passively and those people know you because if they didn’t they wouldn’t know to root against you. It often comes from the people you least expect, too.
When that happens, it is a good reminder that having a small group of good friends or colleagues with whom you can compete and progress is crucial for development as an adult. Anyone who is putting in the work to develop themselves cannot root against you because they are too busy. Instead you will find yourself surrounded by people who want to celebrate you and themselves after each subsequent achievement.
Until you find your people, though, you still need strategies to maintain course. Something that will become increasingly more difficult as you get closer and closer to the goal thereby making it ever more important to find the people in your life who will cheer for you. For the time being, blocking out the negativity is more than enough to get rolling.
Negative wish casting
It is indisputable that there is far too much negativity in the world. You cannot control that and it will not change. What you can do, however, is control yourself. That means putting positivity into the world when and where you can to offset some of that negative. If you can’t find someone who will root for you, start rooting for others. You will be shocked by the results.
Cheering for other people’s success has a funny way of coming back to you. Whether that is in them also rooting for your success or something completely unrelated to that person happening to positively influence your life is less relevant. When you put goodness into the world, goodness comes back to find you and it often does that in the form of friends and, if desired, clients.
Finding your tribe requires an incredible amount of honesty. With yourself, of course, but mostly with the people with whom you have always surrounded yourself. There is every chance that you have a group of people who always root for you and want to see you succeed in every facet of life. I am blessed enough to have that and I hope you are, too. But if you are, that makes you the odd one out.
Conclusion
Your goals are precious. They deserve to be nurtured by you and by those who want to see them grow to their full potential. Sometimes that means speaking less and listening more. Not everyone needs to know what your plans are because not everyone wants to see those plans succeed. The environment you build will dictate the limits of your progression.
Protect your environment from thoughts and minds that would see it destroyed. That alone will make learning a new language easier than it otherwise would be. Finding the right amount of judiciousness to apply here is going to be difficult, but you can do difficult things and build a space in which you can thrive. So go out and do some difficult things and learn to thrive. I am rooting for you.
Requests
If you have anything you would like covered you can reach out to me on X, Instagram, or at odin@secondlanguagestrategies.com.
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