Perspective Shift: How You Can Slay Your Inner Saboteur with a Growth Mindset
The outcome of your efforts in learning something differs based on the parameters you set around the idea of achievement. That means you can have the same outcome yet still either fall short of, or, surpass your desired level of achievement. Take singing as an example: If you subconsciously think of getting better at singing as a game of “working one’s voice to rise to the level of a particular song’s vocal skill requirements”, you will probably have a hard time both enjoying practicing and finding your own singing style. But if you think about songs as tools that can serve the singer - vehicles to help you to find your vocal style and all the tricks and nuances it possesses (literally “to find your voice”) - then it would be easier to experiment and be playful: This would mean discovery and growth would be the parameter of achievement instead of perfection. So is it just about the song itself or is it about the full meaning of learning to sing?
If you choose to see achievement in the latter, there’d be no need to get bogged down as much by self doubt. You’d be more likely to let errors just float past rather than dwell on them. You’d have a growth mindset about singing instead of a fixed mindset: It’s all about your perspective on what constitutes “achievement”. And that is true of all learning - for any new skill.
How do you apply this to your language experience approach?
Thinking about singing in this way makes me wonder if thinking about self-teaching language could be aided by this kind of a shift in perspective. The former’s equivalent for language learning would be thinking we weren’t learning enough if we didn’t learn every word and every grammar structure of the language we were pursuing. That would mean never being satisfied with one’s own vocabulary in our target language, thereby not being able to appreciate all that has been learned so far despite being a ways away from a full, rich and deep vocabulary.
The latter’s equivalent would be applying that growth mindset instead of the fixed mindset, where you think about your own vocabulary as being right for you because it’s filled with words that come from what you are most interested in. It doesn’t mean you don’t learn ANY words from categories of topics that are not particularly useful or interesting to you. But surely, pursuing a vocabulary of words in your target language that actually means something to you, i.e. that helps you express “your voice”, seems on its face to be a more motivating reason to keep language learning as a lifelong pursuit than feeling one must learn every possible word.
What does “fluent” really even mean?
What would it be like if you could allow yourself to look at your vocabulary as just that - yours? Not something that has to be tested or level-checked or compared to anyone or apologised for. No more feeling like you have to learn every word in the language or else none of your effort will “really count”. No more thinking “What if I need to prove something about my vocabulary to (eek!) a stranger some day?”
I always say we don’t often beat ourselves up for not knowing new words from our native languages (unless we are literally studying for a test), and many of us would put our reading and writing abilities at different points on the scale, but we still call ourselves fluent. Whether you are consciously aware of it or not, you are still and always will be learning your native language, even as an adult. It shouldn’t be so hard to feel the same about our additional language(s): that it is OK if your additional language takes you your “whole life” to learn and in the end, you “still aren’t fluent enough”. So what? Did you have some great conversations? Did you learn anything that you value? Did your language pursuits bring you to friendships with amazing people?
Setting the literally unattainable goal of “finishing” learning any language to be the parameter for achievement is 100% your inner saboteur talking.
Drown out the voice of your inner saboteur.
One thing I think language learners who have plateaued probably aren’t doing enough is listening to their target language being spoken in stretches that are longer than dictionary example sentences spoken by an app. Don’t get me wrong - those things have their uses and they are great. (This generation of language students is so lucky!) That said, they don’t fill the gap that needs to be filled when creating one’s own immersion environment, like I spoke about in our previous blog post entitled How To DIY a Simulated Language-Immersion Environment .
Listening to a language extensively before (and of course, after) you understand it may sound ridiculous, but that is exactly how babies learn. And wouldn’t it be nice if at least SOME of our language acquisition could come from a kind of “environmental absorption” rather than only and always coming as a result of conscious studying, notetaking and the like? It does feel as though babies learn by osmosis, because one day they suddenly say a word no one in their life had explicitly “taught” them. (And then comes another one, and another one, and suddenly it’s phrases! And short sentences! And… where has the time gone? *cry*) Sometimes it feels as though those with older brains are totally incapable of “just picking up” some target language, as if we were babies. But that’s the very kind of fixed mindset that can lead us to self-sabotage, because, for example, it stops us from choosing to watch a Chinese drama or comedy show or cooking show instead of something in English.
The first person I ever developed a rich friendship with in which I used a lot of my Mandarin was my best friend in China. She is still a major motivator for me to keep learning, not just so I can speak Mandarin with her but also because she is a brilliant language learner whose English is absolutely excellent. She was the first person who made me realise that it’s not only “okay” to watch TV to study, it’s almost language-learner “malpractice” NOT to if you have access to tolerable TV shows and movies in your target language. A large part of her speedily picking up English had to do with all the TV shows she watched. (We watched a LOT of House MD together, wayyy back in 2002!)
Another person whose experience confirms and supports my theory (it’s not just mine of course) of the necessity to create a simulated language immersion environment and do a LOT of listening is instagram language coach @learnchinesewithkristen: Kristen had the resources to teach herself Mandarin in one year while living in our shared home country, Canada, as opposed to getting to fluency through studying, working or living in China. Now she lives in Beijing, but when she was first learning, she had to improvise when it came to listening.
Kristen is joining our Sandy Suggests page in the Digital Creators category. She recently put out a free download of her favourite or recommended Chinese TV shows to watch. I was excited to get my copy so I could see which shows she had collected together, and as I had guessed, she put at least one on there that I was already thinking of doing a review of. (The name of the show in Chinese is 下⼀站是幸福 - Xià yí zhàn shì xìngfú - which in English is called “Find Yourself” but the translation of the title actually means “The Next Stop is Happiness”. I don’t understand why they don’t just call shows by their original name, only translated. It’s one thing if you think a show will do better in a foreign market if it has a different name, but in this case I think “Find Yourself” is a worse title!) I hope one day to interview Kristen so we can get super nerdy together about all this stuff!
In the meantime, for anyone studying Mandarin, go grab yourself a copy of Kristen’s list. Whether you’re using her list or have your own in mind for whatever your target language is, grab our TV Show Viewing Study Sheet for Any Language freebie to keep the characters in order, learn some story and TV show terminology, and help you to jog your memory about the plot when you have to take a pause in-between episode viewings for any reason. Heck, why not embrace Valentines as a theme and go with a rom com series to start this month? All us Mandarin learners could maybe even start with 下⼀站是幸福 (it might have a little more of the “rom” than the “com”, but there are still funny bits in it!).
Final reminders from Team Growth Mindset…
It’s easy to let that inner saboteur whisper in your ear that your goals need to look like the achievement of others, or that your work is only worthwhile if you could pass some sort of test with the knowledge you’ve gained, or that you don’t and can never know “enough”. But approaching your learning with that growth mindset - recognising that you get to decide what achievement looks and feels like for yourself - frees you up to enjoy the process of learning and to see achievement in your effort itself.
Enjoy the show! 欣赏表演吧! Xīnshǎng biǎoyǎn ba!
Rebecca