asmTaB6RH7I.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Hello everyone. Welcome to the Lange Focus Channel and my name is Paul. Today I'm going to talk about language learning edge number five and that is let go of your ego. So what do I mean by ego? Well, by ego I mean that you have an image in mind of the way you are and an image of the way that you want other people to see you. In order to be successful in language learning and really to be successful at anything, it's really important that you don't cling too tightly to your image of yourself. It's important that you realize that your image of yourself may not completely be reality. Basically, you need to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You can't hide yourself from situations that challenge your image of who you are. It's human nature to always look for information that supports our image of who we are. But in order to grow as a person, you need to be flexible in that self image, the way you see yourself.

Speaker 1:          00:58          Let me give you one example of how your ego may trap you. In this example, you have convinced yourself that you suck. Let's say that you've had a bad experience with language learning when you were in school. Maybe you had a bad teacher, maybe nobody taught you how to study at home. Maybe you were just a teenager, preoccupied with teenagers stuff, but you concluded that you were bad with languages. You defined yourself as someone who was not good with languages because you've defined yourself as someone who was bad with languages. You have probably ignored evidence that you can be good at them.

Speaker 1:          01:33          Maybe you started to get some success with the language, but you gave up and you didn't know why, or maybe you had some success, but you gave the thanks to some external factor to someone else or something else, so that's success didn't motivate you. Maybe every time you had a little setback, which everybody has, you thought to yourself, of course I have a setback. I'm bad with languages. This is my fault. Maybe that unconscious belief about yourself keeps you in a trance and you need to snap out of it and see yourself more objectively. Recognize your successes and also know that all successful people encounter lots of challenges and failures. Failures and successes did not define you. They're just something that everybody goes through while learning a skill. So I want you to evaluate your own beliefs about yourself. If you define yourself as someone who has bad with languages, expelled that belief from your mind expelled that idea from yourself.

Speaker 1:          02:28          Here's another example of how your ego can trap you. In this example, you are trying to convince yourself and trying to convince other people that you are amazing. So let's say that you see yourself as someone who is great with languages or as someone who is great at everything, we're better than other people at most things he does, and you present that image to other people like you want them to believe that, well now you're trapped in that image as being someone who's really good. Now that might hurt your progress because in order to improve, you have to take risks. You have to face failures, you have to overcome challenges, but if you are scared to shatter that perfect image of yourself, then you're probably going to refrain from doing that. You'll shy away from all of those risky experiences because you want to see yourself and you want other people to see you as already perfect.

Speaker 1:          03:12          Taking risks, making mistakes, overcoming failure, dealing with embarrassment. That is all part of the learning process for everyone, and if you try to skip that part of the learning process, you will not be successful. You may have noticed that I never referred to myself as a polyglot and there's a reason for that. It's because I think that using that word, this is just me personally, I'm not judging anyone else, but when I use that word for myself, I feel like that's creating an ego that I have to be attached to. Maybe if I call myself a polyglot than I will be scared to speak a language in front of other people. If I'm not fluent in it yet, maybe I'll be worried that I'm being judged for my language skills, so I'll want to speak less. I tried to avoid that kind of go a trap by not defining myself in terms of my results.

Speaker 1:          03:55          I'm not a polyglot or I'm not someone who is amazing with languages. I'm just someone who loves languages and loves the learning process. So in order to free yourself from any kind of self sabotage when it comes to learning languages, I recommend that you take a look at the way you define yourself in terms of language, learning your story about yourself, make sure that your story doesn't define you as someone who was bad with languages, but on the other hand, make sure that your story doesn't define you as someone who is great with languages. Just define yourself as someone who can get the right result by taking the right action and dealing with all the little challenges along the way. No more, no less. Thank you for watching the [inaudible] folks channel. Please leave your comments down below and I'll talk to you again.

Speaker 2:          04:36          Sure.