It’s been just about a year since I wrote my last post, and I realize I’m finding out even more about learning as we evolve our life here in Spain. I just reread my first “Long Wild Ride of Real Learning” post, and everything I shared in it is still true. However, I want to add another element that I think will be helpful to anyone who’s on a serious learning journey of any kind.
Given that I’ve been working on learning the Spanish language and culture for another twelve months, you’d think I would be pretty perfect by now, right? If you said “no way,” then you have much more realistic expectations than I do.
Most days, at some point I think to myself some version of, “My god, Erika, you’ve been learning Spanish for 8 years now, really intensively for the past 2 years AND YOU’RE NOT 100% FLUENT YET? What’s your problem?!”
Your Self-talk Can Really Beat You Up
My negative self-talk about this topic seems to have gotten worse instead of better over the past year. I neglect to notice that I conduct my entire life in Spanish while we’re here. I read newspapers and books in Spanish daily, rarely having to stop and look up words; I’ve been working with our lovely lawyer, Belén, to navigate the wildly complex and contradictory process of getting a digital nomad visa — all in Spanish. Youtube videos in Spanish are my go-to to find out whether stuff I’m interested in exists here (can we change our heating system in the apartment to a heat pump?). Every day I have conversations with friends and acquaintances, and people often tell me how good my Spanish is.
Instead of all these positive things, though, what I notice are all the small mistakes I make, the times I have to ask someone who’s speaking very quickly to repeat themselves, the fact that I sometimes don’t know a word I want to say. Focusing on the negative in this way is exhausting and not fun.
Enoughness; An Important Idea for Learning
So, what I’m trying to do now (as I recommended last year) is to be kind to myself, and more specifically to remind myself that I am enough just just as I am. “Enoughness” is a powerful concept that I learned from my friend and colleague JC Lippold, and it means just what it says: to acknowledge to yourself that who and what you are right now is, indeed, enough.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t want to keep growing, and it has nothing to do with complacency. It just means that if you are enough right now, your motivation for continuing to improve can be the joy of evolution, the thrill of discovery, and the satisfaction of new knowledge and new skill.
When we feel as though we’re not enough, then all too often our motivation for improvement is negative: “I want to get better because I’m not happy with who I am or what I can do right now.”
So these days, when my mind starts to beat me up and tell me my progress is not enough (and that therefore I am not enough), I consciously stop and say, “I am enough. I am having a lovely life, and enjoying every day, and I am able to do everything I need to do to live in my adoptive language and land.”
And once I’ve relaxed into that, it’s easy (and pretty joyful) to add — “and I’m excited about continuing to improve.”
What are you working on learning and how can you start from a place of “enough’?
Big props to JC: here’s his website. Thank you, buddy!