Yesterday my wife and I hosted some new friends with similar-aged kids for a playdate. One of the guests speaks English fluently, but the others don’t, so for most of the three hours we were together we spoke in Spanish.
At this point, social events in Spanish are not completely uncommon, but there are a lot of people here who are very fluent in English, so it’s sometimes more common to have a mixed Spanglish conversation.
This Sunday’s playdate was great. It was fun and coming out of it I felt like I’d started to build friendships with people who were closer to the acquaintance category before.
I noticed myself mentally re-living a handful of moments when I felt that I’d been awkward, had made a grammatical mistake, or had sloppily thrown out an English word instead of finishing a thought in Spanish.
Later, something caused me to change my perspective. I was thinking about speaking in this second language has gotten to the point where to do it feels normal. I was thinking about how if I, 5 or 6 years ago, still early in the process of learning Spanish, could see this day and watch how I was able to make new friends and hold a long conversation in Spanish, that younger version of myself would think it was awesome.
It is very easy to take where you are today for granted. It takes conscious effort to not do it. But the perspective you take on something has incredible power over how your future is going to go.
If I spend time beating myself up over a handful of mistakes, I will feel less excited about speaking Spanish in social situations in the future. If I spend time feeling happy and motivated because I spent three hours making new friends in my second language, I’ll be more excited to create those situations again in the future.
I’ve written before about focusing on gap vs gain, and yesterday was a good reminder for me. I fell into living in the gap and then consciously change my feelings by focusing on gain:
To put it simply, focusing on the gap is comparing your progress to an ideal that is moving further into the distance. The gain is comparing your progress to your starting point.
If you focus on the gap, you will be disappointed and frustrated. If you focus on the gain, you will be motivated and confident.
Having an ideal in mind is not a bad thing. To succeed, we need to have a vision of for the future that we are working towards. That future ideal is a great motivator, but it is a terrible measuring stick. If you fixate on it and compare your progress to an unrealistic ideal, you will feel regular disappointment and find yourself losing confidence day by day.
Instead, you should still embrace the ideal and work towards it, but when you measure your progress, you should always pause and look back to where you started.
https://ryanaferguson.com/2017/12/gap-and-gain/
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