I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about what success means. We all want to succeed. Even if our societies didn’t put such a heavy emphasis on it, individually we feel best about ourselves when we succeed. Success gives us the courage and motivation to take the next step or to try something new. When we don’t succeed, we lose our confidence in our ability to do anything, we hesitate (or stop altogether) in moving forward or trying again to succeed at the thing we just tried. We get stuck in a cycle of giving and believing a list of excuses we created for why we didn’t succeed and why we shouldn’t try again.
When it comes to our success, the most damaging word in the English language is the word can’t.
I learned this the hard way. When I was in high school, I started figure skating lessons with my local club. All the other girls had been taking them for several years but I had to work to save the money to pay for them. I worked hard as a waitress and was allowed to pay for part of my lessons by teaching the levels lower than me. Eventually, I was good enough to take a weekly group lesson with a professional that the club hired for those who had the skill to move on to more serious training. I took on more shifts at the coffee shop and more teaching with the club to be able to afford the extra tuition.
After some success at learning various jumps and the basics of spinning, I was finally feeling that I actually belonged there. Just then, the coach started teaching us how to do the loop jump. All the jumps we had learned thus far had been entered from a forward-moving approach which gave me a certain level of power (I wasn’t on any kind of physical training routine so I did not have the power of the other girls). The loop jump is entered from a backward-moving approach and requires enough power from one leg to push you off the ice and rotate yourself enough to land on the same leg, exiting the jump with a backward flow.
Well, this was the first jump I simply could not do. Apart from the fact that my legs couldn’t get me off the ice, I also couldn’t figure out the mechanics of it. Now, I am NOT what we Americans call “a whiner”. I love solving problems and have never seen the value in wasting my time and energy complaining about things. “Just get it done” is my mantra. So you can imagine how shocked I was when the Pro suddenly said to me, “Come get me when you’re ready to get the job done, Cathleen. There are others here who actually want this,” and he skated away.
What I had not realized is that, as a result of being faced with failure at something I unconsciously felt I didn’t deserve, I had been continuously whining, “I can’t do this.” I was literally jolted out of my inner world of self-inflicted despair and back into the reality of who I am – a woman of action and solutions. After I scolded myself (“Can’t means WON’T, Cathleen”), I started working the problem and found a solution. After I figured out the mechanics of the jump by looking at it from a different angle, I tried it and succeeded. The Pro, who had been watching me from across the rink, applauded and shouted his congratulations on a job well done. I have never forgotten this lesson. It is the reason that I don’t give up.
So what does this have to do with learning English? Bear with me a little longer.
Last night, I watched the Disney movie Million Dollar Arm, which I recommend. It was the last place in the world that I expected to find a lesson in learning English (not the least of which was that I just thought it was another movie about baseball, and not because two of the main characters needed to do so). This movie is all about chasing a dream until you catch it.
Even when no one else believes in you, you can feel your dream in your gut so strongly that you can see your improbable success. Sometimes the constant barrage of people telling you you can’t do it, or you’re an unrealistic idiot wears you down into believing them. Other times, it can feel like you are being thrown an endless string of strikes which will put you out of the game at any minute. It is usually during these times that we give in to the messages of doom and failure, we are tempted to quit, to accept failure, and to give up on our dream, on our personal success.
The fact remains that whether anyone else can see the logic or practicality of our dreams (and as students of English, our basic dream is one of becoming fluent), whether anyone else supports us or not, the power to push ourselves off the ice and land that jump (becoming fluent in English) is entirely within our power. All we have to do is:
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work the problem (what is blocking my progress right now?),
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figure out the mechanics (what is the best approach for the way I learn that will lead to my success in understanding right now?), and
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put it all into practice. As any professional athlete knows, you will never master anything without continuous repetition and correction.
As we move into the weekend, let’s take some time to remember what our dreams are in relation to becoming fluent in English, then check (and adjust if necessary) our attitude toward our success, and get a plan of action in place to get the job done.
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What is your proudest moment of when you turned failure into memorable success?
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