Have you ever read a self-help book?
Self-help books are written with the goal of helping readers solve personal problems
and, generally speaking, improve themselves.
Why am I talking about personal development books on a channel dedicated to language learning?
Simply because I have found that in many of these books you can get extremely useful tips
and techniques to learn languages, even if the book isn’t on the topic of learning a language.
Today I’m going to give you 5 key lessons I’ve learned from self-help books to master any language.
The first lesson comes from “The Power of Habit” in which Charles Duhigg explains
that 40% of our daily actions are habits.
A habit is an action we perform without any intent or willpower. A great example of a
habit is brushing our teeth every morning.
We simply do it without having to force ourselves or thinking about it, since we’ve done it
every morning for as long as we can remember.
What if we could transform our daily language learning sessions into habits?
Actually, we can, if we understand how habits work.
Let’s analyze a very popular habit: checking our phone very often.
This habit is made up of a cue (we hear our phone buzz) of a craving (we want to
know who sent us a message), a routine (we stop everything to check our phone) and a
reward (we feel pleasure or distraction by reading a text, an e-mail or a notification
on social media).
Now let’s look at how we can use this to study a language every day.
For the cue, you can put a language book on your desk or set MosaLingua Web as your
browser’s default page. For the craving, you need to set up a reward
for completing your task.
This can be either an immediate one, like eating something you love like a piece of chocolate at the end of your
session, or a more long-term reward such as picturing
yourself traveling abroad and speaking the language of your dreams fluently.
By repeating this routine every day, every time you see the cue (the language book
or the MosaLingua Web webpage) you’ll start associating it with the reward and you’ll
end up having a craving which will drive you through the routine to get your reward.
And if you repeat this process for 30 days, this habit will become so strong that you’ll
no longer need any willpower to study languages every day.
Lesson 2: Use social pressure to boost your willpower
Speaking of willpower, let’s look at another very powerful hack explained in “The Willpower
Instinct” by Kelly McGonigal.
Sometimes it’s very hard to find the willpower, to work on difficult goals
or projects like learning a language.
But willpower is one of the most important ingredients when it comes to learning a language
and you need a good dose of it every day to be successful.
Even if we might not want to admit it, we are profoundly influenced by the behavior
of the people around us.
The truth is that behaviors are kind of contagious.
We often feel social pressure when we see that people around us are doing something.
Here are my suggestions to use this social pressure in your favor and achieve better
results with languages:
1. Share your goal of improving your language skills or learning a new language with your
colleagues, friends and relatives. You can do this via social media
or in person.
Now your plans are public and you know that if you quit, everyone will be aware
of your failure.
This little social pressure will push you through and give you the motivation to work every day
toward your language learning goal.
2. Pair with another language learner. Team up with a friend or relative who has
a similar goal and agree on specific times to study with them.
This will help you both because when one of you is lacking willpower, the other will
be there for support.
Regularly meet with people who have similar goals.
Like I said, behaviors are contagious so if you regularly meet with other people who
are learning a language, you will end up having more motivation and willpower.
That’s my case when I attend a polyglot event: during these gatherings I meet so many
motivated and focused people that I, myself immediately feel more motivated and enthusiastic
about language learning.
Lesson 3: Practice “deep work” to avoid distractions
This third lesson comes from Cal Newport and his great book “Deep Work.”
Deep work is an activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration
that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit.
These efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate.
The author refers to professional activities, but I think that deep work is extremely versatile
and useful when it comes to learning a language.
To learn a language you need to practice every day for short but very focused sessions.
In order to achieve intense focus during your learning sessions, you need to:
1. Avoid multitasking: if you study 15 minutes, then focus only on the task of learning so
you can maximize your productivity.
2. Avoid distractions: turn off notifications and put your phone in airplane mode so you will
not be interrupted.
3. Extend your focus over a longer period of time but do not overdo it: place all of your
energy on the task of learning a language for as long as you can, but don’t exhaust
yourself.
I recommend studying 10-15 minutes a day - short sessions
are more effective because you won’t get overwhelmed or bored. So if you want to study
one hour a day, take a short 5-minute break after 20-25 minutes.
4. Block out moments of the day to study languages: in my case, I found that morning is the best
moment to fully focus on language learning and avoid the risk of being interrupted.
For you of course, it might be another moment of the day, but do put this time-slot in your agenda
so you avoid making other engagements and stick to your plan.
These were the first key lessons for mastering any language that I’ve learned from self-help books.
I thought the other two lessons merited their own videos. One comes from “The Miracle
Morning” by Hal Elrod and the other is from Darren Hardy’s book called “The Compound
Effect.” Check out the description below for the links to my videos dedicated to these
two great books and the extremely useful tips they give.
Thanks a lot for watching this video.
See you soon.
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