Language & Belief [Elliott Gore]

I speak four languages, and I’m currently studying linguistics. If that sounds amazing then this post is for you. One thing that I hear the most when people find this out about me, is how what I do is something other people could never do. With surprising regularity people tell me “I could never do that.”

Talking specifically about learning a language, this conviction isn’t all that hard to understand. Most of us - myself included - will remember studying a language at school being difficult, and fruitless; bad methods and frustrating ideologies making it impossible to learn anything useful. And that experience taints how we see the process of acquiring a language as an adult, and it clouds our judgement of our own abilities.

So that part I get. What I don’t get  is how defensive people become when I suggest that maybe they’re wrong. I’ve had a number of people get quite animated in their insistence that I have something they don’t, and that that thing is necessary to learn a language. Even though this belief is exactly what keeps them from doing something they say they’d love to do, people will still fight to hold onto that aspect of their self image. They will fight to insist that learning a language is something they can’t do.

How we see ourselves is a funny thing. On the one hand our ideas of what we can and can’t do are shaped by our life experiences, things we’ve tried and thought we’d failed at, and by comments that people make about us. But there is an aspect of our self image that we have almost entire control over; it’s up to us to decide how we see ourselves and how we see our past attempts and “failures”, and it is within our power to alter or maintain that image.

I’d be willing to venture a guess that there has been a time in all of our lives where we were not actively shaping how we see and think of ourselves, and if there isn’t in yours then that’s fantastic. Because of this there are going to be beliefs about ourselves that we didn’t choose. Some of these will hold us back, and and some of them won’t, and this is important because we don’t need to track down every single idea we have about ourselves and our capabilities. Our job on our journey to our dreams is to find the things that stop us from getting and doing what we want, and then we can change them.

Because we can change these beliefs. I’ve found that a few of them change as soon as I realise they’re there; “wait; for that to be true I’d have to believe that I’m not worth anything, and that’s certainly not true.” Others take longer, requiring repetition, effort, and grace as I slowly shift the thoughts I can control to what I want to believe, and eventually the undercurrent shifts. And working with NLP and Timeline Therapy is definitely speeding things along, but even just the shift in my introspection from “why am I like this” to “how do I want to be” has meant that changes come hard and fast.

What about you? What is it you really want to do in your life, that when you think about it, your mind throws up its hands and says “that’s not me”? As I’ve said in an earlier post on here, most of this game of getting where we want to go is a mind game, and what we believe is possible and not for ourselves forms a crucial foundation. Do you believe you can get the things you desire and dream about in life? What would happen if you did believe that?

Elliott Gore