Learning is a lifelong choice

At the age of 6 I wanted to be a cartoonist. I quickly learned that this wasn’t an option. Imagination and creativity didn’t belong in the exam hall. My assumption was that those who successfully forged a career out of these innate human capacities were some sort of mysterious demigods.

I remember how my love of learning and meeting new people transformed into ‘fitting in’. If I did too well and stood out I was a target to be labelled a ‘swat’ by some peers, if I pulled back too much I was quite quickly told to pull the finger out by the adults. Throughout my formative years the underlying feeling felt like being caught between a rock and a hard place until eventually this transformed into apathy and a belief that the status quo was insurmountable.

At age 14 a spark emerged in the form of my curious fascination with the French language. I don’t know when it exactly came into my life but I’m glad it did. I was unaware of anyone who shared this interest and I had never been to France, in fact when I came across those late night movies on TG4 I wondered to myself how the hell was I ever going to speak French. I had finally found a challenge worth tackling.

When I went to university I hedged my bets. I was insecure about taking French and how I would be perceived by others so I paired it up with Business. My logic at the time was that I could always tell the non-linguists that I was studying Business, something which I associated as being much more ‘masculine’, whatever that means. Hindsight has allowed me to see that I was the one that bought into this nonsensical narrative.

At age 18 I went to France for the first time. It was an adventure. I didn’t care that I couldn’t really speak French, I was experiencing something new and moving beyond my comfort zone. It didn’t even occur to me how odd it was to have studied French for 7 years and not be capable of having the most basic of conversations.

At 22 I graduated from university and went to France to become an English teaching assistant. I was drawn to teaching and helping students and I also wanted to become fluent at French so it made perfect sense. It didn’t bother me that I was sent to a remote part of France with no means of public transportation.

Day’s filled with deliberate practice saw my level in French approach near native. I was beginning to see that the biggest barriers to English acquisition for my students came from within them. I could see that most of them didn’t know why they were learning English and that they couldn’t see the implications a second language could bring to their lives.

Off the back of spending some of the previous summer in Italy combined with my long term affection for Spain I decided that I would learn Spanish and Italian in an attempt to show the students what possibilities exist when you set your mind to a task. Ironically I ended up teaching the biggest life lessons to myself.

Once I had set sail on my quest, I came across a book called Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis. This was the hook that exposed me to the world of the polyglot. I was fascinated by these people and it brought up memories from my time in Luxembourg where children spoke up to 5 languages.

I set myself the goal of learning Spanish and Italian within 6 months. I started to implement hacks and strategies like the 80/20 principle. Within 3 months I was at an intermediate level in both languages. Amazed that I had gone through the educational system completely unaware of this style of learning I decided to write a blog with the intention of making this knowledge more widespread and to potentially earn some money to fund my upcoming Masters.

The blog didn’t work out quite as I had intended. While intellectually I was collecting more tools than I ever had imagined possible I had completely overlooked the emotional side of learning. I had little to no understanding of things like perception, the nature of thought and self-awareness and so feelings of extreme anger and anxiety eventually took their toll on me. It is only with hindsight that I realise how intense these feelings were, at the time that was my default setting when experiencing stress, the problem was that I had never experienced this level of stress for such a prolonged period of time.

When I noticed that my thinking had started to become erratic, as I approached a state of mental and physical burnout, I made the call to go home for help. I took most of the following year to recover and reflect on what went wrong. I began to see that I was harbouring feelings of anger and resentment towards an education system that I felt misunderstood the purpose of learning. I was also angry at myself for some of the unconscious choices I had made. I started to notice that my anxious feelings could often be traced to conditioned thought patterns as simple as ‘I will be happy when…’’ that had me forever chasing mirages. My positive emotions from language learning and overcoming some self-limitations provided the necessary contrast.

My initial reaction was to look for something or someone to blame. Thankfully it began to dawn on me that blaming someone or something for a situation I was in never once changed things for the better. I concluded that nothing would actually change unless I changed. At first it was a bitter pill for my ego to swallow but it was what the patient needed. For the first time in my life I chose to read about psychology, philosophy and even spirituality. I read about business, technology and leadership and watched interviews of entrepreneurs who were making a profound dent in the universe. I gradually found online mentors, in person mentors and before I knew it I was even a mentor myself. Looking back I now laugh at the time I spent a week procrastinating over taking my first online course (to the grand total of €60) because I was afraid it was a ‘scam’.

I began with the assumption that there probably wasn’t that much I could take responsibility for but I would take responsibility wherever it made sense to me. And so it started that one unproductive habit became a productive one, once some progress had been made another habit became visible and so on and so forth.

So that is my story. It has been a continuous journey, I still make plenty of mistakes and still have many moments where I feel like a ‘prisoner to circumstance’. The key difference is that with each passing year I now look back and almost with a chuckle say to myself ‘I can’t believe I used to think like that’, time and perspective are great like that.