Learning a new language - Day 508

I've been in South Africa for more than 3 years now but I always refused learning Afrikaans - I kept on telling myself that I must first perfect my English before attempting to learn another language, that English is tough enough, learning another language will be too complicated... I can really give you a long list of excuses of why I should not learn Afrikaans but the truth is - I believed that I can't, that i am too old to learn a new language and mostly, I believed that I am unable to learn and integrate new information effectively enough and I didn't want to risk seeing that my assumption is real.

My high school learning experience wasn't one that empowered me to succeed and the imprint that was left inside of me since high school was of a failure. It was not that I was failing per say, I actually got very good marks but I could have done better if I wouldn't give up on myself since the first time I didn't succeed in a test as how I expected of myself. It was a struggle for me to consider higher education and with a lot of pressure from my family, I eventually studied law and business and even though I felt inferior all the way through university, my marks were again pretty good even though I invested very limited time in studying.

It is interesting how even with having good marks and achievements in university, my internal experience was of a failure. There was a part of me who knew that I could have done more, be more, if I wouldn't accept my own self-limitations. But the fear of proving to myself that I am a failure when investing time and effort in studying new material was something I was not willing to face. I preferred investing as little time as possible in my studies and make the best out of it because I always found a way around it, if that make sense.

The experience of being inferior and failure when it comes to learning followed me ever since which was why learning Afrikaans was something I was not willing to do. It is interesting how an idea of oneself becomes self-prophecy through which we use our experiences to validate our ideas of ourselves. With me and Afrikaans - every time someone would try and teach me a word, I would repeat it and try to remember it but inside of me, there was a 'knowing' that I will forget the word the next moment because after all, I am a failure so I didn't even bothered expanding my Afrikaans vocabulary.

In the past few weeks, Afrikaans was spoken more frequently around me and I became annoyed that I don't understand what people are speaking about. I kept on asking them to switch to English but every so often the Afrikaans kicked in again and I felt disempowered for not being able to participate in the discussions around me. So, I had to make a decision - Am I going to be annoyed each time I hear Afrikaans and within that accept my own limitations OR, I will expand my reality and learn Afrikaans? Well.. I decided to go with Self-Empowerment lol.

I asked a friend to teach me Afrikaans and she gratefully took upon herself the challenge. In the first few days, I made a decision to only integrate one word a day as at that stage, I still believed I was limited, failure and unable to integrate more than one word a day. 2 weeks have passed and I increased my Afrikaans vocabulary with 14 words lol and then, one day, I had couple of hours during a drive to a training function and I thought to myself, I might as well use this time to learn a few more words. So she started teaching me the days of the week and I surprised myself because an hour later, I could speak the days of the week with confident. Then she wanted to teach me to count and I for a moment said 'No, it has already been 7 words while I should only do 1 word per day. BUT, I just proved to myself that I could easily integrate 7 new words so why not just give myself the opportunity to learn to count? Again, I surprised myself with being able to count to 10 after just a few minutes with the ability to recall the information of all the 21 words (+ a few more random words) I integrated that day. today, I learnt to count to 100..

Someone asked me HOW am I doing it - how did I move myself from not being able to integrate any word in Afrikaans to now being able to learn and recall what I learnt in a very short period of time. My answer was.. "I Made a Decision".

They asked me "Decision? What do you mean?" I said: "You can decide to accept and allow your own created self-limitations or you can decide to accept and allow your own self-empowerment and growth. Once a decision is made, you still have to decide to consistently stand by the decision that you made in any given moment and that was all that I've done"

With understanding how learning works and what are the methods that assist me the most to effectively integrate information, I can choose to expand my reality and push myself to succeed. So, I am in the process of learning Afrikaans now which I find to be a fascinating process as it showed me how I am the creator of my own self-limitations and if so I choose, how I can also be the creator of my own self-empowerment and growth.

Voice Tonality - Impatience - Day 427

 

 

Note - I've been walking and sharing some points in relation to reactions I've seen within and as myself that were triggered when I heard specific voice tonalities. If you haven't already, I suggest to also read the following blogs:

Reacting to Voice Tonality - Day 421

Inferiority and voice tonality - Day 422

Manipulation and voice tonality - Day 423

 

Throughout our lives, we have encountered people that expressed impatience towards us and especially within the realm of education.  For children, the experience of another being impatient towards them  in the context of learning, can lead to devastated outcome where the child for instance connect the experience of learning to impatience and therefore, would make a decision within themselves to stop asking questions when they do not understand something or to act out as if they do understand a point and this is to avoid the experience within themselves in moments where another is impatient with them.

 

Now, if one understand the importance of laying the bricks in the brick wall of understanding effectively within the formative years of a child's life, one would also understand how destructive an experience of impatience towards a child can be within how the child would define oneself within one's own mind according to how one experience oneself with others. Wherein, as the child learn and develop their confident, self esteem, trust etc. and external influence such as a slight impatient from the teach or the parents comes up, the child would imprint the moment and create unconscious idea about themselves and thus, decide for example, that they cannot tell anyone when they do not understand something.

 

Fascinating enough, the experience of someone being impatient towards us create great consequences within ourselves far more than we would like to admit and here, the voice tonality reaction plays a major rule.

For example, imaging that you are now an adult and you are starting a new job or a business and to be able to do your job/business, there are things you must understand because otherwise, you won't be able to perform your job effectively. So you ask a question because you really do not understand something and the person you are asking is becoming impatient with your question because let's say that in their mind, you should have already understand the point.

 

So they raise their voice and you perceive or interpret them as  becoming 'bigger' within themselves and as such, you react and feel 'smaller' within yourself because suddenly, the past experience from your childhood kicked in, of when your teacher/parent where impatient towards you. Now, because you are reacting and you don't really know why you are reactive,  you cannot even hear what the other is explaining to you because you are far gone in your mind, within the reaction and the experience of being stupid for instance.

 

Thus, a suggestion here, when/as we face these moments where another is impatience with us, the first thing we must do is to take a breath in, breath out, and if necessary, breath again, slow ourselves down. From there, we must realize that what ever the other is expressing within themselves has nothing to do with us per say but so long as we react, there is unresolved point within ourselves that we haven't sorted out yet and if we go back to the example above it would be for instance, how we held onto the idea that if we don't understand something we must not show/tell  to anyone or even dare to ask questions due to the fear of experiencing a moment where another is impatient with us.

 

If we are the ones who become impatient towards others - here we have to slow ourselves down and investigate why is it that we allow ourselves to be impatience towards another, what is it that the other is showing us that we haven't dealt with for ourselves. It can be for example - the question that the other is asking us is not very clear even within ourselves and now that the other is asking us a question and we are uncertain as to how to direct it, we become impatient, not really towards the other person but towards ourselves from the perspective of: "how can I explain something to another that I am not fully understand myself".

 

For those of you who knew Bernard, you know what does it means to live the word 'patience' wherein one is able and willing to unconditionally explain something to another regardless of how many times one as to show the same thing again and again and again. Not once I've seen Bernard being impatient towards another; always embracing the other and looking for ways of saying the same things in different ways till the  other see/understand a point.
 

More to come...