Language Barrier: what it's protecting us from

A barrier is not a bad thing. It's about keeping you safe. A cell cannot be without a membrane. And with that in mind...

I once got into an interesting conversation with one of my clients. It was in Russian — for the first time in over half a year since we'd been working together.

She shared her difficulty communicating with native speakers, which is not uncommon. Despite being fluent and having a wide range of vocabulary, when meeting a person proficient in English, she felt a wall rising and blocking her ability to self-express. She couldn't help but feel assessed, put on the spot.

Moreover, she didn't perceive her ability to speak English as a strength — one more thing she could do quite well — but rather as a weakness, something she was supposed to do perfectly and was falling short of.

I believe many people face this challenge, so here are a few thoughts that conversation has inspired🤍

First of all, there is a difference between knowing and feeling. Unfortunately, self-awareness doesn't instantly result in an emotional shift. No amount of working on one's thoughts and reasoning alleviates this anxiety completely.

Most of us have painful experiences associated with being assessed, tested, and judged. Many of us have high standards for what we should be able to do, producing unrealistic expectations and feeding our inner critic. It gets more complicated as we compare our ability to express thoughts in English with that in our native language.

Having a strong command of our mother tongue can be one of the major confidence drivers, sustaining self-esteem. Switching to a second language, learned in adulthood, might feel like being robbed of that given level of confidence.

As my client mentioned, unlike with other skills, it's hard to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we can't speak a language as well as we think we should.

My thought on this was that language is inseparable from our identity. The way we speak is how and what we present to the world. If we have a certain self-image that we want others to see, the stakes become pretty high.

What are some possible solutions to this predicament? The most obvious one is pushing yourself to courageously do what's scary. Do it 1, 3, 5, 10 times — until it's not that scary anymore. It's kind of like exposure therapy, step by step.

To make this process smoother for yourself, I suggest creating a controlled environment. E.g., finding native speakers on italki to start a conversation in a safe space and gain some confidence.

This approach, however, raises a concern: push too much, and the result will be the opposite. The motivation-productivity dependency is a bell curve, after all.

When our attempts are not immediately reinforced with a positive outcome, the anxiety associated with making them might strengthen negative feelings associated with the action and situation.

I remember how I pushed myself to make cold calls at my first internship. I learned to do it better and even got decent conversions in the end. I also absolutely hated it and will never do it again.

Here's a quote that comes to mind:

If one wants to draw water from a tap, one would not dream of squeezing the water out of the pipe; one would simply loosen the resistance, the tap which holds the water back.
— Fritz Perls

So the question is, how do you loosen the resistance, and where is it coming from?

In childhood, we learn to moderate our behavior, controlling our impulses and ways of self-expression. Parents are responsible for this process, followed later by teachers and internalized parents. If a child cries too much, relieves himself in the wrong place and time, speaks too loudly, asks inconvenient questions, or moves too much and too chaotically, a parent exerts force to suppress this overflowing energy. As a result, the child learns to hold it in, which requires control and energy on the child's behalf.

On most occasions (although not always), a parent (or a teacher) does it verbally. Then those words are internalized and turned into guidelines, helping us regulate our behavior by ourselves. It's an important function, really. Both shame and fear, unpleasant as they are, help us stay safe. But if they are excessive, we freeze when we don't need to.

Now, the point I want to make:

There is this beautiful thing about a second language: nobody ever disciplined you in it. For the sake of experiment, try to turn off your native-language-speaking part and think of a time you heard a negative verbal judgment.

As the old song goes:

Preacher preacher! Fifth grade teacher!
You can't reach me, my mom can't neither
You can't teach me a goddamn thing ...

Eminem is therapeutic for folks who were subjected to toilet training too early with an overbearing sense of responsibility and a need to control. He surely doesn't hold it in.

The point here is, being negatively assessed usually has some verbal form — the embarrassing verdict we all want to avoid. If we look back into our childhood, we can always remember some of those. But when you speak English, your mother tongue isn't a part of the process (and neither is your mother😉). That American dude who seems scary to talk to doesn't speak it and doesn't hold your assumptions about what you should be like.

Seriously, I tried remembering if I'd ever heard any criticism in English that hit home. I recalled only one occasion — I now hate the phrase "pull up your socks" — but it had little to do with speaking...

What else can trigger our anxiety?

One thing that can make us feel insecure is hearing: "Come again?", "What was that?", or "I didn't catch that."

That is, a person indicating they didn't understand what we said, which is often interpreted as: "You are not speaking clearly, so your English is not good enough."

But, in fact, it could be one of the following:

(1) A person was in their head and wasn't focused, so they want you to repeat what you said.

(2) A person is listening closely, and it's important for them to understand your thought precisely. They want to engage with you and see value in what you have to say.

(3) A person is not used to thinking in the patterns that you think in. It's new to them; they are learning about other ways of conceptualizing things.

Finally, try to remember somebody praising you in English. It could be as simple as:

"You are pretty fluent," "You formulate thoughts clearly," "I like your accent," or "Thank you for making the effort to speak English with me."

It could also be less assessing and more encouraging:

🤍 I like talking to you!
🤍 That's interesting
🤍 You are so insightful
🤍 It's funny
🤍 You'll do good!
🤍 You do you