Hadar Shemesh argues that feeling bad about mistakes in a second language is a habit rooted in past trauma and fear of judgment, not reality. This self-criticism makes you avoid speaking and show less of yourself, which costs more than any mistake ever could.
Assume that feeling bad is just part of speaking a second language, and that once you improve, you won't feel bad. Here's a newsflash: even if you improve, you'll feel bad if you've developed the habits of feeling bad constantly. And the feeling bad is not just because of English, it's because we always have a tendency of either it's a traumatic experience that we've had, or beliefs that we've heard about people who are not perfect. What does that mean? And we connect that to shame, and we connect that, like, the fear of judgment, and we don't want to experience shame. We don't want to experience being rejected, and that makes us feel bad. And when we feel bad, we don't take action. We avoid, we speak less, we limit ourselves, and then we show up as a limited version of ourselves in our lives. And we pay such a high price for it, much higher price than making a mistake and being judged. Okay, I'm gonna say it again. The price we pay for always judging ourselves, for always feeling bad when speaking is a much higher price than making mistakes every now and then and being judged by other people.
Read Out Loud with me! Dare to Lead by Brené Brown | Pronunciation & Vocabulary practice
