Have you Ever Quitted Learning a Foreign Language?

by © Monica Di Santi

Have you ever quitted a diet, doing gym or learning a foreign language? Have you ever heard of people going back to destructive habits, such as smoking or drinking? Such a common pattern!

Motivation makes you start a new activity eagerly and full of energy, but only habit keeps you going. So, if you fail to create a new habit, a new neurological pattern, after a few weeks, you start struggling to do the activity, and finally quit it.

Specialists say that 95% of your daily activities are automatic, ie HABITS. It's so easy to go on and on with our established patterns, what you know and feel comfortable about, but you certainly make no progress.

Setting a goal is a conscious activity and has to be reinforced till it becomes a habit. That's the difficult part. It's known that it takes about 20 to 30 days to create a habit and only three to lose it. This has now been proven to be fairly accurate on a neurological basis.

How to Create a New Habit

• Write down your goal somewhere you can check it everyday.
• Associate it with an emotion. When you think of your goal, feel the pleasure of having achieved it already. See yourself, enjoying what you want: being slim, getting a better job, a degree, travelling abroad, whatever.
• Repetition and reinforcement of your goal should be done daily. Take five minutes everyday to reread your goals, and associate them with a pleasant sensation. This repetition makes the idea go from the conscious to the subconscious level, and so turned it into a new pattern of behavior, which should become second nature in you.

Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Charles Reader

• Keep in my mind the big goal, but also set small goals for the week and each day. Celebrate every achievement no matter how small it is. This will help you to keep focused and positive.
• Even if you fail but learn something from the experience, celebrate because you have become wiser.

So, if you want to be successful in a new activity such as learning a foreign language, you need something else than a good course.

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