Progress is Contagious

​I am learning Spanish right now. Which is no small feat; I’ve been practicing English for over 40 years and still struggle with it.

Amanda is the linguist of the family, as she seems to have a knack for picking up languages faster than most. Plus, she is fantastic with accents, so in addition to learning languages quickly, she can quickly sound like a native wherever we travel.

I, on the other hand, have zero talent in linguistics. Amanda has found great humor in seeing me try to speak English over the years because I tend to mix up my words frequently.

You can see why it’s tempting to have Amanda do all the talking when we are ordering food, buying bus tickets, and checking into hotels in foreign countries. But I’ve been making so much progress in my health and work recently that I want to use that momentum to expand progress to other parts of my life.

Amanda and I travel to Mexico and Spain quite a bit; we have trips planned to go to both countries in the next year. Once these trips were booked, I heard Amanda immediately begin practicing her Spanish through a couple of apps on her phone.

Not wanting to be a linguistical dud my whole life, I decided to fire up those same language learning apps on my phone.

The first thing I’ve noticed in this new language journey is how much time Amanda puts into the learning process. Fifteen to thirty minutes a day is the average, but I’ve seen her go closer to an hour in total time throughout her day a few times.

So I’ve adopted this daily routine and do an average of 20-30 minutes a day learning Spanish. I’m about 4 weeks in this process as I write this.

Here are my six takeaways so far…

1. Progress is addictive.
It doesn’t matter if it involves work, health, relationships, or personal stuff. When I experience progress, I want more of it. I’m lightyears ahead of my starting point. Progress is slow, but it’s measurable, which is inspiring me to keep the streak going.

2. Progress is contagious.
When we see others experience progress, we crave it ourselves. When others see our progress, it can inspire them to take their own action. Amanda inspired me when I witnessed how she was learning and the gains she was making from just using an app on her phone. The kids have seen me take up this challenge and have joined in too. It’s not uncommon to see all 4 of us on the couch practicing Spanish at 7:45 pm.

3. Progress is simple.
To improve, to make measurable gains, it simply takes daily action. It doesn’t matter what it is; nothing beats daily practice. A big part of the reason Amanda is good at learning languages is that she puts time into learning every day. She doesn’t just magically learn new phrases; she repeats them many times until she gets them nailed.

4. Progress is not easy.
Easy is watching Netflix instead of taking 15 minutes to practice something you want to get better at. Fifteen minutes of practice is not hard, but there are days when I just don’t care, I’m exhausted and just want to veg and rest my mind. To overcome this, I often do my Spanish lessons sprawled out on the couch, so I am relaxing while I do it.

5. Progress is a game you can win.
Intentional focused energy to get better every day is a simple recipe for progress. To make it easier, you can gamify the process. One of the language learning apps we use is called Duolingo. This app has attempted to gamify the learning process by putting you in a group of 50 or so other people at a similar learning state, and then rank you based on how many lessons you complete during the week. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to this. But now that I’m faster at completing lessons, I watch the ranking every day, and it regularly pushes me to complete many more lessons each week. But you don’t need an app to gamify progress, you could get a friend or loved one to be your accountability partner, make a chart/game map and mark your progress each day you practice.

I’ve tried to learn Spanish before and always fell flat. I now realize the biggest challenge is just finding a way to practice for 15 minutes every day. I’m one month into this process and I can clearly see progress, but I can also see that is not a short-term journey. Which brings me to my final takeaway…

6. Progress takes patience.
It’s so easy to say, “I’m never going to get this. It’s too hard. I suck.” And I’ve said those things for decades. I think part of the difference now is that I hear my kids saying the same thing, which doesn’t sit well with me. So, I’m going to show them that even Dad, who is horrible at learning languages, can learn to speak Spanish, no matter how long it takes.