They say, “Life is hard, get a helmet.”

Well, speaking a language when people place their expectations on you can feel just as unsafe.

Trying to use your Spanish only to have your family criticize you, or feeling nauseated at the thought of having to speak with new people, is a reality many of us face when trying to connect with our home language and culture.

But the good news is that you don’t have to know how to do something, and much less do it perfectly, to feel more confident. Here are a few recommendations to increase your confidence.

Context

To build your confidence in your language abilities and self-identification, it helps to understand the neuroscience of confidence and then connect it to our language learning journey.

Let Confidence Commence: In the prefrontal cortex.

This part of the brain is responsible for real-time decision-making, including reviewing past experiences to determine whether a space is safe to take risks. If you are stressed and/or focused on the negative experiences you have had with using your Spanish, you will have a difficult time regulating your emotions and accessing the language you have always had and/or have been practicing. We’ve all had that moment when we are speaking with someone and panic because we’ve forgotten a word or phrase we have used a bajillion times. When you are in those high-stress moments, the hormone cortisol is being released into your system, which puts you in high alert, “fight or flight,” aka going to the default or dominant language, rather than allowing you to feel safe enough to practice words and phrases that you know. The good news is that there are other hormones, like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, that we can use to support our feelings of resilience and safety, helping us access that language and those memories.

Which brings us to…memory.

Memory

Your brain is always trying to keep you safe. Unfortunately, that often means keeping us small because risk-taking can lead to pain (physical/emotional), and that memory is the evidence your brain initially presents when you are trying to expand. To build confidence, we need to build evidence that we can do hard things. This will require risk-taking. Since we know our prefrontal cortex gets hijacked when we don’t feel safe, we need safe spaces and communities to take those risks in. Find people, communities, and strategies that help you baby-step towards using your language in new ways, reminding you that mistakes do not define who you are; they are how you become who you say you are. Confidence builds when we create memories that remind us we can do new and hard things. And because we do hard things, we grow in confidence, which takes us to the “Confidence-Competence Loop”.

Confidence Competence Loop

“There’s a curious paradox in the neuroscience of confidence: you don’t need to be competent to feel confident, but feeling confident often makes you more competent.” (Sciencenewstoday.com)

We see this, for example, when people with no expectations placed on their language confidently speak our home language in our home country. They feel confident speaking Spanish, even as beginners or when making mistakes, because it does not challenge their identity. Meanwhile, for many of us who grew up outside our home language and culture, we are shattered when someone speaks to us in English instead of Spanish, calls us “no sabo” or “gringa”.

But we all have unique language stories and abilities. Our language ability does not dictate who we are or how we identify. We have a right to access and practice our language. Additionally, we have a responsibility to practice our language and maintain it in our home culture and in the diaspora. The more that we recognize that our language ability is not fixed but instead a reflection of how we were raised, who we admire, and who we aim to be, the more we can honor our language ability today and stand with confidence in order to grow our competence.

Practice

1. Practice language in safe spaces.
2. Baby-step your risk-taking to build evidence that you can do new/hard things, and even if you make a mistake, you are still worthy of your language and culture.
3. Ask questions to start figuring out how you identify, what your values are, and what your language goals are.

​​”Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

Conclusion

Your language ability today reflects your unique experiences. Building confidence is the key to further growth.

If you would like to join a community focused on language practice rather than perfection, check out our 90-day challenge to practice language risk-taking in a supportive community. Click here.​

For more on the neuroscience of confidence, check out this article.