Out of many relationships you have, how’s the relationship with your own language going ?
Tags: Languge, Second Language, Communication, English, Mindset

On a peaceful weekend afternoon, I look over my backyard through the family room window. Trees are fighting against the cold winter’s strong wind with their bare bodies. Actually I am not sure whether they are really naked and protesting. Maybe the more correct description would be that they cover their vulnerable and soft life systems in their thick bark in the harmony with the cold winter. While staring at their winter performances, I imagine blooming of yellow-green leaves and white, pink or red flowers on branches, green greetings spread on the brown earthly ground, and fresh humming sounds of melted icy water in the stream. Closing my eyes in one winter day, I am day-dreaming a beautiful spring scene that promises the potentials of abundance, growth and generosity.

Why am I talking about imagining the profusion? As that is the gift I would like to give to myself in this new year. A deeper, clearer, well-understood and nurturing self-relationship. It sounds really good, doesn’t it? But how? How can I and we can grow a better relationship with ourselves? I do not have a one-size-fits-all solution. But I got a glimpse of one solution from my family book club discussion.

The book’s title can be translated as ‘a communication container’. The author argues that each of us has own communication container which size is different depending on who you are. If that container is small, as we cannot hold a lot of water in a small bowl, one cannot hold deep thoughts and many stories in that communication container with patience. All kinds of unpurified words will flow out from that container easily without any consideration on the impacts to other people’s mind and relationships. In the meanwhile, if the communication container has enough space, one can rethink and contemplate on the words and ideas, and present polished and well-organized languages to other people. Those ripened words are considerate, kind and can touch other people’s mind. So far so good. But the author pulls a reader’s hand further to make one more step forward.

Do you want to improve your communication? Then learning communication skills is not the answer. Learning how to speak well is like cooking an instant food. If you put variety of instant foods on the table, in the beginning they will taste good because they are already prepared using the error-proof methods. However, repeatedly buying and cooking instant foods does not help you to improve your own cooking skills. To present your delicious food, you need to know how to choose good materials, how long to cook with which method and even how to display the food in what shapes and colors of different plates.

If we want to improve communication, the author argues that we need to understand ourselves first and then change our mind sets. If your mind is changed, your language will be changed. And the author asked the readers. How long and what kind of efforts did you make to improve the relationship with your language? Out of many questions from that book, this question was impressive and eye-opening for me. I always thought that I was more interested in correct word-choices and sensitivity of communication impacts than on average. But, I could not think of any consistent efforts I poured to my language itself to take care of my own relationship with it. The language was a fixed tool for me, not an alive thing. I felt bad and another fact that I realized a long time ago was overlapped on top of that question in my mind.

We cannot think or even feel without a language. If you do not know a vocabulary to express your thought, there is no way for you to think about that concept correctly. If you do not have a explicit word to describe your feeling, there is no way for you to feel it thoroughly. With a little bit of over simplification and exaggeration, the language you use is you. So if your language reservoir is empty, your thought and feeling will be futile. If your language account has a high balance, the self-relationship will grow with a compound interest rate.

Let me borrow one more concept from the author. She mentioned about the human being’s strong desire to be productive. Almost at the level of an instinct. The productivity here means doing valuable things for others or for the next generation and being loyal to values beyond one’s interest. And when people feel the productivity, the self-capability sense grows inside. On top of these views, I add one more point. In many cases, the productivity will be decided by the degrees of impact to others, but the following self-capability judgement is based on the self-talking regarding the performance against the measurements in one’s mind value system.

Here my confession comes in. It is critical to grow vocabularies to enrich your language. It is important to polish your conversation styles to communicate with others well. However, if one puts a predetermined tag on one’s language, a cultivating relationship to language that encourages improvement is impossible. It is simply like whatever you do, the score card is already written with little possibility of being re-written. And I suspect that that’s what I have done for the last more than 10 years. Sometimes, I pretended that I was not worried about my communication level. I tried to give a fake impression to myself that I was working on my communication skills. I gave a false positive generosity saying that it is acceptable to be a less effective communicator. Other times, regardless of people’s feedback, I judged that my communication was really bad and unqualified. I silently put a name tag that I was an unorganized speaker with low self-confidence. I deceived myself that I could speak and write well in my native language, but I could not be a successful communicator as I am using a second language, English. In other words, I kept moving back and forth between two extreme measurements. I have neglected the inner relationship with my language. I postponed looking at my language carefully and taking care of it. I naively assume that my language will grow and get better as I get old.

With that question from the book, I started to look at my language in my mind that had been wondering while searching for warmer attention, clearer directions and more nourishment. Sometimes, it came out from my mouth in undeveloped format like a wild crying animal captured in a bars cage. Sometimes, it refused to come out in this world like a shivering rabbit in its cave. In either way, I was hurt and my self-capability sense went down. With pre-determined judgements, my language got lost for a long time. At the same time, I expect a high performance from my language. Yes, it was confusing and contradictory.

I took my situation as a big disadvantage to my growth that I needed to make a living in English and I still cannot claim the full familiarity with that second language . In many times, I felt stuffed in my throat emotionally and heard the soundless scream swirling inside. However, now my perspective is changed. As my long time ago yoga mentor told me, I have a relative advantage rather than a disadvantage to observe my own thinking and communication systems using English. It is simply because when one is so used to something, one can hardly realize it. However, when one needs to deal with an unfamiliar thing, one can start observing the corresponding familiar things with a fresh eye through comparison.

It would not be easy to rip off the old tags that have settled in my mind for a long time, but I will work on cleaning up my prejudices on my own language and allow a space in my mind to improve my relationship with English for now. I believe when people work on building a safer and more comforting relationship with own language, the communication container will be expanded and be stronger. And after that, we can work on improving communication skills just like deciding which patterns and decorations we want to put on the container to make it look more pleasing and better.