If I put on the ground a 10-meter long board (about 30 feet, in case you’re a US American who hasn’t enculturated the meter system yet 😉) and if I offered you $20 to walk from one end to the other, you’d probably do that in a heartbeat. Even if the board was narrow, only slightly wider than your foot, the difficulty wouldn’t be that great, and the reward would be worth it.
If, though, I put that board on top of a 10-story-high building, I bet you wouldn’t do it even if I offered you twenty-five times more. The challenge is far greater, and the reward simply isn’t worth it. There’s no good reason to risk your life for $500, you’d say. You’d be right.
Final scenario: if your child were in a burning building and the only way to reach them was to cross a narrow 10-meter long board on top of a 10-story high building, you wouldn’t even hesitate to go across. I would have to physically restrain you to keep you from attempting to walk across the board.
In these examples, borrowed loosely from Darren Hardy’s fantastic book The Compound Effect, your motivation to perform a 10-meter walk differs dramatically and yet the task to perform is essentially the same. What differs is the difficulty of performing the task safely and the reward for successfully completing the walk. If the difficulty is high enough, your desire to perform a task decreases dramatically. I couldn’t cajole or yell or inspire you enough to try the walk for just $500. Yet, if the reason to meet a challenge is great enough, I couldn’t stop you from attempting it.
What matters as we learn a language or to live in a new culture is not the difficulty of learning language and culture. What matters isn’t even so much our discipline or willpower to do the hard work of learning. What matters, most fundamentally, is why we want to do so. If you have a big enough and powerful why, then you’ll face any difficulty or challenge to accomplish your goal.
Today, we’re going to consider why your why forms a critical part of language learning and expat life, how you can discover your why power, and how you can keep your why power strong.
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Why your why matters
One of my first years in my host country, I met an expat couple who had lived here for over 20 years. I asked them how good they were in the local language, expecting to be impressed with their high level. After all, they’d be here twenty years. I still remember the husband’s response now, nearly 15 years later. He said he knows only about “50 words,” but he said with pride that he knows those 50 words really well.
In contrast, one of my profs in college met a local gal when he was stationed overseas with the military. She spoke no English and he spoke no German, but they started dating anyway. “Dating with a dictionary” he called it. In a matter of days, they blew past the 50-word mark and they quickly gained the ability to communicate deeply with each other. They married and, twenty years later, her English is near-native. He, though, stopped learning German once he went back to the US.
Why did one couple get 50 words in 20 years and the other surpassed 50 words in a matter of days? The reasons are myriad and I won’t sport with your intelligence by saying it all comes down to “one secret of language learning,” even if that might get me clickbait traffic. However, let me suggest that a big part of the difference in these examples is their why. One couple didn’t think they needed to learn the language at all, while the other desperately wanted to understand each other and knew they needed to share a language to do so.
Your “why” is your motivation.
Your “why” is your motivation. Have a big enough why, and you’ll learn a language and culture. Have a paltry why and you won’t. Darren Hardy calls it “Why power”. Just as a car with enough horsepower can drive over a mountain pass in the rain, a person with enough why power can accomplish even a lofty and challenging goal.
Why power, the affective filter, and language learning
Why power matters for being motivated to do anything important in life, but it is particularly important for language learning because of something that linguists call the affective filter.
What is the affective filter?
The affective filter, sometimes also called the affective barrier, was an idea popularized by linguists Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell as part of their Natural Approach to language learning. I won’t get into the technical linguistic weeds here, much as that fascinates me, but what Krashen and Terrell noticed was that language content in the classroom wasn’t sufficient to explain why some students learned and others didn’t. Two students heard the exact same content in the same class, and yet some students learned quickly and others appeared not to learn at all.
What they came to discover was that there were non-linguistic elements that changed how students were able to learn. As they researched, they came to understand that students who experienced negative emotions in the classroom (e.g. fear, boredom, low self-confidence etc.) weren’t learning. What was preventing learning was not the content being properly arranged; the barrier to learning was the student’s emotions.
Now, any student who is bored will have trouble learning, but what Krashen and Terrell argued goes one step further. As part of the Natural Approach, they proposed that human brains will learn language content that is comprehensible to the brain,1 but negative emotions, somehow, were preventing the brain from learning. They argued that when the affective filter is raised due to uncomfortable emotions, the language input literally does not reach the areas of the brain that processes language. The affective filter or barrier “filters out” the language input or forms a “barrier” to the brain’s language-learning abilities.
This means that a learner facing uncomfortable emotions is literally unable to learn language in the moment. It’s not just that a learner is less motivated but can push through like in other subjects. In language learning, the affective filter means that the brain just doesn’t receive the input it needs to process. A brain with a high affective filter literally cannot learn a language.
A brain with a high affective filter literally cannot learn a language.
The affective filter and why power
How does why power interact with the affective filter? Can why power lower the affective filter so that we can better learn language?
Interestingly, in Krashen and Darrell’s research, they found the three most important influences on the affective filter were motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety. If motivation and self-confidence were high and anxiety low, then the affective filter would be low and learning could take place. If, though, motivation and self-confidence were lacking or anxiety was high, then the affective filter would be raised and learning would not take place.
Low motivation means that the affective filter will be raised more often and learning slowed. High motivation, though keep the affective filter low so that your learning can progress unimpeded.2 The greater your why power, the greater your motivation, the lower the affective filter, and the better your learning.
The greater your why power, the greater your motivation, the lower the affective filter, and the better your learning.
How to build your why
Having strong motivation—not willpower, but why power—is critical to accomplishing any goal in life, but it’s particularly necessary for language learning. How, then, do you grow your why? How do you grow your motivation so that you’re not a 50-word expat but a 50,000-word expat?
In order to be motivating to you, your why has to be your own—not your parents’, not your boss’s, not your spouse’s, not your neighbor’s, and not your teacher’s. If you’re just learning a language to please your boss or because it’s a required course to graduate, you’ll never have a why that is powerful enough to push you through the challenge of learning a language.
Here’s a six-step method for helping you discover your why and be sustained for language learning. These steps are based on my years of experience as a language instructor and language learner myself.3
1. Imagine your dream
I want you to dream for a moment. It’s 10 years from now and you have the language and cultural knowledge to do what you’ve always wanted to do in your host culture, without any restrictions or limits.
Dream a little: What are you able to do? How easily can you do it? What conversations can you have? With whom can you converse? What kinds of problems can you solve? What are your relationships with locals like?
2. Write out your goal
Now, write down the above dream in 3D Omnimax Technicolor with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound. Don’t just write “I can talk to people.” Write it down in vivid detail so that you can taste, feel, and see what having that language ability will feel like. Write it down in present-tense language to help you visualize it.4
Here’s part of what my dream looks like:
I talk effortlessly with my local friends, engaging in banter and joking and puns without growing tired or having to think about what I’m saying.
I have heart-to-heart, deeply personal conversation with my wife’s family and our mutual friends.
I not only can go anywhere without planning and solve any problem, but I know how to speak winsomely so as to make friends, influence even bureaucrats to help me, and deescalate conflict should it occur.
I discuss philosophy, linguistics, and entrepreneurship with my friends and we have riveting discussions as we learn together.
Part of my language learning dream statement
You probably don’t enjoy talking about philosophy and linguistics. I’m a total nerd and enjoy those topics, so they’re in my dream.5 They shouldn’t be in yours unless you’re equally as odd as I am.6
But there will be things that you’d love to talk about: poetry, knitting, Marvel films, vaccines, clean water, cabinetry, chess, architecture, Tolkien, manga—whatever it is—write down your goal in vivid, active detail.
Your goal will set the upper limit of your language ability.
Keep in mind that your goal is going to set the upper limit of your language ability. It’s a great goal to be able to order food in the local language, but if that’s your only goal, then you’ll stop after you’ve reached that level. So, write your goal down keeping in mind it will likely set the upper limit of the level you reach in your language ability.7
3. Write down 100 reasons why you want your dream
Ok, so now that you’ve got a vivid, full-color, surround-sound, tactile dream or goal. Now I want you to do something hard but incredibly powerful: write down 100 reasons why you want that dream or goal.
Yes, 100. Yes, it will be hard. Yes, it will be a stretch. Yes, you’ll have to dig into the corners of your mind to reach 100 reasons for your dream.
That’s exactly the point. As you write out 100 reasons, the first 20-30 will come quite easily. The last 20 may feel like pulling teeth. Yet, in my experience, sometimes the most powerful reasons you want to do something are not the ones that immediately come to mind. Sometimes the most powerful reasons that fuel your why power are the last ones you came up with. That may sound counterintuitive, but do the exercise and tell me if I’m wrong.
I recently did this exercise about losing weight and just compare the first two reasons and the last two reasons I wrote down:
- Because I need to set a good example for my kids of both body weight, of self control, of caring for health.
- Because I’ll live longer—guaranteed.
- Because consistent exercise leads to better mental health: less anxiety, less depression, and better focus.
- Because learning self-control about food will improve my self-control in other areas and make me less prone to addiction.
All of those reasons are motivating to me. But notice how the very first thing that came to mind wasn’t really a motivating statement but more of a “guilt” statement. Same with the second. It’s not that those things aren’t true or aren’t motivating, but they’re not that motivating to me. The last two, though, are far more nuanced, specific, and have a lot more power in them to motivate me. Yours will be different. Discover your motivations by writing out a crazy number of reasons why you want your dream.8
Discover your motivations by writing out a crazy number of reasons why you want your dream.
4. Habitualize your why
Merely setting a high-definition goal isn’t enough; you also need to establish the habits that will lead you towards that goal. That’s a topic for an entirely other post, so I won’t delve into it here, but I didn’t want to ignore habit-making, as it’s a vital part of reaching a goal, even if it has little to do with why-power.
For more on making habits, you can’t do better than to read Atomic Habits by James Clear.9
5. Remember your why
Writing down your goal in technicolor and your reasons why you want to reach it is a crucial and incredibly impactful first step. The next thing to do is to keep the goal ever-present in front of you so that it can continually remind you, on good days and bad, of what you’re trying to achieve.
Here’s a few excellent ways to keep your motivation always before you:
Read your goal daily
Write out your goal, print or copy it, and plaster it all over your house. I have mine in the inside of my bathroom vanity, inside my dresser, inside my Bible, hanging on my desk, and more. I want to see my goals all over the place so that I’m constantly being reminded of them. I’ve even made them part of my prayers each day, asking for help to strive for and reach my goal.
Whatever you do, you want to keep the goal actively in your mind.
Review your goal quarterly
One of the things I do when I take a personal retreat is not just to de-stress but to review and clarify my goals. It may be that your life and thus goals have changed and you don’t want to strive towards the goal you set before. That’s great! As long as you are clarifying what you truly want, it’s good to change your goals. It may be, upon review, that you realize your goal is accurate and you need to redouble your efforts to achieve it. Again, that’s awesome. What matters is not to set goals once, but to review them so that they continually serve as fuel for your life.
Review your reasons regularly
Your 100 reasons for reaching your language goal shouldn’t be shoved in a drawer somewhere, even though you’re not going to review them every day. I’ve found reviewing them every few months and whenever I’m feeling discouraged or down is a great help to remembering why I want to do the hard work of gaining language fluency. There’s immense power in re-reading those somewhat regularly. Challenge yourself to add one reason to them each time you review the list!
6. Celebrate accomplishments on your journey
Especially if your goal is a lofty one—I’m looking at my riveting philosophical discussions goal—make sure to identify and celebrate road-markers on your journey to your destination. As I wrote about in It’s All In Your Head: Fostering a Growth Mindset for Language & Culture Learning, it can be discouraging to see a far goal and see no measurable progress towards it. So break it down and celebrate steps along the way.
One powerful way to do this isn’t by breaking down future steps into sub-goals to accomplish, but by looking backward at steps you’ve already taken on your journey. Four years ago, I completed an onerous legal procedure and it took me an entire day of frustration to figure it out and do it. Yesterday, I did the exact same thing in less than two hours and made friends with the bureaucrats along the way. It was a huge encouragement, linguistically and culturally, but this came from looking backward, not forward.
If you’re learning a language for work, talk with your boss if your company can even give you some incentive when you reach different levels of language ability. If you got an extra vacation day or even a raise for achieving a certain milestone, that would probably be a helpful boost to your learning!
A Caution on the Way
There’s a danger in writing out your dream in 3D Omnimax Technicolor with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound, and that is that a dream far beyond your current ability can seem impossible and thus be discouraging. This is highly dependent on each individual; for some people, a massive dream far beyond their ability is incredibly motivating. However, for some people a dream that is so big can seem impossible. If this is you, it’s good to break down the large dream into smaller goals that you vividly describe, as above. Then, when you reach one, it “unlocks” the next goal.
For help in your inspiration towards difficult goals, see some books and movies that I find deeply inspiring.
Conclusion
Understanding and harnessing your “why power” is crucial for success in both language learning and expat life. If you have a board you must walk across and if that board of language learning will take hard work, then you need powerful motivation to start and keep at the effort. Strong, vividly written “why power” will keep you going as you face challenges that would otherwise cause you to stop. This motivation not only helps in lowering the affective filter, thereby facilitating better learning, but also keeps you steadfast on your journey, ensuring you remain committed even during tough times.
Moreover, regularly revisiting and reinforcing your reasons for learning a language can sustain your motivation over the long term. By vividly imagining your goals, writing them down, and celebrating small achievements, you can keep your “why power” alive and vibrant. This continued motivation is what differentiates those who merely survive in a new language and culture from those who truly thrive. Whether your ‘why’ is to build deeper relationships, advance your career, or fully immerse yourself in a new culture, it is this powerful driving force that will ultimately determine your success.
Learning a language?
While I write about anything and everything relevant to expat life, at least one article a month will be on a topic related to language learning. Stay tuned for language learning motivation and tips along the way!
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Footnotes
- For you nerds like me: Krashen’s formulation of comprehensible input was i +1. That is, the language input needs to be just slightly (+1) more challenging than what the brain understands and then learning can take place. If the language input is the exact same level (i + 0) then no learning takes place because there is nothing new to learn. If the language input is too high, though (i + 2), then no learning takes place because the input is too challenging for the brain to comprehend. Good teachers, then, need to ensure language content is at this i +1 level. You may recognize the similarity this concept has to Zygovtsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and the concept of scaffolding. ↩︎
- This is one of the reasons why learning an “example language” to illustrate language learning methods is so ineffective. As I was learning a language learning method, I practiced the techniques on a “sample” language—was it Urdu? I don’t even remember—but I had zero interest in learning that language. My classmate, though, did want to learn Urdu and so he progressed by leaps and bounds while I dawdled. I think I aggravated my instructor by my indifference—I’m sorry, Mrs. Martin!—but, linguistically, this is exactly what we should have expected would happen. ↩︎
- I’ve been thinking about this in particular this week as I begin studying my third language, ancient Greek. That textbook, quite helpfully, started with the “study tip” of focusing on why you want to learn a language—and thus inspired this entire article. ↩︎
- Brian Tracy argues for this, along with other great tips for goal-writing, in his excellent book Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want — Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible. Highly recommended. ↩︎
- My major in college was Philosophy and my master’s degree was in education with a focus in ESL. Yes, I’m nerd enough that I actually majored in those topics. ↩︎
- If you are, then reach via email or social media: I’d love to meet you. ↩︎
- This is another reason why philosophy is in my goal. I don’t have philosophical conversations that often, even in English, but philosophical conversations require a high degree of fluency and so I’ve set that as my goal and standard. ↩︎
- Ok, confession time: I didn’t actually write out 100 reasons for losing weight; it was “just” 68. I don’t actually care if you literally hit 100 reasons or not, though you should get close. The goal of the exercise is to force yourself to keep thinking and chewing on your motivations. Simply writing down 30 reasons won’t get you there. You won’t really start considering the deeper motivations until you get to reason 50 or so. ↩︎
- One note of caution: James Clear argues in Atomic Habits that goals are less effective or important than habits, but I think this is a false dichotomy. Writing down your goals help you understand where you want to go; habits help you reach the destination. If you want to practice medicine in the local language, that is a different goal and will require quite different habits than if your goal is to coach badminton in the local language. If you want to be able to type in the local language, that will require different habits than if you want to write by hand in the local language.
I thus see goals and habits as complementarily, whereas Clear writes about them as if they were mutually exclusive. Goals help you know where you want to go, habits help you get there.
In the chapter where Clear argues against setting goals, he notes that what makes a football team successful isn’t because they set a goal of winning but because they establish habits that help them win. While this is true, it’s only true because, in the setting of a football game, there is a universally agreed-upon goal: winning. Thus, because the goal is already clear to all, what matters are habits. In most of life, though, the goal is not so obviously clear or universally agreed upon. For example, is it a better goal to be a traveling salesperson or to sleep in my own bed each night? One is not obviously better than the other and so habits don’t help you at all. You have to first know where you want to go–establish your goal–and then you can make habits to help you get there. Making fantastic habits without a clear goal is like driving a well-tuned car in circles or, worse, the wrong direction. ↩︎