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What motivation techniques do you use? | ||
Tags: Motivation | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| nescafe Senior Member Japan Joined 5400 days ago 137 posts - 227 votes  | Message 17 of 36 19 May 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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To be honest, my motivation is that I hate my country, hahaha.
My dream is to live in a Chinatown and put on Manchurian costume, having a tea time everyday. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| evandempsey Diglot Newbie Ireland Joined 5675 days ago 27 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Italian, Russian | Message 18 of 36 21 May 2010 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||
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All my life I have been very bad at motivating myself. I would procrastinate endlessly on things I wanted to do or learn, and the procrastination seemed to grow in proportion to the importance of the goal. I missed many educational and employment opportunities because of this, and gave many people the impression that I am lazy and incapable. About two months ago I started to research motivation techniques. I discovered some techniques that have allowed me to work between five and seven hours every day on personal goals since then. I don't feel burned out and I am confident that I will be able to continue working at this rate.
Some of the techniques are taken directly from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The idea is that if you want to work productively you need to bypass the thought processes that make working seem like an unattractive prospect. Here are some of the techniques I use: Time-Boxing / The Pomodoro Technique: When you consider the project that you want to complete, you probably see it as a whole that needs to be tackled in one go. This makes you reluctant to start. You feel that once you start you will have to go on for hours and engage in all sorts of unpleasantness in order to complete the project. My solution: I promise myself that I will work for 25 minutes. This is a good length of time to maintain concentration. I set a countdown timer on my phone or on my computer and once I start it off I work until it rings out. Then I stop immediately. I usually get up and drink a glass of water and sit down to complete another 25 minute period. The idea is to do less work than you are capable of doing on the project. If you work until burnout every time you sit down to learn your language or whatever, the activity will start to have negative connotations. The key is to stop when you still want to work. It has often been said on this site that frequent short bouts of study are more effective than long burnout stints. This technique will allow you to complete many short bouts and maintain concentration when you want to work for longer periods. Comparing Predicted and Actual Enjoyment: When we are not working on something we often think that working on it would be unpleasant. Most of us, however, are capable of enjoying our work or study and taking pride in a job well done or a movement towards our goals. Anxiety and catastrophic thinking about how horrible it would be to work often play a part in procrastination. We often radically overrate the difficulty of the work we are putting off, and underrate the enjoyment that we would get out of it. My solution to this is to make a chart with 5 columns. the first column is the name of the task and the date. the second column is for predicted difficulty, the third for predicted enjoyment, the fourth for actual difficulty and the fifth for actual enjoyment. Before I start to work on something about which I feel some trepidation, I fill in the Predicted Difficulty and Predicted Enjoyment columns with a number between 1 and 100. When I have finished the hour (Or whatever amount of time. I count two 25 minute periods as an hour because of the intensity with which I am able to work in this time.) I fill in the Actual Difficulty and Actual Enjoyment columns. Doing this for a while made me see that I was greatly underestimating the pleasure and overestimating the pain I got from working. I did this every day at the start and I do it every two days now, or whenever I feel my motivation flagging. It helps to remind me of the original goal of my work and studies, which was to enjoy myself and improve my life. Combating Perfectionism: We are often scared of working because we are scared of making mistakes. Many of us are have been taught to associate the quality of our work and our achievements with our worth as human beings. Pushy parents and schools that treat us like cattle usually don't help. Also, in this day and age many of us work in "white collar" jobs where we seldom have the experience of unambiguous failure. We are not used to failing and we let it affect our self-esteem when we do. Putting off tasks at which we know we are going to make mistakes is therefore an attempt to preserve self-esteem. I use several techniques to combat my fear of making mistakes. I have written a little essay, "Why it is OK to make mistakes." I included such points as "mistakes are unavoidable on the road to mastering a skill." "Even the most accomplished people make mistakes, and you can be sure that they made lots of them when they were learning their craft. They probably made more mistakes than anyone, because they put in more time." "Making a mistakes is not an indication that I lack talent. Hard work trumps talent every time anyway." Every time I feel myself getting discouraged I get a piece of paper and write out points like this. Sure, they are platitudes, but they are true nonetheless, and we forget them all too often. This seems like a really cheesy thing to do, and I felt like that when I started, but for me the ends have more than justified the means. Refuting your own excuses: We often use weak excuses to put off tasks that we don't feel particularly good about doing. I find myself bargaining with myself in this way, saying things like, "I can't really work on that until my new book comes from Amazon," or "I won't take notes while reading this chapter because I only have this shitty biro and I hate the way it scrapes against the paper." My solution to this is to get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and write at the top of the left column, "I want to work on [insert task]." Then in the column on the right I write the lousy excuse that I have concocted. I then return to the left column and write a refutation of my excuse. I might write, for example, "you don't really need that book to do worthwhile study. You have a PDF of it on your computer anyway. You can use that." Then I write the next excuse in the right-hand column: "But I hate reading off the screen. It hurts my eyes. It's better to just wait." back to the left-hand column: "You say that, but you just spent an hour writing a post on a forum. You are perfectly capable of reading off the screen." I continue that process until I have run out of excuses. I am usually much more willing to start working then. When I started doing using these techniques I felt very silly, but I soon saw how effective they were and now I don't care what anybody thinks. The three books that taught them to me or helped me to come up with them are "Feeling Good" by David Burns, "The Now Habit", by Neil Fiore, and "The Pomodoro Technique" by Francesco Cirillo. I would recommend anybody to check them out. Edited by evandempsey on 21 May 2010 at 11:07am 26 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kampernaut Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5373 days ago 38 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 19 of 36 24 May 2010 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Fascinating post Evan. Procrastination is my bête noire too. Thanks for the book references.
I have always found that these types of techniques tend to work for me in the short term but I slip back into my old bad habits. You seem convinced that this won't happen to you. Why is that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| michamotor Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5431 days ago 23 posts - 31 votes Speaks: German*, Czech, French, English Studies: Hungarian | Message 20 of 36 01 June 2010 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
Most of the time I spend with language learning , it is exactly the same. I even loved to read my grammar book for French grammar, and I did it a lot. It is very different with English, because I just need it for practical reasons, to take part in a conversation like this or for business. When I really need to improve my English, I can be useful to read your motivation techniques again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 21 of 36 01 June 2010 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
SRS is a very powerful technique to force you to not break the chain. I use Anki for SRS. I use it for sentences although the 'don't break the chain' works for words, photos, audio, whatever. I use target language sentences only and look up any words I don't know in a pop-up dictionary. So you need to set a target. I think 10,000 sentences all copied from target language material that interests you and that you want to read anyway. SRS is effective in 'don't break the chain' because if you miss a day or so, the work (reviews) piles up. After just one missed day, you have twice as much review to do. It never goes away until you do it, and the easiest is daily. Since you have a target to learn XXXXX sentences, you need to be adding these sentences regularly, ideally a few every day along with your reviews. This keeps you engaged daily with your active reading in material you enjoy. The SRS and the reading should be supplemented with other activities such as audio/video and conversations. So the SRS process is the series of XXXs or the unbroken links in the chain. I have been doing SRS in my main target language now for 1.4 years and have reached 7,855 sentences on my way to 10,000. I effectively haven't missed a day because Anki always forces me to do the ones I miss, which have been very few. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Guido Super Polyglot Senior Member ArgentinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6519 days ago 286 posts - 582 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Catalan, Dutch, Swedish, Danish Studies: Russian, Indonesian, Romanian, Polish, Icelandic | Message 22 of 36 04 June 2010 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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My motivation is the love and passion for languages. Optimism, self-confidence, time,
perseverance and patience are also necessary. Have a nice day! Guido.- 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 23 of 36 04 June 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just found the website www.structuredprocrastination.com the other day.
It describes (from the point of view of a university lecturer with a tendency to procrastinate) how procrastination isn't a bad habit to be disposed of, but a pattern of behaviour that must be accepted and worked around. His views have been a bit of an eye-opener to me, and I now feel I can stop beating myself up for putting things off and start finding ways to make sure everything gets done. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| apatch3 Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6176 days ago 80 posts - 99 votes Speaks: Pashto, English* Studies: Japanese, FrenchA2 | Message 24 of 36 14 June 2010 at 9:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Some excellent Ideas here
1 person has voted this message useful |
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