When Everyone Else Seems So Fluent 📖
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Hello Reader, My first year of college, approximately one million years ago, I enrolled in beginner French. Most majors at my university required at least two years of a language and I figured I'd get ahead of that. On my first day of class, I was shocked at how quickly all of my peers were picking up on the language. They were nailing their accents, understood the feminine and masculine of the nouns, the whole deal. I felt profoundly dumb and way behind. I dedicated myself, going to the language lab, trying to keep up, cranking away at my workbooks trying to master this language that somehow I was the absolute worst student of—ever, in the history of French! About halfway through the semester, I was talking to one of my classmates before class about how much harder the class was than I expected. And, lo and behold, my classmate revealed to me that everyone else in the class (about a dozen people) were already French speakers—he had a Belgian mother and grew up speaking it with her, and others had taken many years in high school. What I didn't know is that this particular professor, an adjunct, was known for not caring if people self-assigned into a lower level of a language just to get their requirements knocked out. I'd spent weeks comparing myself to folks whose proficiency and skill were thanks to years, if not a lifetime, of practice. Why share this story of my disastrous college French class? I'm sharing this anecdote because it popped into my head while I was talking to a client who shared that they just felt really out of their depth with all the marketing stuff. In corporate other folks handled all that work, and it was a "language" they'd never had the chance to acquire and there was just so much learning to do. This isn't all that different from what I experienced in French class all those years ago—I was comparing myself to people who were fluent when I was just a beginner. When you look to the left and look to the right and it feels like everyone else is so much farther along, you have no idea of the context they're coming from. They could have twenty years of experience. They could have a sister who's a marketing director at a Fortune-500 who's whispering in their ear. Or perhaps they're so heavily resourced outside of their business they can offload much of that work and look expert before they are. Wherever you are, that's where you are. There's not a right level, and being a beginner isn't a bad thing. Pick the skills you want to develop and create a plan. You won't always be the person who knows the least, and someday you'll look back at those comparisons and roll your eyes. (And just maybe it will become a good anecdote for an email newsletter.) Cordialement, Sarah
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