Testing the Principles

Hey! So, last week I mentioned that I began reading a book, "The Power of Full Engagement" that a friend loaned to me. Well, this week I have had the opportunity to test out some of the principles from the book regarding my emotional and mental dimensions that were being challenged.

My teacher does a great job of working on my tones to make sure that I am speaking them correctly, but she does not always listen to me when I try to talk to her about my roadblocks in learning Mandarin. It has only happened a few times, but there have been a couple of classes where I have needed to take a break from practicing tones and work on something else as to not want to scream and walk out of class because I was frustrated. For me personally I always do better if I step away from a frustrating situation for a little bit, and then come back to it a little later on. Unfortunately, this week when one of those times occurred, instead of taking a brief break from tones, my teacher felt the need to keep pushing me and was literally in my face trying to correct my tones. I literally shut down at that point. My teacher finally realized that she was not challenging me to be better at that point, but was literally overdoing it. So, after taking a little break I went back to learning, but with something new instead.

That night I sat thinking if I could have done something to better communicate with my teacher, if I could have prepared myself better to have not gotten so emotional to the point of shutting down in class, and how I could mentally take this experience and not let it keep me from wanting to work on tones in future classes. So, I thought about some of the principles that I had just read about, and these were the ones that resonated with me the most. Like with training muscles physically - you have to stress them to the point of discomfort, but if you stress them too much or over train them, then injury can occur. The same is true emotionally - you need to be stressed emotionally so that you are challenged, but stressed too much and it becomes negativity. And mentally - the need to be stressed in order to focus attention, but over-stressed and it leads to burnout. So, my teacher and I talked about these things the next class and things were much better.

I realized that while I felt like I had been doing a good job of communicating with my teacher, that I needed to be doing it on a more consistent basis. I also realized that I needed to listen to her input as well in regards to ways of learning Mandarin easier rather than only using my methods. And of course, when needed there are a few pieces of fitness equipment in a nearby classroom that I can always go use during the class break since that makes me happy. Honestly, I feel like class was even better at the end of the week after all of this transpired.

Well, hoping you all are well and enjoying Memorial Day weekend.

P.S. I do not have pictures of the campus for you since it rained all week last week, and I was not able to take pictures. This week's weather is projected to be nicer, so hoping to have those this week instead.