Yeah, I had no idea either. But that was the case the other night when I went out with a buddy of mine to a Spanish-speaking Meetup. It was more his idea than me loving it. I will admit; I was a little hesitant considering I don’t know a lick of Spanish. Not to say that my buddy spoke Spanish but enough to carry on a much better conversation than I ever could. But you know, going to this actually made sense. How? Who knows…?
So going there, it ended up being a really good time. It started off rough because the organizers were sticklers about making sure everyone spoke Spanish, which is fine. But what if you want to learn conversational Spanish? Telling someone what something in Spanish means…IN SPANISH doesn’t really help. But as we moved along it got a lot better. We met a few people who only spoke Spanish and some who were trying to – not nearly as hard as I was. But I can honestly say that I was carrying conversation with two women using my best broken Spanish (thank you Emilie and Caitlyn).
AND THEY KNEW WHAT I WAS SAYING TOO!
Then, somehow, it was said that I could speak a little bit of French so then I was speaking in French while the woman was answering in Spanish. Needless to say, that became a mess quickly. But we had fun goofing around.
Just comes to show that you REALLY can do anything if you keep an open mind. It also occurred to me that these are the kinds of things that everyone should be doing. If you want to go completely out of your comfort zone, going to a meetup where they don’t speak much English would make the list.
Did I forget to mention that being daring and adventurous is attractive?
Sure, this would be a dramatic example but the important thing here is that I never once thought about saying NO to this. My mentality was, “How am I going to pull this off?” There was no doubt in my mind that it would work out eventually. But you have to build that kind of confidence within yourself to allow yourself to submerge into the realm of the unknown.
The best stories told are from the situations that were the least expected.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.