Why Unrealistic Goals Can Work for Language Learning (I Set Impossible Goals – And It Kind Of Works!)

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[00:00:02.420] - Oliver (Host)

Hello, listener. Hello, student. First of all, thank you to all of my listeners who started with me in 2025. And thank you for coming back. And if you're new, well, you may be here because it's your New Year's resolution to improve your English. If so, welcome. I hope you enjoy the episode and the podcast in general. But even if it turns out that you love this podcast, even if you think I have a unique point of view, an accent that's easy to understand, or that I choose interesting and unusual topics, which is my aim, it is unlikely you will still be here in February. According to the Internet, and we all know you can trust the Internet completely, 80 to 90 % of New Year's resolutions fail, and most of you will have given up on improving your English by February, the second month of this year. And the reason for this failure? It's not because people don't care, but because the goals themselves are often unrealistic, unclear, or demoralising. Or simply not worth it. And even though I know that, even though I could explain exactly how to set a sensible, achievable goal, and I will explain that in this episode, I'm possibly not ever going to be able to follow my own advice completely.

[00:01:33.460] - Oliver (Host)

My own resolutions are often numerous, unachievable, and fundamentally depressing. This episode is about that contradiction, and it is an attempt to show you why I think that this slightly odd perspective can sometimes be beneficial. Let me explain myself, and let's make sure that you are part of the 10 % who manages to carry on and to achieve your English-speaking goals.

[00:02:01.720] - Oliver (Host)

Welcome to English and Beyond, the intermediate-level English learning podcast with unusual topics or ordinary topics with an unusual perspective. My name is Oliver, and I'm an English teacher from London, and I'm very happy to have you here with me at the beginning of the year, student. I do love hearing from my listeners by email or comments on YouTube or Spotify, like this example from Qandil about a recent episode I did for this podcast about studying Arabic as an adult. "Many thanks for your time and effort in making that video and sharing that personal and fascinating story with us all." So thank you very much, Qandil, for that kind comment. And I hope that you too, listener, feel comfortable to practise your English by getting in touch with me. If you find anything in this podcast hard to understand, there's a transcript and flashcards available to help you with the tough vocab available for free at morethanalanguage.com.

[00:03:03.760] - Oliver (Host)

Plus, I've now added for all episodes from now on, some vocab exercises to help you consolidate and expand your vocabulary - that is to improve the range of words you feel comfortable using. But for now, it's the new year, 2026. Are you excited? I'm recording this in the first week of January. I love this time of year. I I love the so-called bleak midwinter, the miserable time in the middle of the year's coldest season, when the trees are without leaves, the skies are grey, and the weather is chilly. But why would I like a time hated, loathed by so many other people. Well, the reason I like it is because it reminds me of my family and my mum in particular. She's from Scotland, the most northern nation within the UK, and she loves the cold. I just spent Christmas with her, and she keeps her house so cold, I may as well have been sleeping outside. But because my mum is from Scotland, and specifically the city of Glasgow, she's always been much more interested in New Year than Christmas. This, incidentally, may have something to do with the fact that Christmas was banned, it was prohibited in Scotland for over 400 years because it was viewed as a Catholic, superstitious and unbiblical holiday.

[00:04:33.220] - Oliver (Host)

This meant that New Year's Eve, Hogmanay, as it's called in Scotland, became the main winter festival in that country, and that influence can still be seen today. What's this got to do with my New Year's resolutions? Well, Scotland, in addition to prioritising the New Year, has a perhaps unfair reputation for being quite a dour country. Dour is actually a word that comes from Scottish roots, it has a Scottish origin. It's a great word, meaning gloomy, stern, severe, harsh. And my mum, although she has always been a really loving, caring mother, was not exactly touchy feely. She didn't usually express a great deal of affection in comparison to the other mothers where I grew up in the south of the UK. She considered a lot of that public motherly affection to performative, something for other people to see and be impressed by. And it is true that when it came down to it, when it really mattered, I never doubted, even for a second, just how much she loved me. But she always had extremely high expectations for me, especially educationally. And these expectations, combined with her love for New Year's Eve, meant that I think I developed a mini obsession with the transformative power of New Year's resolutions.

[00:06:03.940] - Oliver (Host)

We are told that resolutions, and all goals in general, should be smart. S-m-a-r-t. That means that for a resolution to be effective, each resolution should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, S-M-A-R-T, SMART, ensuring objectives are clear, actionable, and trackable, moving from a vague aspiration to a concrete, successful outcome. So, let's apply these ideas to a specific goal. Let's say that you feel pretty happy with your ability to write and even speak English to create your own sentences. But the second that a native speaker opens his or her mouth in the real world, you freak out. You understand nothing, you panic. So you want to to improve your listening skills. And you set for yourself the following SMART goal, telling yourself, for the next four weeks, I will work on my listening skills by listening to one English podcast episode per week from start to finish without pausing. I will then listen to the same episode again with the transcript and create flashcards for five new words or expressions I didn't fully understand the first time. Now, our SMART breakdown could be as follows: Specific: one episode per week, two listens, five new items. Measurable: you either completed the two listens and made the flashcards or you didn't.

[00:07:45.560] - Oliver (Host)

Achievable: one episode per week is manageable for most intermediate listeners. Realistic: the focus is intermediate listening comprehension, not total fluency or perfection. Time bound: the next four weeks, not a vague "sometime this year". So, student, you could try changing the resolutions you've already written to make them SMART. Writing this episode has made me think that I should maybe try to do the same. To date, that is, until now, my goals have been a little different. With my tongue firmly in my cheek, which means with a sense of irony, with dry humour, I've always had a different perspective. I've aimed to make my New Year's resolutions unreasonable, vague, and almost depressing. In fact, unlike most people, I don't really expect or hope to achieve them at all. I'm not entirely sure why, but I have always been driven much more by pressure than by encouragement. Most of the things I'm proud of, I achieved while telling myself I hadn't done enough yet, that I needed to push harder, that I could do better. The goals themselves were completely unrealistic, deliberately so. I never set the goals with completion in mind. I set them to be just out of reach so that I would keep moving endlessly towards them, but never quite get them.

[00:09:18.290] - Oliver (Host)

And even though I fail every year, what I do manage to achieve along the way is sometimes surprisingly solid. The thing is, I'd be slightly embarrassed to tell you what my resolutions actually are this year. They're excessive. Borderline ridiculous, really. If I said them out loud, you'd probably assume I was either wildly optimistic or quietly insane. Even just with language learning, for example, I'm studying French and Arabic at the moment and trying to maintain my Spanish. But as usual, I've set myself goals for these languages that are far beyond what anyone would call sensible or maybe even possible. And I do recognise the downside of that. It's tiring. The goalposts keep moving. There's always something else to improve, something else to fix, something else I haven't done well enough yet. I rarely get that clean sense of arrival, that feeling of relief that says, Good. Well done, Oliver. You've achieved that. But I've also learned to be honest with myself. I've always worked most effectively this way. I don't respond particularly well to gentle encouragement or comforting messages. I work most consistently when I feel a certain level of self dissatisfaction, a certain level of unhappiness with myself, when the goal that I'm working towards always feels out of reach.

[00:10:54.020] - Oliver (Host)

So I'm not totally interested in changing this attitude completely. To be with you, I'm scared that if I am too realistic with my goals, if I'm too kind to myself, I'll settle for less, I'll achieve less, and that will upset me more in the long term. So what I am interested in is modifying my attitude. I don't want to stop setting ambitious, unrealistic goals. I just don't want to feel flat or empty when I do finally reach one of them. So this year, I'm trying something slightly different, keeping the big, unreasonable, but inspiring dreams, but anchoring them with smaller, clearer goals, SMART goals, that I can actually tick off along the way. Not everyone is motivated by endless positivity and reassurance. Some of us respond better to pressure than praise. But even then, I suppose it's probably healthy to feel proud of yourself, at least occasionally. So, student, if you're listening to this in January and you feel that familiar pressure to finally do something about your English, here's my advice - and it's probably not what most people would give you: don't allow yourself to give up by saying you need to be kinder to yourself or by lowering your expectations.

[00:12:21.200] - Oliver (Host)

Be unrealistic. Set goals that are too big, slightly absurd, and frankly, impossible to complete properly. If you're anything like me, that pressure might be exactly what keeps you moving. But importantly, let's not rely on the big goal to do all the hard work for us. Big goals are terrible at that. Let's give ourselves something smaller and concrete that you can actually repeat. Listening to this podcast, for example, making a few flashcards, noticing what you didn't understand. Let the ambition stay unreasonable. Just don't expect it to do all the heavy lifting. If you're still here in February, good. I'm very happy to see that. If not, make sure you get back here in March or April. You're never going to achieve your dream of perfect English without that hard work. And if that sounds mean, maybe it will be effective. Maybe that's just how some of us work best. Thank you for listening, and make sure I see you next week.