Why Your French Self Might Be the Braver One – And What It Reveals About Learning Later in Life | Sixty and Me

One of my students once described her French self as “who I might have been if nobody had taught me to second-guess myself.” I knew exactly what she meant. When adults speak another language, the usual internal commentary – will this sound silly, will I get it wrong – loosens its grip. Something about the very act of stepping outside English interrupts the habits of a lifetime.

French, in particular, invites a different stance. You have to send your voice forward. You have to land your sounds with intention. You cannot mumble your way through liaison or glide over endings the way English sometimes lets us. The language has a built-in courage to it, and many people find themselves borrowing that courage long before they feel “fluent.”

People often assume confidence in speaking French comes from mastering grammar. But grammar, while useful, isn’t the real engine of change. What shifts people is sound. Rhythm. The physicality of the voice. When your mouth shapes a new pattern, your brain follows. You enter a different cognitive state – one with fewer inhibitions and a surprising amount of freedom.

Sometimes students tell me that speaking French feels like putting on a beautifully cut jacket. They stand differently. They feel more expressive. They notice themselves listening with more attention and speaking with more intention. Nothing about their life circumstances has changed in that moment – yet they have changed, subtly but unmistakably.

It’s extraordinary how quickly belonging can appear once someone begins to sound French. Not perfect. Not native. Just committed to the music of the language. A hesitating beginner who tries to place their voice in the right rhythm is often received more warmly by French speakers than someone with a larger vocabulary but no feel for cadence.

I’ve watched people who once felt invisible in French cafés or markets suddenly be met with a smile, a longer conversation, or a comment like “vous parlez très bien.” This is not about performing Frenchness. It is about giving yourself permission to go along with another culture’s way of expressing itself and, by doing that, stepping into a different version of your own.

And that version is often more open, more spirited, and more confident than we expected.

By the time we reach our 50s, 60s or 70s, most of us have lived through enough reinventions to know that identity isn’t fixed. Careers evolve. Families take new shapes. Confidence rises, dips, rebuilds. What we rarely expect, however, is that learning a language could reveal a part of ourselves we haven’t met before.

Yet again and again, women tell me that French reconnects them to something they worried they had lost: a sense of play, experimentation, curiosity and risk-taking that life sometimes squeezes out of us. Speaking in another language removes the pressure to be polished. You are allowed – even encouraged – to be imperfect. And that softens the rules many of us have lived by for decades.

This is why fluency isn’t simply a skill. It is a state. A way of feeling. A psychological space we step into where we are permitted to explore without judgement. And when that space exists, confidence tends to grow without being forced.

Many of the women I teach share a common experience: they didn’t lose their confidence because they lacked ability. They lost it because they were judged, silenced, overlooked or expected to “get everything right.” French, with its musicality and forward-moving rhythm, helps loosen that grip of perfectionism.

Learning to speak with a gentle liaison, or allowing the voice to drop at the end of a sentence instead of lifting (as many English speakers do), creates a subtle emotional shift. You feel more anchored. More assured. More willing to continue even when you hesitate.

This time of year often nudges us to look ahead. Not with resolutions – we know they rarely survive beyond the second week of January – but with a simpler question: how do I want to feel in the year to come? You might consider French as part of that answer. Not because it is a grand reinvention, but because it lets you experience yourself differently – more expressive, more present, more willing to try.

When we experiment with language something shifts. We find ourselves speaking with more intention. We hear our voice in a new shape. We notice the part of us that is willing to take a small risk, turning an ordinary Tuesday morning into something that puts a spring back in our step. It’s a reminder that the changes we seek don’t always arrive through big decisions. They often arrive through small actions, mini experiments, and the willingness to try again.

I often think of French as a doorway. On the other side is not a more “perfect” version of us, but a more spacious one – the us who is allowed to experiment, unpressured by old expectations, surprised to discover she has more courage than she imagined.

What part of you have you not heard from in a while – and what might she say if you gave her a different language to speak in? Where in your life would a little more boldness make the biggest difference? And if you stepped through a doorway into a braver version of yourself, what is the first small thing she would do?