Proceed with an attitude of utter conviction

In her book Dr. Kato Lomb lists her 10 commandments for language learning. The tenth is to be firmly convinced that you are a linguistic genius.

Attitude is that important.

As Henry Ford said:

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.

But I think that there's more. It's possible to inflate your confidence to some extent, but not as much as if your conviction was based upon a solid foundation.

(The metaphor of a house built on sand or on rock fits right here.) 

What are those expressions called - when you repeat positive thoughts to yourself? Oh yes, self-affirmations. It seems to me that that practice wouldn't work so well in a vacuum. 

The history of my folly

Preserve your mistakes for posterity. 

Perhaps you don’t regard making a mistake as actually bad. Perhaps you are quite resigned to the need to make mistakes in order to learn, and you need no convincing as to their value. 

But there might remain a sense of embarrassment.

It feels embarrassing to blunder. You feel a fool when you put your foot in your mouth. You feel like a dick when you trip, a klutz when you stutter (I could go on . . . )

And that’s not good, because any such inhibitions have the effect of slowing you down and making you do less. So here’s a strategy that you could use.

Write down your best bloopers. Start a collection of your goofs. Turn them into anecdotes that you tell at your own expense. Trot them out at parties, and be the loudest to laugh. 

In her book, Dr Kato Lomb refers often to “the history of my folly”. She is not too shy to recount a number of personally embarrassing incidents.  

That’s one way to reduce their potency, and take away the sting. That’s how you neutralize their poison, and remove their fangs. 

The only ‘disadvantage’ with this technique is that you are much less likely to repeat those entertaining mistakes.

Linguistic micro-climate

Another idea that I came up, and that may have been independently discovered, is what I call a Private XXX World (insert your target language).

Kato Lomb has previously written about "a personal linguistic micro-climate". I would need to read up to find out exactly what she means.

Anyway, what I mean is to set up situations in your environment that make it automatic that you are exposed to your target language throughout the day. 
That is, you normalize yourself to the idea of having it around. 

Pages pinned on the wall, DVDs in your language right next to the player, music in your chosen language that you choose to have loaded in your whatever device, your home page on the computer set up to easily link you up to various foreign language sites.

That’s the sort of thing I mean.

Autologue

There’s an idea that I tried out several times in the past. Then, I discovered that Kato Lomb suggested it too. She is a world-famous polyglot from Hungary.

What you do is to converse with yourself from time to time.

You do that, because it isn’t always easy to find someone to talk with. And then it often makes you nervous. And although you don’t actually learn anything new by doing it, (you are not a rusty machine that a drop of oil will free up) you DO develop your speaking muscles to some extent.

Anyway, Dr Lomb recommends it, so it’s probably worth trying.