Boy kicks a stone

Let's say that you are the grandson of Pele, the famous football player, and that you wish to follow in his footsteps and become a professional player. In fact, you feel some pressure on you to succeed.

And so you enroll at the best football school in town, even though it's on the other side of town. And you make sure never to piss a day. Everyday you walk there, or even run so as to get there on time, whatever the weather.

You work your butt off at that school. You study the theory, you do the drills, you complete your homework, and you ace all of your exams.

But all that book study doesn't help you to become a champion. You become a pretty good club player, but that is all. Did you just not have the talent? Couldn't you have tried just a little harder?

Sadly, the fault is not yours. The fault is in the schooling system. You see, you weren't studying football there. You were learning about football, and that's not the same thing as learning football itself.

In fact, the only reason you became a reasonably competent player was that you'd kick a stone along as you hurried to reach school before the bell.

Have fun with random words

Introduce a bit of frivolity into your life! Use a collection of vocabulary items and access them at random. Play games with them, as for Scrabble. Combine the words. Connect them in some way. Create faux-sentences (and accurate ones if you like).  
That way, they lose their power over you. Your awe of them diminishes. They intimidate less.

Really, playing games is good for you—gets you into a state of flow. The outcome of games isn’t a matter of life and death. In a game, you can afford to get really into it without ultimate risk. Your skill improves by playing games. In games, you can do a lot of useful work without it feeling like work.

To sum up, turn language learning into a ‘mind game’.