11/12/2020
Why you REALLY feel stuck in English (Hint: It's not your fault, or your teacher's fault, but something much simpler)
I’m an expert in speaking English fluently - even if you’re still learning. That is, I help people get the feeling that you can just speak, in English, and it will get the job done.
It’s a bit of a sneaky way around actually becoming “Fluent” in English - it allows you to behave as if you are fluent, before you are fluent. And unless you are in a “precise” industry like legal, diplomacy, translation, this is really the confidence you are looking for: to make a good impression so you can network, onboard clients, develop relationships, and ultimately close the deal.
So rather than start with the question “how many vocabulary words do I need to know to be fluent?” We ask “What TASKS do I need to do to be fluent?”
Now we can spend a lot of time brainstorming, and if this were a live in-person workshop, I’d probably ask for a lot of feedback here. A lot would come up…. Meetings, sales calls, dating, etc…
But at the end of the day, it comes down to 3 things:
1. Meeting People
2. Developing Relationships
3. Moving the Relationship Forward (closing the deal)
Let’s break down each of these as “what’s holds most people back?” “how to move beyond this block?” and “technically speaking, what English skills do you need for this task?”
And after we break down all 3, we’ll see exactly the answer to “What do I need to be fluent in English?”
1. Meeting People
Meeting people is hard in any language, and there’s a word for it, “Approach anxiety.” Approach anxiety is the anxiety we feel when approaching people, whether it’s for business, romance or friendship. However, in non-native speakers, this general approach anxiety becomes something very specific “English Anxiety.” “Not if but WHEN will I embarrass myself again in English. I shouldn’t even start.”
English Anxiety is this core belief: “It is not IF, but WHEN will I embarrass myself in this , causing us to NOT EVEN BEGIN>”
The key re-frame to overcome English Anxiety is to work with THAT MOMENT you “forget your words.” Now, I’ll give you a little hint: it’s not you forgetting your words, but rather it is difficult to explain, period. And like always, we will blame English for our own feeling of unpreparedness, hesitation and unsureness. We want to be professionals, but we are not sure now, so it must be English’s fault.
WRONG! If you are reading this far… your English is freakin’ great. I’m not slowing my English down to A2 level. I am writing this post as if it is to my friends back in New York. So your English is good enough for the freakin’ Ivy League. It’s time to look at what it really is.
You need to do the hard thing and keep explaining through the hard topic. It’s that simple. Now there IS an art to it, but that will take another 1000 words and is best done through live training (more on that another day…)
To loop it full circle, English Anxiety is the feeling that if we start speaking in English, we eventually will embarrass ourselves. So we only take chances we are sure about. And that keeps us in our comfort zone. And that comfort zone keeps us getting the same results. And those same results keep our life stuck with… not as much money, time and stability as we want. Not the friends we want, not the opportunities we deserve.
I promised to break-down the next two stages but this post is already getting long 😉 more on that another day.
God Bless,
Peter
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