11 Important English Collocations to Improve your English Mind set
Hey there I’m Emma from mmmEnglish!
Today I’ve got some
cool vocabulary to share with you about wellbeing.
Now this is the noun that we use to talk about
a state of being comfortable, happy, healthy
in a physical way, emotional way and a mental way.
Something that is, well for me at least,
an ongoing challenge in life
maintaining the balance between all of those things.
Many of the words and the phrases that I’m sharing
in this lesson are interconnected.
They’re all linked to this topic
and I want to go into a bit more detail around
how to use these words accurately to talk about
your wellbeing
and the wellbeing of your friends and family.
Maybe your staff, your team at work.
So I want you to take a long deep breath in
and get ready to ease on into our lesson with me.
Let’s go.
So with health and feeling good about yourself,
we can talk about physical things like exercise
and eating well, getting enough sleep, all of that stuff.
But we’re also talking about emotional aspects
of life, of work,
of relationships.
All of these things can be tricky
but as you start to learn more about the
English-speaking version of you and
your mental and emotional state as an English learner,
this becomes increasingly important.
So let’s start with mindset.
And actually
when we say this word, we drop that D sound
or it becomes very quiet.
You almost can’t hear it.
Mindset.
And this is your mental attitude or your mood,
your way of thinking
and there are some really specific verbs and adjectives
that we often use with this noun, with the noun mindset
and we call these collocations.
And as you’re building your vocabulary and you’re
learning new words, it is a really good idea
to learn common collocations with that word.
So you’re learning that new word but you’re also learning
words that are often used together with it in sentences.
So what other words do we use with mindset?
You might already have some ideas about this
but we often use
positive and negative to describe our mindset.
It is useful to keep in mind that our mindset
is not fixed.
Just because we have a negative mindset
about one thing
doesn’t mean that we have a negative mindset
about everything right? It’s a state
that can change and regularly change.
We should always be working towards a more positive
mindset right?
Though it’s not easy.
Think of COVID right, we’ve all been through this
in one way or another this year so we can all
relate to it. I’m going to talk about a couple of examples.
When lockdown was announced, Sarah was
really frustrated because she didn’t have
high-speed internet at home,
her kids were driving her crazy,
she didn’t have enough time to look after them
and get all of her work done as well.
Usually, her parents come around to look after them
after school but they couldn’t during lockdown right
so, of course, this is a tough situation.
But we could say that it’s unhelpful to be
feeling like this.
The situation can’t change.
Sarah has the wrong mindset
not because it’s wrong to feel frustrated
but because if she keeps thinking
about all of the negative things and complaining
and talking about how bad it is,
she’s going to become really unhappy.
Now Maria on the other hand,
knows this is a negative situation
but she chooses to appreciate the extra time that she
has with her family. She gets to spend time with her kids
She tells her boss that she’s doing everything she can
to meet her deadlines
and helps her to understand what’s going on at home.
She’s cooking lots of home-cooked meals
instead of getting takeaway like she usually does
and she loves feeling like she’s taking good care of
her family during a difficult period.
So Maria is adopting a positive mindset.
That is a great verb.
We often hear to have a mindset but to
adopt a mindset is even better.
You might know this verb because it’s used when you
legally take responsibility or ownership
of a child or a pet right? You might adopt a puppy.
But adopt can also mean to take up or to
follow or to use something.
So adopt is especially useful when you are deliberately
trying to change the way that you
think about a situation.
Usually we have to do a little bit of work
to change the way that we think right, we can’t just
make it happen like that.
It’s always a process and using adopt
as our verb helps to explain that it’s a process.
Other verbs that you’ll often hear with mindset are
change and shift.
They’re both talking about the same thing,
about that transition from one mindset to another.
So now you’ve got a few awesome collocations to use
with the word mindset.
I want you to put them into practice
so just hit pause for a moment on the video,
write me a sentence using two or three of these words
that you’ve just learnt
and add them into the comments below.
Has there been a time in the past where you
really had to focus on changing the way that you think
or you feel about something or someone?
For me, I’m going through some significant changes
in my business. As my team grows,
I’m having to shift my mindset around the role that
I play in the business and the type of work that I do
and that’s been really challenging for me.
I’m still working on it. It’s a process, right?
Anyway, share an example about you.
I’ll pop down into the comments to correct
the way that you’re using these words if you need it.
Dealing with problems and challenging situations is
life right? It’s obviously tricky.
It can be quite stressful actually.
So I want to share some language that will help to
express your feelings and your needs
when times are difficult.
Starting with stress relief or to relieve stress.
What do you do to relieve stress?
Or what do you do for stress relief?
As you’re thinking about your answer,
I want to talk a little bit about the structure
of these two questions right because
stress relief and to relieve stress,
they’re both expressing the same idea
about taking stress away or removing it from life.
However, stress relief is a noun phrase.
We treat it as a noun in our sentence,
an uncountable noun. It can’t be plural.
But with relieve stress, we have a really useful
collocation to note and remember.
We have the verb relieve and the noun stress.
So what helps you to relieve stress?
What makes you feel better? What do you do
for stress relief?
Taking a walk outside is always one of the best ways
to relieve stress and tension.
To get up, to move around,
to get blood flowing through my body.
You know movement always provides
stress relief for me, anyway.
I also practise mindfulness
or I try to be mindful.
So again you can see that there are similar ways
to express the same idea here
and this idea is about being conscious
or being aware of something. It’s about focusing on the
present moment, being here right now.
Not thinking about all the things that you need to do
in the future or worrying about
whatever happened earlier.
Now this is definitely something that
I’ve been trying to focus on throughout lockdown
and throughout all of the changes that we’ve been
experiencing this year.
If any of you have tried meditating or you’ve tried yoga
then these are types of activities that help you
to practise mindfulness.
So when it comes to managing difficult relationships
in our lives, whether it’s at work or in our family,
mindfulness
can help you to observe the behaviour of others
and change your attitude, your mood or your behaviour
to respond to them in the best way possible
which also happens to be a really useful tool
as you are learning a language and building confidence
to speak in that language.
Many of my students have had a moment that
burns in their mind, you know a time when they went
to talk to someone in English
and it didn’t go as well as they’d hoped.
Whether they’d made the mistake themselves
and they’d lost confidence
or they had a really bad experience.
Maybe the person was rude to them
or unhelpful in some way.
As a language learner, I really encourage you to spend
some time practising mindfulness,
reflecting on those fears and being kind to yourself
or observing other people’s behaviour
from a different perspective, you know.
Maybe that rude guy had actually just
broken up with his girlfriend or he lost his job.
You don’t let his actions or his poor response
define you and who you are as an English speaker.
This is actually something that I talk about inside
my online community quite a lot, The Ladies' Project.
It’s a space for women who are learning English
to connect, to build skills and to build confidence,
especially in English conversation.
I’ve added a little link in the description down below
so that you can find out a bit more about what we do,
read our blog but also watch some of our
member testimonials.
So I know that this was a slightly different lesson today
but I really hope that by focusing on a few
important aspects of self-care and of mindfulness,
you’ve been able to broaden your English vocabulary
but also to consider some of the different
tools that you have
to help you improve your English life.
Thank you so much for joining me
and when you’re in the mood to practise
some grammar with me,
then check out this entire playlist right here.
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different grammar lessons in there for you.
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