Perfect English You DONT Need it to Start Speaking
Stop trying to be perfect!
I’m Emma from mmmEnglish and today I’ve got a video
for you
in which we’re going to talk about perfectionism.
Perfectionism.
And why it’s holding you back.
Your confidence and your fluency in English is going to
improve if you can focus on being less perfect.
Now, of course, I’ve got my English students in mind
but what I’m sharing here in this video today is relevant
to all different parts of life.
This video is full of advanced vocabulary,
words that are going to help you to impress and inspire
people if you can learn to use them.
Don’t forget to turn on the subtitles if you need to
and then strap in and enjoy the ride!
On the surface, perfection seems like a good idea right?
It seems like a positive characteristic.
Your aim is to be perfect. You’re meticulous,
you pay attention to the details so that you don’t
make mistakes. You like to do a good job.
You really want to impress, right? But really,
perfectionism is about control.
It’s about being in control, being prepared
and looking good, right?
Knowing what to say, not looking stupid.
Of course, you know we all like to be in control.
It’s where we feel comfortable, it’s when we feel safe.
Right here inside our magical little comfort zone.
Speaking in another language with other people
in an actual conversation is probably one of the most
out of control experiences that you can have.
You haven’t mastered the language yet,
you can’t be confident that you’ll always know the words
to say or that you’ll understand the question correctly.
It’s impossible, right? It’s impossible to be perfect
in this situation.
And yet this is what so many of you expect.
You expect yourselves to be perfect and if you’re not,
then you shame yourself for it.
You put yourself down and most often
we fear our imperfection so much
that we avoid taking action at all.
You know days or weeks or months go past
and we don’t do anything.
We make excuses.
I’m just a little bit too busy right now.
I’ve got too many things on.
I don’t have anyone around me that I can speak English
with so I can’t practise. That’s why I can’t improve.
You procrastinate!
We make excuses that we don’t want to do something
until we can do it perfectly
or until it’s easy and it comes naturally
so much so that sometimes we never
actually get to the point of taking
action in the first place, right?
We’ve talked ourselves out of it
before we’ve even got a chance to try.
Does that sound familiar? Does it?
Or maybe you do manage to work up the courage
to start something, to join a conversation
but then after you pick out all of the things
that you did wrong. It wasn’t good enough.
It is a really tough situation, you know?
If you do something, well it’s not good enough.
But if you don’t do something, well you can’t learn
from it and make progress and improve it next time.
By not speaking, you compromise your opportunity to
meet new people or to build your experience
in conversations and broaden your comfort zone.
So all of this is why I wanted to create this video.
If you can focus less on being perfect
accept that you’re gonna make mistakes and also
that you’re going to learn from them,
then you can have more real conversation
experience and become more fluent
and more creative when you’re speaking in English.
So let me share my four strategies or four steps
to help you worry less about being perfect.
If you know someone who struggles to speak English,
they need to get more practice but they don’t have the
confidence to join English conversations then
please make sure you share this video with them.
You know we all need to be reminded that
being imperfect is okay,
that our failures are an essential part
of our success. The failures that you experience
today are going to create the success
that you have tomorrow.
It’s important to keep that in mind.
The first thing I want you to do is relax your standards.
So your standards is just another way of saying
your expectations, what you expect of yourself.
So I want you to relax your standards.
Think about what would be an acceptable outcome
rather than the ultimate best possible outcome.
What would allow you to leave a conversation feeling
like you’d achieve something, that it wasn’t an awful
experience. Of all of my English language students,
one of the most common goals that they have
and they say it all the time is
“I want to speak English perfectly.
I want to speak like a native speaker.”
which of course is the ultimate goal,
to converse freely and you know, easily
in another language.
But if you’re an intermediate level speaker,
that expectation is too high right now.
You can’t have a perfect conversation right now.
Telling yourself or even thinking that you shouldn’t be
making mistakes is really unreasonable
and it’s stopping you from having conversations
and the experience that you need
to improve and become more fluent when you speak.
So are you holding back?
Are you waiting until you can speak better?
Until you can make fewer mistakes.
Are you waiting until your English is perfect
or at least at the level that you think it should be
before you go to language exchanges or
networking events or you start having conversations
that you really need to improve your fluency.
You can still have success without being perfect.
Now I know it’s a little cliche
but I think it’s important to remind ourselves that
no one is successful without failing first, right?
Film stars have faced hundreds of rejections before
they make it big. Top athletes train and train
until they master their skill.
Entrepreneurs on the Forbes 100 lists have failed
and failed until they work out how to build
a successful business.
So I would argue that you need to put yourself
in situations where you fail
in order to learn lessons
and move past them faster.
Failing or making mistakes is a part of your success.
Hey ladies I’m talking at you for just a minute!
I know that it’s really hard to find genuine
speaking partners to practise English with,
especially online, so I’ve created The Ladies' Project
to help women learning English to make international
friends and practise speaking English often,
no matter where you are in the world.
If you’re living in an English-speaking country
but you’re not getting the practice that you need
or you expected, if you need to increase
your speaking confidence for your job
or because you want to travel more independently
or just to immerse yourself in a safe
and supportive English-speaking community,
then definitely check it out.
The Ladies' Project will help you to develop
your speaking confidence and fluency through
real conversation practice.
You’re gonna make friends in different countries,
learn about different cultures and lifestyles
and build your confidence
and your fluency in no time at all.
And the best part is the experience is totally flexible.
If you haven’t got a lot of time but you want to keep
moving forward with your English practice
or you simply want to maintain the conversation skills
that you have,
The Ladies' Project is the perfect place for you to do it.
Enrollments are opening very soon so if you want to find
out more, follow the link in the description
or just up here and make sure you’re on our mailing list
so that you can find out when we’re accepting
new members.
Places are limited but there’s one waiting for you.
Okay my next tip is to focus on mini goals.
Instead of expecting everything to go perfectly
a hundred percent of the time,
focus on just one aspect of your conversation.
At first, it might be:
If I can introduce myself to everyone and they smile
back at me, I’ve succeeded.
Tick that off the list. You nailed it, right?
Next time it might be:
Politely interrupt someone and ask them to repeat
their question again.
If you do that
that’s awesome! That’s a really useful, functional thing
that you can learn and practise to do in conversations.
You could simply aim to make the other person
smile or laugh at a joke
and allow yourself to feel really pleased
when you achieve just that one thing.
The rest of it, you can deal with all of the
other mistakes and other things that happen next time
right?
Practise acting without thinking.
Okay now this one’s pretty tricky because it takes guts.
How many times have you been part of a conversation
and you’ve hesitated just a little bit too long
to share your thoughts and then suddenly
the conversation’s moved on
and you’ve missed your chance.
So
what if you were to start speaking
before you knew where you were going and you just
winged it?
I’m sure that lots of you have been in online classes
or conversations and listening really intently,
thinking about the topic but never saying anything
unless someone directs a question to you.
In which case, you probably freeze
and I know what you’re thinking:
Emma, are you crazy?
Speaking before I know what I’m gonna say
is like conversation suicide.
What are you telling me to do?
To that I would say:
just make sure you’ve got a couple of expressions ready
to help you for when you get stuck
and I’m saying when you get stuck because you will
and that’s fine.
Sorry! I’ve lost my train of thought.
Or…
I’ve completely forgotten what I was gonna say, sorry!
Scary I know,
but what’s the worst thing that could happen?
I was talking to one of my students the other day, Miko.
Miko you’re probably watching, hello!
But she told me that she had a parent-teacher night
at her son’s school
and when she got there she realised that
everyone else was a native English speaker,
all the other parents, the teachers and at that moment
she wanted to leave
back out the door but
she forced her feet to take her into the room
before she could think about
all of the things that could go wrong.
She was already inside. She acted
before her mind convinced her not to
and you know what she said?
She said
“It really wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.”
Often in our head we prepare for the worst possible
outcome
so naturally our body wants to protect us
and we end up avoiding the situation. We put it off.
But by acting before we think, this is a little trick
that we can use to overcome fear and actually
take action
before our minds have had a chance to convince us
that it’s a bad idea.
This is a little trick, I want you to try it out.
Take your fear into the everyday.
This is so important. Expose yourself to your fears
as often as you can and they’re going to become as dull
and mundane as hanging the washing on the line.
Now it’s definitely gonna take you a few intense
sweaty conversations to get you to the point
where a conversation is as simple
and easy as riding the bus.
But exposing yourself to impromptu discussions
will be a very important part of your practice
and it will help you to reduce your fear around speaking.
So I hope that my main message is clear here.
Be brave enough to take action
even when you’re worried or you’re afraid.
Even the tiniest little action will make it that tiniest
littlest bit easier next time
when you try again.
You are not perfect
and the world is totally cool with that.
It’s only you who tells yourself that you need to be
perfect in conversation
and it’s only you who is stopping yourself from making
that progress.
So that’s what I think but what do you think?
Are you a perfectionist?
Do you think that your expectations for yourself
are a little too high?
Are you going to take any of this advice and use it
in some way? I really, really hope so
because I love seeing the unexpected success
of my students, when you know,
they think before they act
and they realise that actually it wasn’t as bad
as they anticipated and they were able to learn
from real experience
and also because I hate seeing my students
miss out on opportunities to experience conversations
and speak with others because they demand perfection
or they tell themselves that they’re not good enough
and they’re not ready.
You are ready and with the right attitude,
you can start today.
For more lessons like this one, make sure you hit that
subscribe button down there.
You don’t need to keep watching grammar lessons
today, you need to find a way to practise.
So if you’re living in an English-speaking country,
then check out this lesson here for some
tips on how to get started and if you are not
then head to this one right here.
And I’ll see you in there!