This is a conversation I have with basically every client at some point.
“Oh my god it was so terrible! I had a meeting and there was this one thing that
I really wanted to say and I didn’t know the words for it and I hesitated and…”
There are a couple of things that I think you should do:
First and foremost, focus on what you do well more than on what you don’t do well. And this is
a conversation I have with basically every client at some point. “Oh my god it was so terrible! I
had a meeting and there was this one thing that I really wanted to say and I didn’t know the
words for it and I hesitated and then… oh I just couldn’t do it!” And then you ask them “well okay,
but how long was this meeting?” “oh it was about three hours long” “And how many things in that
three hours couldn’t you say well?” “well, just one” “what about the rest of the three hours?”
“oh yeah I explained everything perfectly!” Again, it’s human nature that we tend to focus
on the tiny percentage that we can’t do. And it’s the same when we’re hearing and listening
to people as well. We might be listening to, you know, we might be watching a two-hour film and
there’s one word we don’t understand and suddenly oh we’re terrible, but, you know, it’s like 0.00%
of the language we just comprehended; we just don’t notice the positive stuff.
So that’s why in the template that I gave you right at the beginning of MEFA when you did it…
I can’t remember the exact wording, but that’s why somewhere in there it says like “what’s
one thing you did well today?” and I think it’s important to, to try to notice and recognise
the things that you are doing well. Because the chances are, it’s probably about, you know, 98% of
what you are doing, is, you know, you’re probably doing spectacularly well. And it’s just that
2% that’s not quite as good as what it could be. So, you know, give yourself the credit you deserve
and notice the good things. And try not to worry too much about the bad things.
Simultaneously, you do want to learn from those things that you couldn’t do. And that’s where,
you know, really, the idea of retrodictive learning is extremely powerful. And it can
be as simple as just writing, simply it’s just writing down, like we did in your conversation
diary. And then you can just leave it at that and then you just try to spot things that you
could have said in your day to day learning over time. Or you can proactively go out and
then actually work at how to say that thing. Couple of things that you might want to try:
the first one is probably the best, it’s definitely the riskiest but that’s where
you’ve got the most to gain. And that is when you are doing a presentation or you’re speaking about
something in this kind of way and you run into something that you want to elaborate on but you’re
thinking “actually... I don’t… not confident that I can actually to this, this might be wrong”,
do it anyway. You might surprise yourself. You might explain it far better than you expected.
It might go horribly wrong. But just treat that as a learning experience. As long as you’re not
going down a rabbit hole of trying to explain something to somebody and where you actually have
no idea what you’re saying and you’re basically just confusing and wasting people’s time, I mean
it’s… and it never will be that bad. Yet some point, somebody might think “oh wait a minute,
he wasn’t quite as articulate as he usually is with that particular point but whatever.
And that will make then the retrodictive learning part more powerful anyway because those emotions
and that feeling that go with that and the experience of having tried it will make the
whole thing clearer in your head where you went wrong. It will also, you know, be a more powerful
emotion as far as actually learning and improving and getting better at that thing is concerned.
The other thing is what you’re already doing, the retrodictive side of things,
and this is going to be most useful that you are likely to say and elaborate on the same
thing again at some point. But if you can’t do it, then go back and work out how you could have
done it and you can and should send for example, send an email to the EES group and just say “hey,
I wanted to say this, but I wasn’t too sure what the right expression was. What do you think?”
“hey people can chip in, myself included” and then use something like, 432 exercise to then
practise that, then it will become clear. The super important presentations cause
preparations in advance is definitely beneficial. I practise everything, even in English, the
YouTube fluency thing we’re doing on Monday, I’ve talked myself through that already so I’d know
where I’m likely to trip up, and where I’m likely to not be able to explain something.
So those are the main things I would suggest. Alongside be kind to yourself and notice the thing
that you are doing well because you’re probably doing better than you think, is the reality. And
again, it’s a part of this Dunning-Kruger curve, you know, at some point we do feel what is called
impostor syndrome, this feeling of “I’m not good enough, why am I here?” almost like we’ve tricked
ourselves, something like we’ve tricked people into letting us be there but it’s actually not
true. And everybody suffers at it from some point. Does that all make sense?