- Last week you enjoyed improving your English
by watching a real-life video created for native speakers.
And today, we're going to continue that exercise
with part two of Understanding Real-World English
with Videos Created for Native Speakers.
Hi, I'm your English coach, Christina,
and welcome to Business English with Christina,
where you become better at English and better at business.
Now, as I said,
this is part two from the little series
that we started last week,
all about taking that video from one of my favorite authors,
James Clear, he's the author of "Atomic Habits",
you see a book right there.
There's my cat, there's the book.
It's a book that I highly recommend for you
if you can read in English.
So, if you missed the video from last week,
I definitely recommend that you go back
and watch part one of this little two-part series,
just so you kinda know what we're talking about.
It'll make this video a lot more useful and enjoyable.
All right, so picking up
where we left off in the last video.
That's a lot of phrasal verbs.
It means starting in the place
that we stopped the last time.
We're gonna talk about changing your environment
to change your habits.
You know, thankfully,
we don't have to be victims of our environment,
we can also be the architect of our environment.
And that means creating a space
where it's easy to make the decisions
that make it easy to make the changes
that you want in your life
so that you can build those good habits
and reach your goals.
Now, just to give you a concrete example
that I'm sure you maybe are familiar with.
You know, if you're trying to eat healthy food,
because you want to be healthier,
maybe you want to lose weight,
you want to change your eating habits,
but then someone brings over a box of cookies for you
and they put it in your kitchen,
well, that makes it hard to change your eating habits
because those cookies are there
and they're so easy to just grab one,
put it in your mouth.
But if you just don't have any cookies in your house
and you only have, I don't know, carrots,
it makes it easier to eat healthier
because that's all you have in the house.
- Thankfully,
you don't have to be the victim of your environment,
you can also be the architect of it.
You can decide to design something
to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behavior.
- As James clear points out in his video,
"You don't have to be the victim of your environment,
you can also be the architect of it."
Like I said, you decide how your environment helps you
or prevents you from building those new habits.
And he also says,
"You can decide to design something
to make your good behaviors easier
and your bad behaviors harder."
- So when it comes to habits,
if you want to practice your guitar more frequently,
put it right in the middle of your living room
so you run across it all the time.
If you want to read more,
when you make your bed in the morning,
take the book you want to read, put it on top of the pillow,
when you come back that night,
pick it up, read a few pages, go to sleep.
- Then another idea from his video
is focusing on starting, not focusing on finishing.
You know, a lot of times we think about the goal,
the objective, the thing that we want to get,
and it seems like so much work.
You know, it takes a long time to get to that goal.
And that's the thing that discourages us,
because we see all the work we have to do,
all the time it's gonna take,
you know, all that effort, the difficulties,
and we maybe just don't really do it
as well as we would like to
because it seems like such a big challenge.
But James Clear talks about
not focusing on the end result,
but focusing on just starting.
And one thing that he says is:
- You should optimize for the starting line,
not the finish line.
- "You should optimize for the starting line,
not the finish line."
In other words,
put your effort into getting started on that new habit,
do the best that you can at just starting.
Like I said, even if it's something super tiny,
you know, just very, very, very small,
but just focus on getting started,
starting to get that habit,
and then you can improve on it from there.
And really doing that consistently,
that is the best way that I've found to reach your goals.
- If you can optimize for the starting line
and make it as easy as possible
to get started and get your reps in,
often the outcomes just come as a natural result.
- As I say, if you don't use it, you lose it.
So here's how you can use what you learned today.
In the comments below,
tell me about a small change
that you can make to your environment,
to help it to encourage your good behaviors
and discourage your bad ones.
Maybe that's a behavior about learning English,
but maybe it's another habit that you want in your life.
Doing more sports,
eating more healthy food,
whatever it is,
but tell me about the small change that you will make
to your environment to help you start that good habit.
It's a perfect opportunity for you to practice your English,
to make it concrete,
and to, as James clear said,
optimize for the start line, not the finish line.
And if this type of lesson was helpful for you,
where we take a real-world video
created for native speakers,
break it down and help you to understand the ideas
and the vocabulary, I would love to know.
And there are three ways that you can tell me.
Give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube
and subscribe to my channel
so that you can continue learning business English with me.
You can go over to christinarebuffet.com/worksheets
and get the free worksheet that goes with this lesson,
but also with last week's lesson.
So it's one worksheet for the two lessons.
You'll have plenty of things to learn
and to make this a part of your active English vocabulary.
And go ahead and watch the next lesson,
I don't know, it's not the next lesson,
it's the previous lesson,
but you can go back and watch part one
of this little two-part series if you missed it.
All right, thank you so much for improving your English
and yourself with Business English with Christina,
and I'll see you next time.