- Are you engaged in caterpillar English learning?
If you are, watch this video.
This morning I was talking to one of my coaching clients,
a language teacher, and we were talking about the,
frankly, quite bizarre ideas that some people have
about improving their English.
Ideas that are very, very common,
very, very widespread but actually don't
really make that much sense.
And we were kinda talking about why, why is this?
And I said "aha, it's caterpillar English learning",
"What, what are you talking about?", my client said.
So, I explained,
a French biologist Jean-Henri Fabre.
Fabre, Fabre, Fabre, Fabre.
Fabre? I have no idea how to pronounce the French,
but whatever, you get the idea.
Did an experiment with caterpillars.
Caterpillars, you see, doubt their own decisions
and prefer to just follow the caterpillar in front.
And what this French biologist did,
was take a flower pot and fill the middle with pine needles,
a caterpillar's favourite food, by the way.
So what this French biologist did,
was take a plant pot, fill the middle with pine needles,
a caterpillar's favourite food
and then place a circle of caterpillars around
the rim of the flower pot,
so they were all behind another caterpillar.
What happened?
Well, each caterpillar just blindly
followed the caterpillar in front,
and the caterpillars went around and around
and around and around in a circle, on and on and on,
until one by one they dropped dead of hunger and exhaustion.
Not a single one of the caterpillars in the circle
thought to break away from the perpetual circular motion
and head towards the middle of the pot
where delicious food awaited.
We see the same thing with language learning
and indeed, really any area of life.
People start to work on their English,
they say "I need to improve, I don't speak well enough,
I need to get better at this."
Then they doubt what they are doing and say,
"I don't know if this is working,
I don't know if this is what I should do",
they looked to then, other people,
and start to copy what other people are doing,
however, those other people also have
the same doubts and are doing the same thing,
they're all copying each other,
not really understanding what the other is doing,
just blindly copying what they see on the surface.
One person says "You just have to chat with native speakers"
and everybody believes that's what they've got to do,
even if none of them in the group
seem to be getting any result.
One person says "You've got to study grammar rules"
so they all start to blindly follow
and on and on and on goes the perpetual motion
of caterpillar English learning.
Well, I'll tell you right here, right now,
my clients are making five key changes
to the way that they learn English
that are completely different
to what anybody else is doing,
and they are getting extraordinary results as a result.
And you, too, can discover those five changes
by heading over to doingenglish.com/freetraining
where I will teach you all about, again,
these changes that you need to make.
Alternatively, if you just wanna get
down and dirty with me, as a client,
and have me coach you through the process,
help you to transform your English speaking,
head over to doingenglish.com/talk
to book a free one-on-one coaching consultation
with me to talk about how I may be able to help you
to make that English speaking transformation.
What I do recommend, however,
is that you stop looking at other people
and blindly copying what you think they are doing,
because you don't know if they are any
more successful than you or not,
and simply doubting what you are doing
and copying everybody else
probably isn't helping you that much.
This is me, Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video.
If you found this useful
give it a nice, big, old thumbs-up,
if you didn't give it a thumbs-up anyway
and I will see you, my friend, in the next one.
Bye, bye.
(exciting music)