Hi there I am Drew Badger, the English Fluency Guide and in this video I'm going to talk
about stumbling towards fluency, stumbling towards fluency. Now this is an interesting
idea, something that I think a lot of students need to hear about and it's really important
not only for fluency, but also for everything else in life you'd like to do. So what do
I mean by stumbling towards fluency? Well, first of all, to stumble means you're tripping
a little bit. So if you're walking and there's a rock or
something on the ground and you walk and you trip over that thing, but you don't fall down,
you stumble forward a little bit and then you're safe. Now, the reason this is such
an important idea, especially for fluency is because most people want to be safe. They're
looking for safety. Write this in big red letters. So they're learning a language and
they want to be safe. They want to be certain they're not making mistakes, they want to
be safe in the conversation. They don't want to be embarrassed. They don't
want to make mistakes in front of other people. They're looking for safety, safety, but nobody
does great things trying to be safe. So all of the amazing things that we've done as humans
or people individually building businesses or flying an airplane across an ocean or all
kinds of things like that, these are done by being bold, being bold. So I don't want
you to be safe when you learn a language because you're not going to become a good speaker
if you are, you're going to learn a lot, but you're going to be too shy, too nervous, too
scared to do that. Also like I'm not immune to this. This is
a great conversational phrase for you to say, "I'm not immune to something." Immune. Write
this up here I-M-M-U-N-E to be immune from something. Immune means you have a protection
against something. So to be immune to something like a sickness. So usually if you get the
flu and you recover from it, you are immune from getting it again. Also, this is immunity.
It works the same thing, but when you are safe, you're not making any effort to take
chances and to try using new vocabulary, you will just use the same simple sentences that
you always do. You're not going to try to say something new and interesting that you
learned because you're afraid you might stumble over your words and you might say something
that makes people laugh at you, something like that.
So the people who are safe, and I'm not immune from this. When I was first learning Japanese,
it was the fact that I had struggled for 20 plus years to learn different languages. So
I failed to learn Latin, failed to learn French, failed to learn Spanish, and I even failed
to learn Japanese when I first started learning it. When I was really depressed, because here
I am in Japan and I should be speaking because you learn to speak in the language or in the
country surrounded by people who speak the language, don't you? Isn't that the secret?
So it is not the secret. It certainly was not for me. But to be immune to something
like that means like I struggled with the same thing. So I'm not immune from searching
or seeking safety. So when I was making lots of mistakes, I would try learning some new
Japanese and I would be nervous about saying things because I thought people would laugh
at me or I would say something wrong. And if you're like a guy and you say something
to a girl, like some Japanese girl just as an example. And she's like, "Ah, that's kind
of funny you said that wrong." Like you feel kind of, yeah, you know you're not how you
feel about that. But anyway, what I realized is that you have to be bold and you can't...
What you can't do, you can't move from safety to being bold. So you can't move from safe
to bold in a certain way. So you can't do it... You can't keep safety as you move to
being bold. So there's a point where you have to, it's like if we're going to draw like
a cliff right here and then a cliff over here to be bold, like we call this a leap of faith.
Now what usually happens, and we'll just use a very specific example of some kind of vocabulary.
Let's say you learn this vocabulary from me. Say I'm not immune to whatever, so I'm not
immune to criticism, so it means that people say bad things about me then I will feel bad
about that, so I'm not immune to that. If you are immune to criticism, then people can
say whatever they want and you don't care. You just feel great about that. But you can't
move from safe to here. You can't use that expression. You might by yourself practice
I'm not immune to criticism. I'm not immune to criticism. So that's being safe practicing
that vocabulary by yourself, but in order to be able to use it in an actual conversation,
you have to jump. You have to make a leap of faith, and this means you're doing something
where you might make a mistake. I might say I'm immune from criticism or you
want to say I'm not immune to criticism or whatever. But you make a mistake in the conversation
when you use it. Well what happens is you are bold. You use that sentence or that phrase
or whatever in a conversation. And you were bold about that. And when you do that, even
if you make a mistake, the... If we're going to make a simple graph here, this is a kind
of an easy way to do it. I remember teaching a Japanese guy this, he was a friend of mine,
kind of a practice partner many years ago with me. But I explained to him that when
your confidence is higher than how you feel about making a mistake, then you are more
motivated to improve. So at some point you might feel if we want to give this a number,
like you feel five... You feel kind of like, I have like a negative feeling of five from
making a mistake and people laughing at you. But because you said something, you have a
confidence boost of 10. And so should you be bold in this case? Absolutely. So it's
maybe you lose a little bit, but you gain a lot more. So in this conversation, most
people, they only think about the mistake that they made, but they don't remember the
boldness, the action that they took. And when they remember that, they feel good about that
and that helps them move to fluency. So what does this mean coming back to the idea of
a stumbling towards fluency? It means that you're constantly all the time trying to jump
across this. And after a while you're learning a new phrase and you use it, you learn another
new phrase and you use it. You're trying something new and you're going to make mistakes part
of this. But if you remember, "Hey, I was bold. I tried using that phrase, even though
I knew it might not be perfect for me." And because you did that, you feel a lot more
confident and the next time you use it, now you're going to feel really strong about using
that thing. And you're going to have... Most of the problem problems that people get in
conversations is because they're worried too much and the worry affects how they speak.
But if you're bold, if you're moving forward with kind of stumbling forward, so you're
not doing it perfectly, but you're making progress. And that's the key. So if you're
perfect, you stop here, you make no progress. But if you stumble, you're like, "Ah, I didn't
quite do that perfectly, but look, look, I made it over here." So it's not perfect, but
this is how you make progress. So the only way to do that is to be bold.
So be bold when you speak. When you try something, force yourself to make some phrase or say
something even if you're going to say it badly, you could even try to intentionally say something
badly just to see how it is. It's like if you're a guy at a bar and you're nervous about
asking a woman out, just walk up to some random woman and say, "Would you like to go out with
me?" And even if you expect her to say no and she says no, you're fine about that like,
"Oh, that wasn't so bad." So I took a step. I learned how to do something. I was bold
and I think less about the mistake and I think more about how awesome I feel because I took
a chance. And that's how you develop the ability to take risks and to be bold and to become
fluid. You got it? Does that make sense? All right.
That's enough for explaining about this. But this is what I mean by stumbling towards fluency
and it works in all areas of life. So it's better to try something, even if it's imperfect
action than to wait and do nothing and wait for everything to be perfect. So this is not
to just about fluency. I can make the same video about business or playing the guitar
or singing in front of other people. It doesn't really matter. We all struggle with these
same things. But if you remember this, the thing that gets you to take action is this
idea down here. So you get like a 10X boost even if you made a 5X mistake or something
like that. Does that make sense? All right, well that's it. If you'd like to learn more
about this, how to put this into practice, you can click on the link in the upper right
of this video or on the link in the description below this video to learn more about the fluency
course. I give lots of great secrets like this and
talk not only about the vocabulary but how to think the same way a native speaker or
a fluent speaker is speaking so that you can become a confident fluent speaker. So do that
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for more of this kind of content. If you're still watching more videos here on YouTube
or anywhere else, it's just teaching you more vocabulary and it's not really doing much
to improve the way you speak, then start thinking about bigger ideas like this, because the
outside kind of the breakthrough that you get from moving to where you are to where
you want to be is usually not going to come from what everyone else is doing. So if that
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