Hi I'm Anne Marie with Speak Confident English and welcome to this week's
Confident English lesson where we're focused on common fears when speaking
English and how you can overcome them. Everyday I hear from my students in
emails and in my small group classes and I often hear about three common fears
again and again and you might have some of these same fears about speaking
English. Those three common fears are often related to the fear of starting
conversations in English, the fear of not knowing what to say or what is
appropriate or correct to say. The second fear is related to making mistakes in
English, the fear of feeling silly in a conversation. And finally the third fear
that I often hear about is the fear that no one will understand you or that you
won't be able to express yourself correctly the way that you want. If those
are some of the fears that you have in English, I want you to know first that
you're not alone having those fears and number two we can totally change that. In
fact it's what I love most in my work. I love helping my students overcome their
fears in English, to overcome feeling shy and nervous so that they can do what
they want and what they need. And the reason it's so important is because if
you are always afraid to speak, if you never learn how to overcome those fears
then you might lose opportunities. You might lose professional opportunities to
grow your career or to get a better job; you might lose the opportunity to get a new
client to work with your company; maybe it means losing opportunities in
an English-speaking country where you live; it means being stressed every day
just to go to the grocery store or the bank; and maybe it means it's really
difficult to get to know people and make friends. And we don't want any of that. We
want it to be easy for you to communicate in English, to feel
comfortable, and to know that you can say what you want. So today I want to share
with you a couple of practical ways that you can do that. There are just two words
that I want to focus on in today's lesson and these two words are
everything you need to overcome your fears and to help you advance and be
more confident in your English. Those two words are preparation and practice. It
sounds super simple but you and I both know it's not so simple. The truth is
preparation and practice take time, they require a little bit of work, they might
also require some opportunity and even a little bit of courage. Preparation means
the process of getting ready, it means that you have to collect information, you
have to think and evaluate, and make sure that you have everything you need to be
ready for something. If preparation is the process of getting ready, practice is
the process of doing something regularly, doing something as a habit. And those two
pieces together are what allow you to overcome those fears, to become more
confident and sure about what you want to say in your English. I want to share
with you an example of why preparation and practice must go together to help
you overcome fears and nervousness, and to help you become proficient and
confident in what you can do in English. This is an example I often share with my
students in Fluency School. Imagine that you play the piano and you're going to
learn a new song maybe a new song by Chopin or Mozart and of course before
you learn to play a new song you need to get familiar with it, you need to make
sure you know how to read music, you need to know where the notes on the piano are,
what the different keys do, you need to make sure your piano is in tune.
All of that is part of that process of getting ready. And then if you
just know how to read the music but you never practice and you have a concert
tomorrow it might be really difficult to go to that concert and play perfectly if
you've never played the song before. Of course you've read it, you've read the
song, you understand reading the music but you've never played it on the piano
so it's probably going to be really scary to go to a concert and play that
song without knowing exactly how to do it, without the practice. So of course
most of us don't do that. Most of us do the preparation and then we practice. The
first time you play that song you might be really slow and sometimes you look at
the piano, sometimes you look at the music, sometimes you play the wrong note
and you have to start over. Sometimes there might be a really difficult part
of the song and you have to do it again and again and again. But after the first
week it gets much easier you don't have to read the music so much your
hands go where they need to go more easily, it feels more natural you, just
know what the music is. And of course, with time, eventually
you can just play the song. It's easy. You don't think about it, you don't read the
music, it's in you. You've got it. That is the process of preparation and practice
working together. And now let's go back to language. That is absolutely the same
process that we need in becoming confident in English and learning how to
say what you want and to not feel afraid in that moment. First strategies for
preparation and again remember this is the process of getting everything you
need so that you're ready to practice. So when you have to start a conversation
and you're nervous about making mistakes, you want to make sure that you're
understood, you want to think about what are the things you need for that
conversation. Are there specific questions that you
need to ask? Is there information that you need to be prepared to share? If
there are, then you want to know what those are
in advance. That means you need to spend some time thinking about them, maybe
doing a little bit of research or even writing some things down. If it's a
business meeting and you know that you'll have to share some information,
write down what it is that you'll need to share. If you really want to get to
know your neighbor and you would love to ask some questions
think about what those questions are in advance. Now before we talk about
practice, I want to give some practical tips about starting a conversation,
asking questions because that's often one of the biggest challenges or areas
of fear that my students have. Number one I have a lesson on my 10 favorite
questions to start a conversation with anyone. In that lesson I share with you
what those questions are, why they are great questions, and how you can use them,
who can you use them with. And the second lesson that I have is all about
small talk and how to be better at small talk, what kinds of questions can you ask
and how can you be ready for any of those situations where you might need to
get to know someone and start that conversation. Now let's go to the second
part of that equation - that preparation and practice. You've prepared for a
conversation, you've prepared questions to ask but now you have to do the work
of practice. If your goal is to overcome feeling afraid of speaking, of making
mistakes, or of being understood, practice is what will help you do that.
Practice is that process of doing something as a habit, doing it regularly
or repeating it so that you are proficient at it. Let's imagine that you
have a business meeting coming up next week and the meeting will be in English.
You know that you will have to present some information and maybe even offer
your opinion on a solution to a problem. So of course, before that meeting, you
will prepare, think about what it is you need to say, what information do you need
to share, but then you need to also practice it. If you want to feel more
confident, if you want to not feel afraid to say what you want and to know that
you're going to be understood and that you can do it clearly. One easy way that
you can do that (in a way that I love doing even with my students) is recording
yourself. Use your computer or your smartphone and record yourself by audio
or video. This gives you the practice of speaking out loud and then, when you're
finished, listen to it. How is it? Are you happy with what you said? Are you happy
with how you sound? Are you okay with the vocabulary that you use,
the grammar choices that you made? This is a little bit like that first time of
playing the piano and maybe as you listen to it you think -
oh I don't like that. Or I made a mistake I want to fix it. Just like when
you practice playing the piano, when you record yourself, the great thing is you
can delete it you can start over and do it again.
And through that practice you start to perfect what you want to say, you make
changes and improvements, it gets easier to remember the words that you want to
use and maybe you change your sentences a little bit but through that process
you build confidence in what you're saying, it becomes less scary and you
feel more sure about what words you want to use and what grammar you need so that
when you go to that business meeting, you've done the preparation, you've done
the practice and you're ready. You're ready for that business meeting, you're
ready to say what you need or what you want. The awesome thing about recording
yourself is you can do it no matter where you live, even if you have no one
around you to practice English with. This is something you can do anytime, you can
do it for five minutes a day and again that process of doing something as a
habit is what will help you build that confidence so that you can do it more
easily. The second strategy you can use to help you get that practice that you
need is to invest in yourself. If speaking English with confidence is
something that is important to you, if it is essential for you to get better
opportunities or to feel more comfortable where you live, then invest
in it. There are so many wonderful language schools around the world and
online. You can hire a tutor, go to a class near where you live, or you could
even join me for my Fluency School course which is focused on speaking
practice. The reason this second strategy is great
is it gives you someone else to work with, whether it's a teacher or a small
group. You have others who can help you through the process and support you,
encourage you as you practice to perfect your English and be more confident. If
you've ever wondered how someone else has become successful in English or how
they became so confident, this is exactly how. It is always the process of
preparation and practice combined together. This is what leads to
overcoming your fears, it is what leads to confidence and the ability to make
progress or advance your abilities. Now that you know exactly what it takes or
what is necessary to help you overcome fears in English, I have a question for
you -- are you ready and are you willing to give English the time and the work, the
commitment that it needs so that you can become more confident and to feel that
you can speak freely in English? Remember preparation and practice do
take time but if you know that your time and your work will be worth it, that they
will help you accomplish what you need, would you be ready to do it? This is an
important question because it's so easy to be discouraged if you've spent a lot
of time studying English, if you've taken classes and bought grammar books and
watched videos on YouTube like this, it can be really easy to feel discouraged
if you don't see progress. So it's important to ask that question -- are you
ready and are you willing to give English a little bit of time and energy,
work, commitment every day to see those changes? This is where I would love to
hear from you and this is my challenge question for the week -- if you feel that
you are ready or maybe you've already started the process of doing a
little bit of work in English every day and trying to make progress, what steps
are you taking? That's what I want to know. As always, you can share your
comments with me in the comment section just below this video. I want to hear
from you what steps you are taking to do that process of preparation and practice
in your English. When you share your comments, I do always read them, I often
provide feedback and you can read what others in the community say. You might
get some new ideas or maybe you have a strategy that will be just what someone
else needs. With that thank you so much for joining me this week, I love having
you here every Wednesday and I'll see you next week for your Confident English
lesson.