- Do you find yourself skipping English study
because you don't have time to do it perfectly?
If so, watch this video.
(upbeat energetic music)
Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com,
here to help you master the English language
with less stress, less hassle, fewer headaches
and dare I say a whole lot more fun.
Whew, I am just done with a rather intense workout
and damn I feel good, you know uh if I do say so
myself I'm looking pretty good as well.
But go back a year or so and things were
quite, quite different when I quit my day job
and I made doing English my full time job
I went from being on my feet teaching classes
all day everyday to sitting in front
of the computer all day everyday.
Very quickly, I got unhealthy and fat, not many people
really noticed, a few commented that my cheeks
were looking a little chubby but for the most part
unless you saw my massive belly you wouldn't have
realised how fat I actually got.
I was running everyday but that wasn't helping with the
massive tyre of fat around my waist or with the total
lack of upper body strength or the bad slouched over
posture that was giving me back pain.
So eventually I did the sensible thing and I brought in an
expert, I hired a personal trainer, Phil, lovingly known as
Phil the cunt, cause that's what he is, to work with me
over a three month period to teach me everything
that I needed to know and to beat me into shape.
Phil put together a routine for me that I could
follow and after the three months with him
were up, I just kept at it by myself.
For a while, everything was hunky dory,
until I made the decision to move to Ireland.
Now you might be wondering what that has
got to do with anything, but you see as part
of that move, we realised that we would
need to get rid of most of our stuff
because we just can't take it with us.
And it just happened that I've got a mate
over the road who wanted a workout bench
and a set of weights so rather than faff
around putting them on eBay later, I thought
screw it and I just gave them to him.
No problem I thought, I'll just go
to the gym down the road instead.
Ha ha ha ha, yeah like that's gonna happen.
What actually happened was I stopped working
out completely and began to regress to the mean,
waist size starts to go up, posture goes down,
before I know it, I'm feeling like shit
again, but you see here's the thing
because I'm a real perfectionist,
I got stuck into the thinking whereby
because I didn't have the equipment
anymore, I couldn't do the full routine
perfectly, therefore, I'm not going to do anything
which is stupid, stupid, stupid because when
I thought about it of all the exercises that Phil
kind of sequenced for me in this routine
only about half of them actually needed
a bench or weights, things like push ups for example
need neither and then of the remaining exercises
about half of those again could easily be
modified to simply not use weights.
For example, weighted dips could quite easily
be done as just dips without the weights.
So now instead of doing nothing because I can't
do the whole thing perfectly I just do the
exercises that don't need the equipment.
Is it as good?
No, it's not, is it better than doing absolutely nothing?
Hell yes!
Again, I am a real perfectionist and I get
frustrated when I can't do something
properly and if I can't do it properly
I'll simply not do it at all but this is
silly, it doesn't make any sense.
And my guess is you are exactly the same when it comes to
learning and putting time and effort into your English.
No, scratch that, I know that that is the case
because Extraordinary English Speakers members
are forever emailing me to tell me that this is
the case, they get busy, they can't do the lessons
perfectly so they end up missing lessons for
weeks at a time and then they're frustrated
and don't know what to do about that
because they're out of their routine.
The solution is simple, just do a half
assed job of it, something, something done
is better than nothing done perfectly.
If for example, you become really busy and you don't
have time to sit down and do a fantastic job
of studying English it doesn't matter, do a crap
half assed job of studying English cause it's
still better than doing absolutely nothing.
We're going to end this video here, cause we're out of time
but tomorrow I'm going to give you an example of a very
minimalist English study routine.
One that I recommend to my Extraordinary Speakers
when they get really busy but there's something
that you can do with minimal time and minimal resources
and in fact you can do it whilst you do other things
so you actually don't even need to find any
extra time in your day to day routine anyway.
That's tomorrow because again this video is getting long.
Again, it's me Julian Northbrook signing off from
another video, if you're new to this channel, subscribe.
If you found this video useful, thumbs up,
if you hated it, bash that thumbs down button now
and if you're interested in becoming an
Extraordinary English Speakers member click
on the link in the description.
Thank you and goodbye.
Oh, and I almost forgot, Extraordinary English Speakers
members there is also an interview with Phil
in the Extraordinary English conversations
interview series that you get as part of your membership.
It's called working the fluency muscle and we talk
about the parallels between weight training, health,
fitness and language learning.
I'll put a link down below this video in the description,
you'll need a membership to be able to access that though.