"My weakness? Well, I'd say I'm a bit of a perfectionist."
How many times have you heard someone saying that or have even
said that yourself? It's quite common to repeat this over and over as an excuse to not take the
next step towards a goal or a dream that you have. Now, you may be thinking "But Ethan, I am proud of
myself for being a perfectionist because it means that I care deeply about the things that I do."
Now I understand why you might believe that calling yourself a perfectionist
makes you feel that you work harder than others to achieve the things you want to do.
And there is some truth in that. However, our admiration for perfection is so universal
that we never really stop to think about what this concept is doing
to you and your language learning journey. Just like Alejandra who even after 5 years
studying English is still paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes.
So if you watch until the end, you will get more than 50 years of experience from teachers and
experts who have battled with perfectionism, just like you have, so that you can get the
tools that you need to overcome the anxiety and barriers that having to be perfect is causing you.
Now, the default game language learners play, when they enter into conversation is be perfect,
get grammar perfect, pronunciation perfect, right. And the thing is, your emotional state
is dictated by your performance against your goals. So if my goal is to be perfect, and then
I get a, I say the wrong word, I mispronounce something or I misconjugate something,
then I will experience negative emotion. When I experience negative emotion,
it'll deteriorate my performance, I'll get into a vicious cycle of, the whole thing will be painful.
I'll walk away, and I'll say, Ah, do I want to do this again? Maybe I do a couple more times,
but it's even worse. And then eventually I give up, right? This is, this is the scenario. This
is a story line for the vast majority of language learners ever who ever existed.
So how do you get out of that? Well, you have to play a game that you can win and feel good about.
'Don't let perfection be the enemy of good." I think it's really important to realize that
you can never reach "perfect". If you strive for perfection at all times, you are only
going to cause yourself pain and struggle. What is much more effective is to strive for
personal best. Just like for a casual runner it is not healthy to strive to be as fast as record
holder Usain Bolt. It is more important that you are faster than you were last week or last month.
The same is true for you. You only sabotage yourself when you believe that your English won’t
be good until you speak like a native. Rather than seeking perfection, it is more important that you
are trying to improve a little bit every day. If you put yourself in a vulnerable spot
and you are resigned to the understanding that you will fail, you will fail. If you
are resigned to that understanding, then you don't have to worry about sounding perfect.
All you have to worry about is did I try today? That's it. That's your only worry.
So your best English doesn't mean perfect English. If you think too much about having
perfect English, you won't be able to ever communicate with people,
which really is what languages are for! This is our main purpose since we started RealLife
with meetups where people would connect and speak English regardless of their level.
Look how Justin talk about the transformative journey learners go through once they relax,
accept their mistakes, and start speaking.
​​So people are going beyond this whole, like judgment standing back. And which I think is
typical, there's, you know, people stand back and look at each other, and like, kind of,
there's judgment going on, people are scared of being judged and everything. But it's so clear
after this, that nobody cares, everybody is just supporting each other. And I think that's the most
amazing thing. People walked away from that, with this transformational experience, like,
Oh, my gosh, like really living your English, I don't need to be perfect. I can just speak,
I can just connect. And that's it, I'm on my way! I may not be perfect now. But I'm speaking in like
that, that's so empowering. Because then you can take the next step, the next step, next step, and
then you're speaking English in the real world, you're living your English in the real world.
So Lindsay also put it interestingly when she emphasizes that seeing the language as a tool
for connection is so much more crucial than your fear of not sounding perfect.
So the 'connection, not perfection', the way I connect to that is, I never want our learners to
feel that, right I never want language to get in the way of human connection. That's what that's
all about. It should always be the number one goal is to maintain the connection. So if you
make a mistake, don't drop your eye contact, don't feel embarrassed, don't move away, look
at the person in the eye and keep the connection going. It's up to you at that moment, whether you
lose the connection, or you keep it, right. So we have a lot more control than we think we do.
The more effective way to overcome your perfectionism and fear of making mistakes
is to get out there and start making mistakes. With our RealLife app you can have conversations
in English anytime, anywhere at the touch of a button. The great thing is that you will
speak to other learners around the world. Now they are going through exactly what you are,
they know how challenging it is, so they will have empathy for you. Conversation the conversation
you'll see yourself becoming more comfortable, confident, and natural in your speaking.
In addition to this, you can learn to understand fast speech by listening to the full interviews of
the teachers that you are seeing today with an interactive transcript and vocabulary.
And guess what, all this is absolutely free so you really have no excuses to not get started now.
Download the app by clicking here or in the description down below
or you can simply search for RealLife English in the Apple app or Google Play Store.
Go ahead and give it a try. The confident future you will be so happy that you did.
So a big lesson perfectionists need to learn is how to get out of your head and enjoy the journey
by not focusing on thoughts like, "Am I making mistakes" or "I have to be like other people who
I see are speaking perfect English", just like Gavin Roy learned how to do with his Portuguese.
When we're speaking, when I'm speaking in a foreign language, and when I'm speaking
Brazilian Portuguese to my followers, there in Brazil, it helps them to see that I'm not
speaking perfectly, that I still have a bit of an accent, you know, and it makes them realize
that they can let go of their standard of perfection and need to sound like a native
speaker with zero mistakes. So did you have anything
that really helped you to overcome that perfectionism after that year and a half
that finally pushed you to, to start speaking? I think I realized I only saw results when I was
letting go of my perfectionism and just allowing myself to make mistakes.
There's a specific piece of advice too that, there is a polyglot named Benny Lewis that when
I read this thing that he said, saying, you need to make 200 mistakes a day, or else you're not
going to improve. To hear someone of that stature say something, which to me seemed crazy, but,
and to see that it was working for me kind of made everything okay.
So I'm still very much perfectionist in terms of I like my videos to be edited perfectly,
I like all of the videos in my English course, for example, to be perfect products, but when it
comes to my actual speaking, my language learning, it would be imperfect to assume that you're not
going to make any mistakes. So the moment that I accepted that, like truly accepted, not just
like I might make sense, but truly owned, that I'm going to make mistakes, and not be perfect
was when my language improved. And so now I'm okay not being a perfectionist when I'm speaking.
My students have told me countless times that they are afraid of speaking English
or that they are not fluent because they don't know enough. However the real problem is that they
can't do it because the program, which is English or any other additional language, is currently too
heavy. It takes up too much energy and their brain just can't work fast enough. So if you
have ever suffered from fear or stress related to learning and speaking English, meditation can be
a huge help. Some of your favorite teachers have told me about their experiences with meditation
on Beyond Borders, so if you watch until the end you will learn about the benefits of meditation,
how to get started and even continue and how to connect it to learning English.