are you an intermediate or maybe an advanced English learner who has been learning English for years and yet you still feel a drop in your confidence every time you go to actually speak English is there anything more heartbreaking than this is there anything more frustrating than this I see you I understand you because I am you I feel this exact same way about my own language learning Journey which we will'll get to later on in this video I could say a lot about confidence and English learning based on observing the most successful English Learners in
my life including my own husband in fact these are my original notes for this video however today I only chose three of the most important points to discuss to help you break through your insecurities and become The Confident English speaker that is already inside of you but first I need to ask you a very important question there are two types of English Learners which one are you the first type of English learner I'm going to call them adventurers adventurers no matter what their level of English from the very beginner to highly Advanced adventurers see learning
and speaking English as a way of communicating ideas simple that's it adventurers go out into the world whether whether they're ready or not they explore and they try to connect with other people using English as a tool now being an adventurer is not all rainbows and sunshine it's actually really hard and it can be frustrating because it means that they make mistakes constantly every time an adventurer opens their mouths they can feel the problems with their pronunciation they can maybe sense that their grammar is not perfect they often cannot find the right word that they
need in the middle of a conversation sometimes they feel like other people are judging them for these things making progress as an adventurer is not glamorous and it can actually feel like a very long and hard Road at times however it is one, times better to be in this first group to be an adventurer than to be in the second group of English Learners the second type of English learner we'll call them tortured artists this group sees English learning not as an exchange of ideas but rather as a performance that they can either get right
or wrong the tortured artist can be a bit of a perfectionist and can be very sensitive to the way that others see them and because of this they tend to take fewer chances they tend to take fewer risks and much of their beautiful artwork is never shared with the world now before you answer me and you tell me which group you belong in I want you to know that your group membership is not fixed you don't have to stay in your group and this is the point in the video where I have to confess that
I am very much trying right now to move from group two to group one in my own English sorry in my own French learning language journey I myself have not been very confident with my own language learning and this kills me because I encourage my students all the time to be brave and to try to speak English despite being scared despite being nervous and this makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite sometimes a hypocrite is someone who tells you to do something or who critiques you on something without doing it themselves without applying
it to their own lives and that makes me feel not so good so I am trying to take my own advice and just to let you know we are in this together and I know that it's not easy so let's look at the three secrets that we need to unlock in order order to become the best most confident language speakers that we can be number one you have a gift to share with the world and you have a duty to share it in my opinion some of the most influential people in my life some of
my closest friends some of my best professors my husband have been non-native English speakers who learned English as teenagers or as adults they have obviously made a big impact on my life personally and so this is perhaps a selfish point of view on my part but if they had never learned English I probably never would have met them and they would not have had this impact on my life you have special gifts to share with the world there are ideas and thoughts and feelings within you that have the power to positively affect the lives of
other people around the world that's just a fact and it's also a fact that English has become For Better or Worse the lingua franka around the world that more than 1.3 billion people speak and so for better or worse in order to get our feelings and our thoughts to a greater number of people it's very helpful to be able to communicate in English if you do not feel confident right now speaking English for yourself for your own sake then try instead to concentrate on how important it is that you gain confidence in order to connect
with and to help other people you don't know the impact that you could have in the world on even just one person in the world because you are able to use English to connect with and to help that person okay number two I'm going to give you an example of a confident person that you probably won't expect imagine that you are sitting in a classroom with many other students and the teacher is giving a lesson that is very complicated the teacher is explaining a very complicated lesson or if you prefer if you're not in school
anymore imagine that you're in a meeting at work and your boss is explaining something very complicated and there are a lot of other people in the meeting you know that this meeting is important or that this lesson is important but you are feeling so lost and confused but everyone else around you seems to know what's going on everyone else is going mhm mhm yep I understand mhm so you don't say anything you don't ask any questions because you don't want to admit that you don't understand right this is a normal reaction however your friend who
who's sitting next to you your friend raises their hand and says I'm sorry I did not quite understand what you said I'm I'm lost can you please explain that again wow to me that friend is the definition of confidence that is the most confident person writer Mark Manson said the only way to be truly confident is to Simply become comfortable with what you lack the only way to be truly confident is to Simply become comfortable with what you lack confidence does not come with knowing all the answers with getting a perfect achievement score on an
exam confidence does not come from achievements there are many many people with high achievements with high scores with lots of success who are not confident confidence comes from celebrating or at least feeling comfortable with your failures being comfortable with what you don't know my most confident English Learners the ones that I remember the most as being confident were the ones who were okay with saying things wrong with making sometimes embarrassing mistakes with saying things that were kind of nonsensical in English where sometimes we had some miscommunications maybe the idea of being comfortable with failure just
sounds way too hard I understand so instead just try this say to yourself I'm nervous I'm scared I don't feel confident and I know that I'm going to make mistakes that's okay here is a really great quote from another writer Matt heg on the topic of confidence the most confident thing of all is when you don't care if you look nervous it's like getting over panic disorder the moment you don't try to stop having a panic attack is the moment you stop having a panic attack be imperfect be nervous so you're nervous so what you're
human okay and number three you've probably heard people say just believe in yourself or just be confident of course telling someone to just believe in them themselves usually doesn't work however you can probably think of an example in your life a time when you played Sports as a child or you maybe you were very good in algebra or art or something something that you were good at I say as a child but anytime in your life and because you knew that you were good at it you felt confident about it this maybe sounds a little
bit obvious but there is a well researched Concept in psychology ology called selfefficacy which is basically how much you believe in yourself to be able to do things well the more that you have what psychologist Albert bandura called Mastery experiences the more Mastery experiences that you have the more confident you feel in that activity basically competence equals confidence which makes sense right the more evidence that we have that are able to do something well the more confident we feel in doing that thing it's a very positive cycle but this is maybe not what you want
to hear right now because maybe you don't feel competent yet in English and you don't feel like you want to wait until you are a C1 level in order to be a confident English speaker and you do not have to wait until you're competent there are many low-level beginner students who are very confident in practicing their English [Music] so according to the study of self-efficacy or self-belief confidence whatever you want to call it Mastery experiences being very good at something is only one strategy but there are three more another strategy that you can use to
build self-efficacy is to watch other people who are like you doing the thing that you want to do watching somebody who is like you in terms of age a similar age maybe from a similar language background the same gender whatever it might be watching someone who you think is similar to you achieve Mastery or fluency in English speaking is very powerful is there anyone in your life or a celebrity who has achieved the level of English that you want spend a lot of time studying them and observing them and even trying to figure out how
they reached the level of confidence that they have and try to follow in their footsteps a third way to build your self-efficacy is to have a person who you trust tell you that you are capable a good Mentor a good friend a good teacher who believes in you and who can tell you you can do this if you're still looking for that Mentor or that friend let me be that person for you in this moment and tell you I know that you can do this you can do it and finally the fourth one here it's
really hard to build self-efficacy if you're in a very low mood or you're feeling really bad physically there are a lot of ways to feel better mentally and physically but the one that I'll talk about today is just how you talk to yourself self this is not magic it's brain science there's something called HEBs law which shows that the more often you think something the more often you tell yourself something the more that that becomes the reality in your mind so if you find yourself talking to yourself very negatively try something like affirmations or mantras
write down the thoughts that you would like to have about yourself stick them on your bathroom mirror and say them to yourself every day if you are an adventurer from the beginning of this video you will suffer because you will make difficult and sometimes embarrassing mistakes and it will be frustrating inconsiderate people may even be rude to you sometimes or may laugh at you and over time you will become a confident and fluent English speaker if you choose the other path the path of the tortured artist you will create a lot of beautiful artwork in
your mind or at home that you never share with anybody you will never suffer embarrassment no one will ever laugh at you it will seem very comfortable but you will suffer too because you will come to the end of your life and you will realize that your suffering is the suffering of having regret RS of having betrayed yourself in some way in my opinion a much much worse form of suffering so you get to choose your suffering becoming more confident in your English speaking is an internal journey and I have created a little exercise to
help you deal with this it's basically a set of questions that you can ask yourself you can do it in your first language if you want to or you can do it in English I've turned it into a little Google doc and you can download that from the link down below alternatively you can watch this video about stealing the confidence of famous people I'll see you soon guys
