7 Habits to Learn English Effectively

[Music] all right so today we're talking about one of my favorite books and it was actually on the recent video that i did on six books that can change both your english and your life and we'll link that down in the description in case you want to check that out but this book can really help you with the tools that you need to be successful in any endeavor that you have and any objective you're trying to achieve can help you to be a better human being and to make your mark on the world and it starts with seven really simple but super powerful habits so let's jump into episode 212 of the real life english podcast yeah boys and girls citizens of the world this is ethan from real life english where we believe that listen to podcasts is a fun natural convenient and proactive way to learn english so download this podcast and listen to it while you're stuck in traffic riding your bike laying in the cold sand at the beach or even planning your week i'm joined here in the global studio you've probably heard some new voices and you're seeing some new faces if you're watching over on youtube first of all by max power who many of you if you've been seeing this podcast for a long time you've probably heard and maybe even seen him before in some video how's it going max it's going well how are you guys doing and by a newbie to the podcast so he's getting his first debut uh time in over here on the relief english podcast izzy how's it going is he great it's great to finally be here i i thought about about different topics that i could be uh doing this my debut and uh participating in the podcast and this is a great one because it's probably one of my favorite books ever so it's awesome to be here yeah so izzy's giving a bit of a spoiler today we're talking about also one of my favorite books definitely i've read it a few times and every time i read it it makes like a whole new impact on my life and that book is the seven habits of highly effective people and this is a book by stephen covey who i believe was a professor and he did just like a lot of research about kind of you know what makes successful people successful and really a lot of people actually see this book as one of the best self-development books ever written so i pretty much anyone i've ever spoken to who has read this book says that in some way it kind of changed their life so we're going to talk a little bit about this but especially just kind of like how you can apply the lessons to it from to your english learning so both max and izzy are non-native english speakers but maybe they fooled you because they both have really exceptional english and they both recently read the book in english of course and they've been kind of applying these their life so they're going to kind of help to explain some of these and explain how you can use it for your own language learning but before we get into any of that i want to give a shout out to a very special english learner out there [Music] all right uh we have this shout out from chris andre from ecuador and he says real life english the best to learn english language so he says hi guys what's cracking this is christian from ecuador and i enjoy always learning english with your podcasts guys you've developed the perfect method to teach english to any english english learner around the world moreover i highly recommend to all english learners or any person who wants to learn and speak english in a perfect way listen to these podcasts and check out reallife english website thanks for your help guys and ah yeah uh yeah so thanks so much chris and i'm really glad to hear that this is making a change in your life i think that what's kraken that's a really native way to say what's up or how's it going and he might have learned that here on the podcast because i think we use it quite a bit so if you want us to shout you out it's really simple all you have to do is head over to apple podcast stitcher or wherever listening to us and leave us a five star review and the really great thing about this is that you're helping other people from all around the world to discover us and have fun learning with their english with us just like chris so that said we have an awesome quote from the author of this book that max is going to share [Music] so the quote reads i am not a product of my circumstances i am a product of my decisions this is by stephen colby the author of 77 habits of highly effective people and it's a great quote what does that mean exactly what do you say when you say that someone is a product of something that will mean that um if you're the product of something you are like the result of that if you're the product of your choices or your decisions you're saying that those things um define you in a way not your circumstances which is a bad thing that that doesn't determine you but rather what you decide is best for you yeah but most people tend to live their life the first way kind of blaming the circumstances blaming the environment blaming you know the things that they can't control and a really big theme in this book as we'll discover is shifting that so that you're focusing more on what you can affect on the things that you have power over like your decisions so i think that's a great jump off point into today's main topic all about this incredible book and how it can change your life and your english [Music] so max just to kind of like say in a nutshell what is this book about this book is a self-management book said to be one of the most important ones and what it deals with is changing the way that teaching your perceptions and providing a set of actionable and very practical principles that you can use to build your life around and it's also very very helpful for um to apply for like as an english learner totally it's something that i felt when i when i read this book that uh anything that you have any goal any particular area life that you want to focus on and develop you can use what you learn from this book and basically structure your life and think of it as like these four different dimensions that the book presents which is the physical dimension like your body how you feel it's your body there's the mental dimension there's a spiritual dimension like you're you're what motivates you and there is the emotional dimension so if you work on these four you should have um the right structure in your life to achieve anything and that's what the book kind of promotes definitely and i think it's really interesting to look at that seven habits so it's like things that you kind of have to incorporate you have to be constantly working at them every single day that's basically what a habit is is like something you make part of your life and you're just constantly doing and i think by practicing these things you can just see a huge shift in whatever you apply it to so that said uh this book is broken up obviously it's seven habits so it's broken up into seven main sections and so we're going to kind of look at each of those there's some of them that apply more strongly to your english which would be the first three but we'll give you kind of a brief overview of everything and if you're interested i highly recommend that you go and read the book so the first one the first habit what is it is he it's a be proactive and it's one of my favorite ones but i would say that i'm probably going to say that to every single habit that's one of my favorites so what is to be proactive max a little way to really grasp that phrase the meaning of that is like be proactive not reactive um again going back to that quote we shared um you are a product of your choices not your circumstances and that is really like a very good principle to always live by and as an english learner particularly that's always going to be very very useful to you know to constantly be reminded of that definitely you kind of stop complaining right about like the excuses the typical excuses we hear from english learners that i'm just not a very talented english learner or i can't go live in an english-speaking country or whatever it is so it's kind of like you're taking the focus away from those excuses and kind of like we said with the quote which i think is very much focusing on being proactive and you're focusing on okay what can i actually do so what does covey say about that uh i think uh one of the things that he says is really uh powerful is that productivity is all about responsibility it's not just uh because it's a very this word of creativity or be proactive is used a lot these days everyone would say like oh be proactive let's let's have productivity but what it really means at least uh based on what the author says is that it's about the realization that we have this responsibility you know it's it's something that we need to take the responsibility for because we're not just like animals we're not like a dog or a cat like we have this uh ins this ability to receive like a stimulus a external force will will happen we'll perceive it and then we'll be conscious of it you know and then after that we'll have a response so between the stimulus and the response there is thought you know there's conscience there's ourselves like thinking about what we want to do so we need to be responsible about that because we have that capacity that ability to choose our response right as he says exactly do either of you have like any stories of how you've been proactive in your own english learning i do and another way of looking at that word taking responsibility that i also like to to you know be reminded of is uh take an initiative and once you kind of like recognize what their circumstances are and how they can limit you you can then take initiative and that's that's exactly what happened to me a few years back when i was you know just starting to learn english i was taking english classes i was going to school and one of the things that used to be a big source of frustration was the fact that we were learning a lot and that was great but we i didn't have that the opportunities to really put my english into practice i didn't have that speaking time that practice that practice time so that was a moment like a key moment when i said i have to do something here this is very important for me and i really need to actually myself try and change this otherwise it's i'm not going to go anywhere with my english and so i remember going to this facebook group we had there that's cool and just basically saying hey guys we have this problem what can we do to actually you know try and improve our english and i said how about we create a conversation group anyone who's interested just say i'm in in the comments and then i got like 30 messages 30 comments in that in that thread nine ten people ended up showing up and i clearly remember noticing how i was becoming fluent week by week because i already had like collected all this knowledge but what i was missing is actually putting that into practice so remember like when i actually had the chance to practice my english we would meet every saturday one hour and just speak english and uh i would actually notice how my english was becoming better and better but just i was improving lip and lips and balance really um and that was really a before and after moment in my you know english learning journey you said leaps and bounds what does that mean you're improving by leaps and bounds that's a way to say that you are improving a lot really really rapidly it's like big jump a leap or a bound is a big jump so it's kind of like you're thinking of a figurative huge jump in your progress so i think that's that's a really great example because there's so many english learners out there that have the excuse that like i don't have anyone to speak to i can't improve my speaking but just like uh you max uh that you were proactive to actually be like okay i don't have anyone to speak to like let me create this group where i can speak with people find other people who have that same that same frustration and i think even if you don't have that maybe if like someone lives in a really small town or you don't know anyone else who's like learning english or has a similar level to your own it's like you can also record yourself you can talk to yourself you can tell yourself different stories and stuff and just by doing that you're at least starting to help yourself take your thoughts what you have in your head and translate that into speech so i think any of these excuses that you have you can always find some solution within it and that's what this habit's all about wouldn't it be great if there was some way to understand real english without getting lost and without getting bored well now there is with our real-life native immersion course we will take you on a 41-week real-life adventure of the english language each week exploring a different topic connected to our goal to help you understand and use real native english and make it a permanent part of your life in a way that is fun natural and convenient the best part is you can try for free with our three-part power learning series we will send it to your email just go to reallifeglobal.com pod that's p-o-d to sign up [Music] so that said i think that's a perfect point for us to close up the first habit and jump into habit two so what is that one it's a begin with the andy mind which actually is totally related with max's story if you think about it he not only had the initiative but he had an end in mind he had a thought which was let's gather let's me like gather all these people have these conversations in practice or english so it's not where there's a difference between like habit one and two where habit one is just the realization that you you are the creator you are you are the person who needs to do uh something about it and habit two is the actual creation is what you're going to do and uh what would you have to say max about uh just this visualization that you you visualized this happening and you you did it yeah that's a key word to visualization and um yeah basically as you just described i was had this goal and i had this strong motivation and from that you know came the initiative and um yeah i just made it happen and it was so important in my life there in my you know english learning journey it's uh it's one of the interesting things also about visualization there are some people who even um have like meditation techniques just to kind of empower their dreams and their motivations and these people they tend to achieve more just because of that so it's something that not a lot of people normally do but that i would recommend uh um do that on a weekly basis just like any vision how your week when you want it to go and in the case of learning english what are the different habits they want to implement and what are the different things they want to be doing to to achieve your fluency and the actual tasks saying how how are you going to to do those things you know like see yourself doing those things totally i think they say something about there that they've done different studies that actually people who take the time to visualize on a regular basis their goals are much more successful in reaching those goals so uh it's interesting in the book he actually even gives the example of visualizing your own funeral like envisioning like who would be there and what would they say about you and like kind of that is an exercise to design your whole life for just thinking about okay you know when it comes to the end of my life what's the impact what's kind of the you know the mark that i'm going to be leaving on the world and on the people that i love or i care about or you know that i'm doing whatever i'm doing for and as it says in the book everything is created twice and if you think for example of a building a building just doesn't just pop out of nowhere someone has to first visualize it um create the blueprint of it and then have other people actually build it and well a goal is or like a like an action is first visualized to first think of it and then actually you execute on it or you just go after that goal in this case exactly it's like we're always designing our own lives in that sense but either like carefully or carelessly like we either pay attention to it and and build it ourselves or we'll let the circumstances in the world build it build it for ourselves so you need to make the choice the decision definitely that's a great point and for english learners i think that it could be so powerful just to i mean for one we talk a lot about on this podcast and our videos and everything how important it is to actually like know what your goals are to have objectives in your life and to write those down and to be tracking your progress towards them but also just like if you want to be like a fluent english speaker like actually visualizing that visualizing yourself confidently having a conversation with someone and and being able to speak you know uh and like even if you make mistakes and stuff that you don't let that trip you up you don't let that get in the way of your ability to communicate and stuff so i think if you actually start doing that then it will kind of help to align your actions and help you to make the proactive decisions that you need to make in order to be successful in achieving that objective if i may add there um i think this goes hand in hand with uh also like having high expectations for yourself because if you plan or if you um have us an end vision to be really fluent in the language you have that high expectation of yourself then your actions are going to be directed to actually achieving that if i thought like when i was beginning to learn english that i would just like settle for just be able to communicate basic ideas i wouldn't have been able to actually you know speak so far unless i do it currently yeah i think that self-talk is really important too it's like what are you telling yourself are you telling yourself you know i'll never be fluent i can't do it or are you telling yourself you know i just have to keep working hard i have to keep going i have to do something new every day to improve my skills and i think whichever you have it's it's definitely going to just you know in the end it's going to reflect where you're going to get so that said i think that we've we've definitely given a good overview of the first two habits and the next one i think helps to really put it all into action so what is that one habit three is put first things first so i mean habit two is in the process of imagining that end you identify your priorities and now inhabit three is actually living by those priorities those values it's uh it's interesting that max talked about that analogy of building a house and then you have that first creation that first mental creation have the blueprint how you want to build your house so i'd say that habit three is actually that second creation it's it's when you go and build a house and there is a method to that there is a a way to do that that is uh most effective and this is what this habit is all about and one of the i think the most important things that this this chapter this habit presents is the four quadrants the idea of the the four there are four different quadrants different tasks that we have in our lives and these tasks they vary between being important or not important and being urgent or non-urgent that's a big insight from the book really there are things that you have to manage there are things that you have to focus on and there are also things that you should avoid and limit like if you say put first things first that's not going to be watching netflix all day long that's not going to be your priority unless that's your job if you had like a job like was related to that but there's an interesting thing there that i'll get on in just a minute so things that are important and urgent are for example your like school assignments or your your job assignments your tasks in your job things that are not urgent but important learning english falls into that category i believe or like exercising or doing things for um self growth right so these are things again not urgent but important so you have to carve out the time to actually have some time to engage in those activities yeah yeah i'd say these are the things that normally we uh we do the least like the things that are just like waiting forever for us to do but that we know that that it would make the most difference in our lives so are those habits all those good habits that are just waiting for us to to build them and they fall in this category of things that are not really urgent but then they're super important yeah so i think like you said like most of us we tend to spend most of our time probably in the quadrant one and kind of like the things that are usually like other people are putting kind of like fire under us to to do those things right that it's like you know maybe your boss or or your teacher or like uh your parents or someone else is saying like you know you have to get this done by this date it's things with a deadline and then like those those quadrant two ones that are the things that aren't urgent but they're still important are the ones that like you really have to have that fire within to push you to do that because if no one else is going to do that and basically you know if you're if you're not proactive about carving out that time for those quadrant two activities then you know they're never going to get done and those really are the things that probably are going to bring uh the most fulfilling experiences the most fulfilling really uh everything that you want in your life are going to come from there so ethan i really like that phrasal verbs there carve out time what does that mean carve out i think you actually used it that's what i said if you carve out time so it's like carve is to cut something like you would carve um for example like a piece of wood to make like a sculpture or you might carve like a ham or something like that if you if you eat ham uh and we use this kind of figuratively so it's like as if time were something physical and you had to like uh cut a chunk of it out or something like that another thing that i like to add there is between these quadrants quadrant one being important and urgent in quadrant two not urgent but important is that it it's easily to imagine like english learners falling into either of those two categories like one that falls into color one would be an english learner that's just probably just depending on a teacher or on a subject of english as a subject and just um doing the homework or assignments for school but just because he wants to not fail the subject but one thing that i think you guys would agree on is that successful english learners are successful because they spend a lot of time learning practicing taking interest in the language outside of any obligation force that might have been imposed by school by a teacher i can't really imagine a successful english speaker that hasn't spent time in that way as english as a thing that was not urgent but very important definitely and i think like we only talked about the first two quadrants but the quadrant three is like the the next one the things that aren't important but they're urgent and maybe depending on where you're learning english maybe if you're like in a class i definitely know when i've learned uh different languages in school i had a lot of quadrant three things like things that they were telling me that i had to do and stuff but in the end they didn't really help me to advance my skills in the language so i think like it's also really important to identify you do you have a good teacher are they making you kind of do those quadrant one and quadrant two things like the things that are actually important or are they making you just do busy work are they making you just you know do grammar exercises that you know aren't really actually helping you to master anything or uh which those can be not to bash on grammar because i think sometimes that can be a quadrant too as well but if it just feels like you know you're doing things and they're very easy and stuff it's not challenging you in any way then that might be something to kind of reflect on how can you better spend that time on something that would really be kind of uh pushing pushing the dial on your english and one very interesting thing about quadrant four uh when it comes to learning english is that a lot of the activities that would fall under that category in that quadrant of things that are not important and not urgent uh is that for example if you're watching netflix as max pointed out you could easily just like change to english subtitles and then that would be maybe quadrant two maybe it would be something that's uh important but it's not urgent like nobody's really asking you nobody's uh obligating you to to change the subtitles but if you do that it's a very proactive thing that you can do to turn uh like a very a time that you have for something that's not so useful one could say to something that is great for your english learning process or taking notes on your phone of like new new words that pop up or like anything like that that you can kind of take something where you're maybe just passively like relaxing and stuff and turn it into a learning opportunity so or i think just if you're anything like if you're just uh i don't know you have to go to the bank or something and you're standing in line and that just seems like obviously a waste of time like it's important to go to the bank but it's not so important to wait in line but all of a sudden you can turn that into a great learning experience if when you're going and doing these different errands you're whacking some headphones in your ears and you're listening to a podcast like this one so i think that you can uh find a lot of ways to move out of those quadrants three and four of things that maybe aren't so important or out of quadrant one and into quadrant two so i think that's something that covey talks a lot about is like how can you kind of plan out your your day pa and your week and your life really so that you're spending more time in quadrant two so these first three habits covey kind of talks about them as like the personal victory and then the the next three are about a public victory so the first three are kind of about becoming independent which means that you know you're able to like really be a responsible person you're able to do what's most important and you're kind of you know contributing to society in some sense you're kind of being the best that you can be so that's the thing that you're trying to master with the first three and then after that you can move to a public victory which means that you are able to have good relationships with other people you're able to kind of um you know if you're in a work setting for example that you're able to be uh well basically like the the habit for to find a win-win situation instead of you know you're just trying to win are you just trying to let the other person win uh but maybe these these aren't quite as applicable to your english in some sense they are a little bit so we'll move through them faster but i highly recommend that if you're at all interested in this go and watch a video on youtube that like gives kind of more in-depth uh summary go and read the entire book and if you do this in english obviously that'll be a very proactive way that you can be improving your skills so i briefly mentioned uh that you can kind of have like a win win sort of relationship or a win-win deal with someone what does that mean i think like every relationship or every situation where there's like two sides to people um there might be different goals or different ways of achieving one the same goal and a win-win situation is when both sides feel like they've they've won they they got to where they wanted so habit 4 is think we went and um i think this is very important for really building first creating building relationships and one of the senses that this had before and the following ones do correlate with the activity of learning english is that english as a language is a social activity as a social thing unless you want to be speaking english to yourself forever i don't think that would be very motivating but i think we win is then like having um cultivating good relationships with people so um it's it comes with this abundance mentality uh i win and i want to win out of this relationship that we have but i also want you to win it's otherwise it would be win lose which is not a good mindset and one thing that i can think of is imagine you are meeting with another learner and you both decide to speak in english because that's beneficial to both of you right um or even on a language exchange thing like for example i'm a spanish native speaker and then i meet with someone who is an english native speaker and we want to exchange languages so i speak a little bit spanish a little bit and then he practices in spanish and then they speak in english and i practice my english and it kind of like works like that that's a perfect example i think of a win-win relationship in language learning is when you do a language exchange because it's obviously each person is getting something out of it and and i think the other thing that it applies here i mean um he talks a lot about it a lot kind of as something for business because in business you're always doing negotiation but english really is the language for diplomacy it's like the the language that most uh relationships cross-border relationships are conducted in and another term for this that i've heard that i really like is finding the third way so there's always kind of like you know my way and your way and more most the time when people are having some sort of discussion they just think about that there's like you know i'm right you're wrong or you're thinking you're right and i'm wrong but there's always some sort of third way there's always some sort of thing that you can find that both people would be happy with and that's a win-win and i think that really if you're in anything related to diplomacy or if you are having any sort of relationship with people from other countries where you might have different points of view on things you always need to be looking for that third way so that said i think that's that's a perfect way to jump into habit five which is seeking first understand before being understood so what's that about izzy that is a actually a great method to get started with what you're talking about before because if you're if you have that win-win mentality if you want if you have an abundance mentality you need to start from listening otherwise there there's no agreement because somebody has to listen first and then because we're already trying to be proactive we need to be that person who will seek to first first to understand and in the case of english that is even more important if we think about it because uh i think like one i think was the previous podcast like the previous episode that we were talking about the importance of listening and uh listening more than speaking uh at first initially especially so even from that perspective you think about it's important to to have that input before you can you can have any output definitely it's kind of like twofold there that it's better for having a good relationship and it's also better for just improving your communication skills in general so uh as an english learner so you definitely have to be doing a lot of listening like listening to a podcast and watching tv series and like using those as learning tools probably twice as much or even more than you're actually speaking because it's kind of like all that input is what's going to feed the output when you get the opportunity to speak and i think too if you're kind of like a learner and everything if you're nervous about speaking or whatever i mean okay you know just turn that into a really great learning experience before you're listening you know listen a lot more ask a lot of good questions and stuff take a lot of interest in that other person and that's also going to be a great way to make a friend because people always like talking about themselves right what a lot of people do with this actually is not listening to understand but listening with the intent of replying like especially when there is like a conflictive situation like they say in their minds okay i heard you nice okay okay you had your time to speak but now this is my viewpoint and like this is what i think and it's probably right and you're wrong and so that is the paradigm shift that a lot of people have trouble doing and it's this is said to be like the most difficult habit in the book actually it's not easy but we just need to constantly try i'm sure anyone listening to this probably can think of some experience where they've been having a conversation with someone and they're just thinking about in their head what they're going to say when that person finishes talking so this one's all about you know kind of cutting that chatter out of your head cutting out that uh that kind of like talk that's going on while you're in a conversation with someone and actually trying to hear the words that they're saying and actually even more than that maybe trying to understand like the feeling the emotion behind it what they're really trying to say because a lot of times when we're speaking i think that we can't really communicate how we're feeling you know our words can't match our emotion so it's kind of about right just like being there listening to the person and even just like letting them talk and kind of like figure it out themselves and not just trying to give them your advice that's great advice actually for for just developing good relationships because once you do that and you're able to express to to say it back to the person all the things that they've said and maybe even better maybe you're able to make their argument even better than they can you're showing that you care and ensuring that uh you want to to achieve that uh third to the third alternative to actually have a win-win situation because after doing that they'll be able to listen to you as well they'll respect you and then you can show your your viewpoint and you can go from there very well said and then you can ultimately find synergy you can synergize and that's habit six so i think i don't know if this is a word that he invented or if he just kind of like popularized it but what does that mean what does synergy mean and what does it mean to synergize with someone i remember when i heard it for the first time from you guys from you and justin islam i remember looking that up because i didn't know that word and it's such a great word and one of the things that uh that i always think is we don't have like a good translation in spanish you can think about synergy as creating something that's bigger than the sum of its part like one plus one isn't two one one plus one is three if you are synergistic with another person or maybe even more sometimes you can make one plus one equal one million maybe in the in the best the best cases so uh that's definitely something as a company that we value a lot which is uh reminds me of culture actually because one of the things that we can think about when you think about synergy and this one plus one is that it is important that these two parts are not equal so they actually have something different in the end this like different additional this complementary type of sum in the end and it reminds me of culture because it's really interesting when you see two different cultures uh communicate and be in the same room because from that we can have uh so much like synergy and and and have a more interesting actually conversation with people that we're not so familiar with or people are simply different from us than if we're talking to the same people like all the time yeah so it's kind of the importance of having those different perspectives right to be able to come up with something that maybe neither of you could see just on your own actually one of the ideas of global citizenship is that we need to have that understanding of other cultures of other people so we can achieve a certain level of global awareness of global consciousness so in a way like a synergize when it comes like speaking english to learning and speaking english is really to go out there and find people that you know is kind of different from you from other cultures and understanding how we can actually achieve a different level of of consciousness and and just like a break shift paradigms out of that it's a very good point so that said i think we better roll into the last one we're all ready to have it seven and this is one of my favorite ones do you want to share what it is izzy and the story behind it uh so sharpened to saw is habit seven uh his name sharpened the saw uh the idea is there's this little story that uh a guy a a man was in the woods like in in the forest and he was like sharp he was cutting down a tree and he would spend a lot of time cutting trying to cut out a tree then another man comes along and starts to sharpen his saw and uh in the end the man who was sharpening the saw actually made like a way less effort than the one who was just for hours just trying to cut down a tree and then the other one comes along and just uh when he finally start stops sharpening his saw he just cuts it down really quickly without so much effort because he basically prepared he he he brought his best self to the situation and and he came out of it feeling feeling good and ready for actually cutting down other trees yeah i think the first guy says too like i don't have any time to sharpen my saw i'm too busy trying to cut down this tree so that is like a perfect parallel to like you said bring your best self that most people are think that they're so busy that they can't do the things to take care of themselves so they can bring their best self but it's kind of like a paradoxical in that sense that if you don't do that then you're just not as efficient and you end up wasting so much time um so it's kind of you want to be more like the guy who's spending a little bit of time sharpening a saw and then he's able to do the work really quickly really effectively so how do you be effective according to covey max yeah so that is like the answer to that would be the the biggest idea that you can take out of this uh chapters of habit seven is there are four dimensions and uh ones that uh you see described early in the podcast there is a dimension the physical dimension the mental dimension the spiritual and the social or emotional dimension and really they are all very important in keeping a balance a balanced person has a good interaction with all these dimensions physical means really exercising moving your body not just being sitting down all day long if you have a job that requires that that puts you in that position you have to actually be proactive and care about these physical dimensions of that nation of yours then there's the spiritual the mental and the social and i'll describe that one the social one we are social animals and we really need that human contact right otherwise it's going to be detrimental to our health and ultimately to to our life in general definitely and i think that that social one maybe it's a no-brainer for english learners you you need to use it it's a tool for communication to be social uh and i think the other ones it's like basically you know he says if you you do these four things if you carve out that time as we said uh for these kind of quadrant two activities of finding time a little bit of time for each one so exercising taking care of your body doing something spiritual whether that's like praying or meditating or getting out into nature uh reading a book or doing something that kind of like challenges you or stimulates you mentally and uh and then kind of just being around people so i think like the social one is really important too that those social interactions are fulfilling so like max said that he had like a an english speaking group you know so that was kind of like helping him towards one of his objectives is people who are kind of like pushing him and challenging him so if you have all these four things for example if you're a big objective you know to get fluent in english then you need people who support that objective and you need to be doing these things every single day so that when you come to your your deliberate practice of learning english you're 100 there you're feeling really great and you're you're enthusiastic and ready to get to work um so i think just by taking that one takeaway from this book just like this this habit of everyday sharpening the saw doing four things for those those four dimensions then you're going to see a whole shift in how you feel totally it's it's i think it's all about just like remembering that we need that practice of renewal just remembering that story of the the two men who were in the jungle they're trying to cut down trees and then you don't want to be the first guy because he's gonna end not basically killing himself it's gonna not have enough energy for for whatever he wants to achieve next and the second one is the one practicing renewal and then you should think about how how that analogy would apply in your life for anything for like physical for example like having enough sleep if you're not sleeping like enough hours um you're probably not going to be so productive the next day so instead of burning the midnight oil which is something that's an expression that i think we've read explained here recently but that basically means it's working uh like all night instead of doing that might as well just like go to sleep early go to bed early and then wake up earlier and start in the morning start again in the morning and have like all these other these are three dimensions where you could easily find other like renewal practices practices of renewal to be working on totally so i think that's a perfect place for us to wrap up this podcast it's been a real pleasure to get to talk about this with you guys and hopefully we can have you guys on for a round two about maybe about another book maybe we can talk more in depth about some of these if uh anyone out there has something specific like that they would like us to dive more into that they'd like to learn more about then let us know down in the comments below on youtube or maybe by leaving us a review on one of the channels where you're listening to this on the podcast or even sending us an email so that said we have had a great time here with you today and we look forward to seeing you next week on the relife english podcast one two three yeah don't be a stranger you can find all the notes like vocabulary links and more for this lesson on our blog at reallifeglobal.com and connect with us and on instagram at reallife.english for even more fun english recommendations do you want to continue your learning and get confident fluent english then i have a couple great recommendations for you first of all check out our youtube channel learn english with tv series where you can have fun learning to understand fast speaking natives with your favorite movies series and more without getting lost without missing the jokes and without subtitles second if you like our podcast then our real life native immersion course is perfect for you it is the next best thing to studying abroad in an english-speaking country try it for free with our three-part power learning series just go to reallifeglobal.com pod to sign up finally if you are enjoying our podcast then please assist us in helping more people go beyond the classroom and live their english you can do this by sending a link to this podcast to a friend or by leaving us a five star review wherever you are listening we might even shout you out on the podcast stay healthy and safe and i look forward to seeing you next week ah yeah [Music] you

Channel: RealLife English

Views: 19,244

Keywords: Learn English with TV, Natural English, Real English

Id: nQA1QuItRvQ

Length: 45min 35sec (2735 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020