Hey, it's Annemarie was Speak Confident English
and welcome to this week's Confident English lesson. This is exactly where you want to be
every week to get the confidence you want for your life and work in English.
Let's talk about muscle memory. Have you heard those words before? They're a bit confusing because of course
your memory does not have a muscle. So what could that mean? Muscle memory is the idea that
you have repeated something so many times that you no longer really
need to think about it when you do it, it's almost automatic, like walking, riding a bike or typing an
email on your computer keypad. Those are all things that at one time
took a lot of effort and a lot of thinking, but now you just do them
and you don't really think about it. This also includes a skill
like playing the piano. Maybe there's a song
that you've played 873 times by now. You no longer
need to read the music. You don't need to worry about thinking
where your fingers should go on the keyboard and you don't really
worry about making mistakes either. You just play the song. It's easy. You do it fluently or smoothly
and with confidence as well. When you've mastered a skill like
that, you've created muscle memory. So how does muscle memory, or perhaps a better word when we
talk about learning a new language, automaticity, happen? To practice effectively and
master your English skills and confidence, there are
four steps you can follow. And that's exactly what we're going to
talk through in today's Confident English lesson, not only will we look at those four
specific steps and how they can apply to language learning so that you can master
the skills that you're working on, but I've also got a free download for
you that will help get you on the right path In their wildly popular Ted Ed video
on this topic of how to practice effectively Annie Bosler and Don
Greene define effective practice as "consistent, intensely focused and targets, content, or weaknesses that lie
at the edge of one's current abilities." I'm going to leave
that here for a moment because that's a lot to think about effective
practice is practice that is "consistent, intensely focused and targets, content, or weaknesses that lie at the
edge of one's current abilities." In other words, learn how
to do something correctly, learn it with intense
focus and repeat it often, slowly adding challenge or level
of difficulty so that you're always moving forward. Now in their video on effective practice
Bosler and Greene are focused on physical or motor skills, such as learning to play
a musical instrument, perfecting a fine art, like painting or
improving athletic skills. But I think it's always useful to
observe something that you're learning and think, what can I learn from this? And how can I apply it in
other areas of my life? That's what we're going to do today. We're going to look at their method
of effective practice and how we could use that same strategy in language, learning to master your
skills so that you gain ease, fluency and confidence. Bosler and Greene. Break that down into four simple steps. We're going to walk through each one
of those steps and break it down into practical things that you can begin
doing today to start mastering the skills that you're working on
in English. And as I mentioned, I've got a free download that I'm going
to share with you that will help you get started on the right path
immediately. So step number one, focus without distraction. You and I both know that this is
true for anything that we want to do well in our life. The more we
can eliminate distractions, the better we're going to perform. The problem is of all four steps. This one might be the most difficult.
It requires the most self discipline. Not only do we already
have family members, kids, coworkers around us that distract us, but many of us are also
addicted to checking email, responding to text messages, looking at what's happening on Facebook
or Instagram every few minutes. And that is a disaster
when it comes to focus. So here are two tips that I have
for you to help you eliminate those distractions. When you're focused on achieving
mastery in your English skills, number one, keep your practice time short. It's much easier to turn off your
email and to turn off your phone or even shut yourself
in a room. If you know, it's just for a little bit of
time, maybe five, 10 or 20 minutes, the key here is making sure that you
can give a hundred percent of your attention and your energy to that
one thing that you want to do better. The second tip that I have for you
is you can make this even easier by scheduling it. I know for me that
if I don't schedule something, it's super easy for me to forget
about it or say that it's not so important, I can do it tomorrow or
next week when I schedule something, it becomes a priority. It's something that I make
time for. Step number two, start slow, learn it right the first time, slowly increasing with your
speed or level of difficulty. This might seem counterintuitive
to language learning because of course in language you
want to speak quickly. Many of us think that fluency
is about speaking fast. If you're one of my
Fluency School students, you absolutely know fluency
is not about speaking fast. It's about being in control, being smooth and being clear. That is fluency. And you can only do that when
you start slow and you perfect or master a specific skill. And then with time build up the
speed or level of difficulty until you have absolute
confidence in what you're doing. That's exactly how I help my
students in Fluency School. And it's one of the reasons
the program is so effective. So how can you do this? Well, there are a couple of things
that are important. Number one, you have to learn something
correctly from the very start. What that means is finding an instructor. You trust to give you
the right information. Now whether that's me, someone else on YouTube or another
teacher where you live locally, that is a hundred percent fine, but it's important that you have someone
who can teach you the right skills. Once you've done that, start working on those skills slowly. I'm going to talk a little bit more about
this when I share the free download I have for you. How do you start slowly? So if you're thinking that if you're
wondering about how to apply this, I'm going to help you do
that in just a moment. But first let's talk about step
number three, repeat often, but give yourself breaks
and avoid burnout. If you've ever tried to improve
your ability in playing a musical instrument or perhaps playing a sport, you know that if you only do
that thing one time a month for two or three hours, you're going to lose everything
that you've learned the next month. When you practice again, four weeks later, you're going to repeat the same
thing that you've already learned, because you never mastered it. That's why sports teams and
clubs meet every week or even twice a week. Children's sports teams might practice
every day after school during the season. The reason for that is of course, repetitive practice allows you to
build on what you've already learned and make gains going forward. This is absolutely true
for language as well. This goes back to that idea of short, committed practice time. It's so much easier to get regular repeated practice when
it's short and focused. If you practice 15 minutes
a day, five days a week, that is so much easier than
trying to do three hours a day. And finally, step four on
the list. Use visualization. What that means is to
practice in your brain, imagine those specific skills that
you're wanting to use and how you would use them. How do you apply
this to language learning? If you've been following
me for awhile, you know, I'm a huge advocate of
preparing for conversations in advance by imagining what
you would say in that moment. My Fluency School students
definitely know about this and in my lesson on how to be interesting
and cool and English, I actually talk through
my method for this. I share with you exactly why
it's useful to imagine or visualize what you might say in a
conversation in advance and how to do it so that when that
conversation happens in real life, you feel prepared, confident and at ease. If you want to link to that lesson
where I talk about how to visualize or imagine what you'll say in a conversation, I'll leave a link to that in
the notes below this video. But now let's talk about practical
ways to apply all of this. And how can you do this to improve
your English language skills? As I mentioned, I have a free download available
for you at the start of this year. I shared a lesson on how to
accelerate your English confidence. And with that lesson, I included a download with 30
speaking prompts for daily practice. If you haven't downloaded it yet, I want you to go to today's lesson on
the Speak Confident English website, where it's available for you to
download. And if you've already got it, get those speaking prompts out. We're going to talk through exactly
how you can use that to follow all four steps we've talked about
today and begin to gain mastery in your English skills. Once you've downloaded the 30
speaking prompts for daily practice (notice I said daily, we're talking about that consistent
repetition) here's exactly what I want you to do. Number one, create focused time to
practice, make it short, but make it focused. So if you
can find five, 10 or 15 minutes, five days a week, schedule
it and make it a priority. This is your committed
speaking practice time. Once you've done that, I want you to follow the daily
prompts that I've provided in that download. I've given you specific topics and
skills for you to practice in your English. And here's where we're going to talk
about what it means to go slow and then slowly build up your speed or level
of difficulty. With each prompt, I have a question for you, and I want you to give yourself some time
to practice speaking on that topic out loud, the first time that you do that, I want you to speak slowly. I know that sounds strange. And
it's counterintuitive. Again. You might be thinking that
fluency is speaking fast. It's not it's about you being
in a hundred percent control of what you want to say and how
you want to express yourself. So I want you to start slow and
don't worry because no one else is in the room with you. This
is your practice time. So no one's going to hear you going slow. It won't sound strange to anyone
because they can't hear you. I want you to practice speaking as slow as possible. Give yourself time. As you speak to think
about what you're saying, think about the words
that you want to use, or the specific grammar
I've asked you to focus on. Think about your pronunciation. Speaking slowly gives you time
to think about all of that. It helps you improve your accuracy. Once you've done that, you
can do the activity again, this time speed up just a little bit. If it's a topic that you already feel
really comfortable with and you think, Oh, this is so easy. Well, then I have
a different challenge for you. Instead of focusing on
increasing your speed slowly, try to increase the level
of difficulty speak slowly. So you can focus on using
advanced level vocabulary that is more difficult for you
to use or use more challenging grammar and sentence structures.
No matter what the topic is, there's always some way
to make it more difficult. And when you do it the first
time, if you do it slowly, you give yourself that opportunity
to really refine perfect what you're doing as you master it, you can increase the speed and
gain that confidence you need going forward. All right, so we've talked about giving
yourself some intensely focused time regularly to your practice
with these speaking prompts, we've talked how you can apply
the strategy of going slowly and increasing your speed or
level of difficulty over time. That allows you to continue building
on what you've already learned and move forward. Step three is do it consistently. That's exactly why I included the
words daily practice in this download. If you can,I want you to
do this five days a week, give yourself breaks. You
need them. It's healthy, but commit to regular practice.
And finally, step four, visualize or imagine again, when you have those speaking
prompts before you immediately begin speaking, give yourself a
couple of moments to reflect. Imagine that someone has asked you
that particular question in a real conversation, take a few minutes to think
about what you might want to say. Give yourself just a little bit of
time in advance to prepare before you immediately begin speaking. I know that we don't always get those
opportunities to just sit and think in a real conversation, but
this is your practice time. This is the time that you're
using to master those skills so that when you're in
that real conversation, it comes easily, fluently,
and with confidence. With that, you have an effective way to
practice and gain mastery in your English skills and confidence. My challenge for you this week is simple. Download the 30 speaking prompts
for daily practice and get started today. Follow the
steps that I've provided here. And as you implement this practice,
let me know how it's going. You can share your practice journey with
me in the comments below this video, with that have a fantastic week, and I'll see you next time for
your Confident English lesson.
