Hey everyone and welcome back to the Easy English Podcast.
I'm your host Oliver and, as always, you are welcome to another great episode where we are going to learn some English vocabulary.
Have you ever had this experience?
Perhaps you're at a party, maybe you're in class speaking in English.
You're in your job and you know exactly what you want to say in English.
But the moment that you open your mouth to start speaking, your heart starts to beat faster, your hands start to get a little bit sweaty perhaps, and your voice starts to become weaker or it starts to shake.
Suddenly, you might even forget the simplest of words.
It's a really horrible feeling, to be honest, but it's something that most people experience at some point during their language learning process.
And usually this feeling makes you want to speak a lot less.
It makes you want to not really practice as much as well.
But here's the truth.
Confidence is not a lack of fear.
It's the ability to still speak and continue while you feel those feelings.
And today we're going to talk about exactly that topic, about confidence in English.
So, with your English skills, how can you be more confident to feel less nerves about speaking, and also how you can sound more confident in English as well?
And we'll look a little bit about why being perfect is actually the enemy.
It's the opposite of being confident in most cases.
So, as always, I usually like to do a key vocabulary session at the start of each episode, where I will introduce for you five new keywords and phrases that I want you to listen for in today's episode.
Before I read the first word, make sure that you've followed and subscribed to the Easy English Podcast if you're new here for new episodes every single week.
I'm proud to say it's been over one year now where I haven't missed a single episode, a single weekly episode.
Every Monday, we have had an episode of the Easy English Podcast.
So it's been a lot of work, but I am glad that we are growing.
Let's take a look at our key vocabulary for today's episode.
The first word is a phrase.
It is self-conscious.
So this is an adjective rather, not a phrase.
And to be self-conscious means to feel nervous about what other people think about you.
So when you're feeling self-conscious, you're maybe thinking, oh, these people are looking at me.
They're thinking about me.
They're talking about me.
That is self-conscious behavior.
For example, I felt very self-conscious during my presentation.
I felt like everyone was looking and thinking about me.
Our next word today is a verb, and we're going to learn the phrase here, and that is to hesitate.
So the verb is to hesitate.
And to hesitate means to pause before saying something, usually because you're nervous.
So if you hesitate, you're a little bit nervous or you're not confident.
I hesitated and lost my chance to speak.
So perhaps you've had that in a conversation where you're chatting with some people and then you hesitate with your answer and they already move on to the next topic or the next part of the conversation.
You hesitated and you lost your chance to speak.
Our next phrase is to own it, to own it.
And this is a phrase and it means to act with total complete confidence, even if you make a mistake.
So if you say something wrong, you can own it and continue to move forward.
You continue to just act with full confidence, even though you've made the mistake.
You owned it.
Our fourth one today is a word and it is a noun and that noun is mindset.
Mindset.
And your mindset is your way of thinking and your opinions.
So we can say that if someone has a growth mindset, they are thinking about improving.
They have the opinion and the mindset that they want to improve.
And our final word today for today's vocabulary section is assertive.
Assertive.
A great adjective to be assertive is to have or show a confident and sometimes forceful personality.
So you don't need perfect English or perfect grammar to be assertive in a meeting.
Alright, that is our words for today.
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OK, let's continue.
Most learners often think that they will become confident after they stop making mistakes, or that once you reach a certain level of English you will start to become confident.
And while this is true, that once you get more of a mastery of English, once you become a higher level, you'll probably not think about it as much
But sometimes people think you know, once I have learned this many words, or once I understand these tenses and I can use them, then I will feel more confident to speak in English.
But it can actually work the other way around.
Confidence comes from actually making the mistakes and realizing that nothing bad has happened.
So realizing that you can make mistakes and it's okay.
Think about it.
Have you ever been annoyed by a foreigner or someone from another country speaking your native language?
Have you ever been annoyed when they had an accent or they made a grammar mistake?
Probably not.
You were probably impressed that they were even trying.
And this perfection trap is something that I see a lot with English students.
It's when you're trying to be 100% correct or you're stressed about making mistakes.
And I've made episodes about that before, talking about the fear of mistakes, the fear of failure.
So I'm not going to talk specifically about that today, but this idea of trying to be perfect is a bad one.
And it does create what we can call a brain fog.
So you're focusing too much on grammar or vocabulary or generally your English, rather than the moment, rather than the person that's in front of you, the person that you're talking to.
And I see it time and time again where students freeze up and they overthink what is going on.
Whereas they do have the vocabulary there.
Even if it's more simple, they can just say it and use it.
And it would be so much less stressful than trying to get everything right.
And the ironic thing that I notice is when people stop trying to be perfect or they stop obsessing about speaking correctly, they usually start to make fewer mistakes because their brain relaxes.
They start to have better vocabulary and ultimately they start to sound more fluent because they're not pausing as much, they're not stressing as much and the whole thing becomes a lot more natural.
One of the biggest confidence killers for many people is silence.
So once you are when you're speaking and you're trying to find a word, perhaps you're searching for it and there's a long, awkward pause.
Or you have a moment where you're saying something and you can't remember what you're saying.
Or maybe what comes next how to correctly grammatically pronounce phrase this and you feel pressure and a lot of people begin to panic inside and it can cause stress.
It can cause you to feel more anxious and then for you to make more mistakes.
But the best way and I always advise the number one way to deal with this is to use fillers.
Fillers get a bad name.
People say it's bad, it's not proper English, you know, these uh, um, all of those things.
Of course, you don't want to have it too much in your speech, but fillers are natural.
And in fact, native speakers use them all the time, including me in this podcast.
If I talked entirely without fillers, if I spoke without fillers, I think my speech would probably be a lot less natural, because I like to talk.
I do this podcast recording in one take.
So I just do one shot the whole way through and I edit, you know, little pauses and things like that.
But generally I like to just talk as if I'm talking to my friends, because you are all my supporters and friends and members of this community.
So naturally, there are going to be filler words, but they can help you while your brain is trying to find what comes next.
And there are some that you can use which are more natural and it's not simply um or uh, but a little bit better than that.
You could try using, for example, actually or well, or you know or, to be honest, you know when you're thinking about what to say.
Or you could simply say, let me think about that for a second.
And while you're saying that, while you're creating the pause, your brain is still working in the background.
You're buying yourself some time and you're taking that pressure and stress off of yourself.
When you have like an entirely silent pause and a panic, it makes it look more like you're stuck rather than you're thinking.
But when you use a filler, it makes it seem like you're thinking in a natural way.
And it buys you a few seconds of time for your brain to find the word or the grammar that comes next without stressing about it.
It's a small trick, but it can make you look and feel a lot more assertive with your English.
Another thing that I see sometimes is that when people get nervous, sometimes they hide their mistakes by using long, complicated sentences.
So they might over explain things or try to use big words, complicated words, perhaps to show that they have good English.
But long sentences are difficult and particularly if you're in more of a stressful conversation or you're nervous, you're much more likely to make mistakes, maybe to get tripped up on those sentences and find parts where you pause.
So I always recommend that if you can explain something complicated using simple words, you probably should do it.
And it shows that you're actually understanding and confident about what you're talking about, rather than trying to over explain it and make it seem like you're using much more complicated words than are actually needed.
Simple is usually more effective, particularly in the day to day.
You know, when you go to the shop or you meet someone in person perhaps that you haven't met before like a new friend or a language partner.
You shouldn't be with that mentality of trying to impress with your English.
You should be trying to make it as natural and as comfortable for yourself.
The goal always with English, particularly for most of our use, is to understand one another.
So you want to be clear, but you also want to be understood, and you want to understand the person that you're speaking with.
That's it.
You know, with time, your English is going to get, of course, more complicated.
But trying to force that complexity, trying to make your English more complicated to show that you have good English, like that is not the right attitude or mentality to approach speaking, in my opinion.
It will create more of a pressure and a stress on yourself and also create more sort of issues in speech where you're making more pauses, thinking of more things, and that's not good for confidence.
But every mistake that you do make and learning that those mistakes are good and nothing bad happens afterwards will build your confidence over time.
Okay, so let's take a break and go to our listener spotlight.
Last week's episode was about understanding accents, different accents in English.
And I asked, what accent in English do you find the hardest?
And it could be any from around the world.
And I got quite a few answers of people telling me which accent they find difficult.
If you haven't seen that episode yet, make sure to go to last week's episode and watch or listen to it.
It was a really great topic and a lot of fun to make.
The first comment I want to read is from Beau.
And Beau said, Hi Oliver, I'm Beau.
I've studied British English since middle school.
So even though the American accent is widely used, it's still really hard for me.
After listening to this episode, I tried listening to some American podcasts.
I found that, although I listen to your and BBC podcasts every day and can understand 95 without subtitles, it's difficult to catch what the American hosts say.
Even with subtitles, I still need to pause and rewind to listen again.
I also found a podcast with an Indian accent.
Following your advice, I've decided to listen to podcasts with different accents every day.
I hope I can understand them as well as I understand yours soon.
Excellent comment, Beau.
Really, really well written.
And it's interesting to hear that you struggle more with the American accent.
But it makes sense because you have studied with the British accent for so long.
I find when I speak to people, most people tend to find the American accent easier.
But I think it's because a lot of people use American media and then they get used to it.
So it's interesting to hear the opposite.
Thank you so much for your comment.
That's a really, really great comment.
And I hope to see you in the comment section again.
OK, the next comment, and I hope I say your name correctly, is from Gisela or Gisela, maybe.
Hi, Oliver.
I'm so glad to hear your podcast.
It's really important to be aware of accents.
The hardest accent for me to understand is the Australian accent.
Wow, yes, the Australian accent can be quite a difficult one.
I think Australians speak very differently from pretty much every other country that speaks English.
So, yeah, that's a very, very good one.
Thank you for your comment.
Another great comment from Guido and they said hello Oliver, picked your podcast for the first time today.
You're very welcome.
Welcome to the show.
You have a new follower from now on.
Oh, thank you very much.
Thank you for your job here.
Great for me because I need to learn and practice English much more than before.
Answer to your question today.
I often struggle with American English because Americans often speak in a mumbling sound.
They cut letters, etc.
So I think it's slang that makes it difficult to understand.
Yeah, very, very true, Guido.
Americans can speak a little bit mumbly, but I would also say a lot of different accents in Britain and in the UK can be quite mumbly as well, in my opinion.
I think in the episode I talked about the Scottish accent, which I love, but it can be quite mumbly for me.
Thank you for all your lovely comments for today's episode or for that last episode.
And that brings us to today's question that I would like you to answer.
Tell me about how you feel when you speak in English.
Do you feel nervous?
Do you feel stressed sometimes?
Do you think about what you're saying?
Or do you feel relaxed?
Do you enjoy it?
Tell me about your experience speaking English.
How do you feel when you speak English?
I look forward to reading your comments and I will pick some of them and read them out in next week's episode.
So confidence is not a gift that you are simply born with.
It's something that you develop from experience.
It's like a muscle that you're training and building with your English.
Every time you speak English, even though you feel a little bit scared or nervous, you're getting a little bit stronger and a little bit more confident.
So stop waiting for perfection.
Stop waiting for you to improve before you actually do it, which will make you improve.
And start owning your mistakes, owning your English.
Use some fillers to buy time.
Speak simple and just try to reduce the stress so that you actually do it.
And when you make mistakes, own them and learn from them.
And you'll realize there's nothing bad about it.
So thank you so much for listening to today's episode.
I hope this was encouraging.
I hope it was helpful and I hope it was interesting for you.
Remember to subscribe to the Patreon if you want to support the show a little bit further and get some additional benefits.
Thank you very much for listening and I hope to see you in the next episode.
Goodbye.
