Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, AJ Hogue, where AJ's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills.
Here's AJ with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly.
How to feel more confidence when speaking English.
Feel in many situations.
You have an English speaking test coming.
You're very nervous.
Might be the OET. Might be TOEFL.
Might be IELTS. Maybe something else.
And if you don't speak confidently, you might fail.
Or you have a job interview.
A job opportunity in English.
But for this job, this better job you want, you have to do a job interview in English.
Again, you're probably gonna feel very nervous.
And what happens when you feel nervous, your speaking ability actually drops, right?
You know this, right?
So you need to feel confident.
When you feel confident, the words come out more easily.
Whatever your level, you'll speak better when you feel confident.
And you'll speak worse when you're feeling nervous, not confident.
Right? So very important presentations, job interviews, English speaking tests, even sometimes just talking to a native speaker.
Might or just a business meeting in English.
All these things can make people feel nervous.
And then you think, well, I know I know more English, but I can't seem to use it every time I try to speak.
I don't feel confident.
And of course, you need confidence just for good communication, even in your own language.
More confidence means better communication.
People will listen to you more.
They respect you more, they'll actually listen to your ideas.
You'll be more persuasive if you're trying to get people to do something.
You're more likely to succeed when you are communicating confidently.
So how? This is the question, right?
Because we all know this, everybody knows that confidence is important.
But the question is, well, I don't feel confident.
So how can I do it?
How do I change my feelings?
I feel nervous. I feel afraid.
I just feel like I'm not.
Excuse me. I feel like I'm not very good.
You know, we have all these negative feelings and you want to feel confident.
You're like, ah, I should feel confident.
I should feel confident.
But you don't. You want to, but you don't.
How do you change that?
I have two methods, two methods.
There's an instant method and there's a long term method.
The instant method we can, some people call it fake it till you make it, which is a nice little idiom.
Fake it until you make it.
Fake it means pretend until you make it, until you succeed.
Pretend until you succeed.
And it's actually a little more than pretending, but it is using the instant method, meaning right now, immediately, the instant method is powerful.
It works. It will help you a lot.
And it's using actually a lot of techniques that come from NLP, neuro linguistic programming, and also that actors use professional actors, movie actors, stage actors, quite similar the way, you know, they can do a great job of pretending, right?
So you might have, for example, an actor who's actually kind of weak and, you know, not not tough at all in real life, right?
But, you know, in front of the camera, they can play like a super tough gangster.
And they seem so confident and strong, maybe even mean and terrible, right?
Maybe they're playing a bad guy.
And yeah, you know, everybody watching things, oh, wow, this guy, this guy is so scary, so tough.
But in real life, actually not, right?
So what is the actor doing?
And women do this too.
So actor, actress, what are they doing?
They are, you know, using different techniques to appear.
They appear to be super confident, super tough, super strong, right?
And of course, this is their job as actors to be really good at that.
And not just confidence, they, of course, they can do all different lots of different emotions.
So we can do that. You basically become an actor, you see it as a performance.
Your job interview is a performance.
Your English test doesn't matter.
OET, TOEFL, whatever I else.
It's a performance.
Like an actor on a stage, right?
It's a performance.
A speech, a presentation is a performance.
It doesn't matter how big the audience is.
You might give a presentation to four people in a small business meeting.
You might give a presentation to 30 people at a conference.
You might give a presentation, a speech to, you know, thousands of people at a big seminar.
Okay, but it's still a performance you're performing.
And so you can use these tricks instant.
So let's talk about this first.
And then we'll talk about long term.
Instant, what do we do?
How do you change or at least pretend to have confidence when inside you're feeling nervous or something else?
You're not feeling strong.
Okay, and the first thing we got to do, this is basically NLP.
And this is also something actors do is you you work with your body.
Okay, your emotions are not cooperating.
They're not helping you.
You know, you're not move your body, make your body into positions that look confident.
What does that mean?
So an actor might, you know, they bring their shoulders back and they put their head up, maybe they push their chest out, they might exaggerate, especially if an actor is on a stage and the audience might be farther away, then they have to do big movements, right?
So they'll put their chest really up.
You'll tell he's exaggerating when he's doing a speech, a presentation, a seminar, you know, it's like very exaggerated, his chest is always out, really, really big.
And he's always shoulders back and ah, you know, he looks like he's like really, really like a gorilla, right?
Big and strong. Well, you can do this.
Right? So you start doing this and you study, how do confident people move?
Well, confident slow movements, right?
They move. They're not boring.
They're not just, if they're speaking, giving a speech, they're not just, you know, dead, not moving, but they kind of, they move calmly.
So this is the second thing you do.
First, you put yourself in a, you know, a power posture, some people call it, you know, you're, this is why in power English, I teach you in my course, power English in my VIP program, I teach you again and again, like every lesson I tell you, shoulders back, head up, chest up, right?
I'm training you every day to get into this confident position.
And when you do this, you actually will begin to feel stronger.
The physical body affects your mind, it affects your emotions.
This is a cool little trick because it's hard to just change your emotions directly.
It's hard to just say, ah, feel confident, feel confident, feel confident.
It doesn't work. You've probably tried it.
It doesn't work. You're like, ah, but I don't feel it.
I'm just, I still feel nervous.
So forget the, forget the emotion part, focus on the body, change the body first.
That will then start to change the emotions.
And you can do this with your face too.
You can smile. Maybe you don't feel like smiling.
You're super scared and nervous, but I don't care.
Even a fake smile is better than nothing.
So you put on a, your best fake big smile and you start changing your body.
So you start with just the position, the posture and how your face looks.
Right? And then you focus on movement.
How do you move? How do confident people move?
Generally more slowly and calmly.
They're calm because they're confident.
And how do nervous people move?
Quickly, right? Like the worst, a really nervous person shakes and they're moving very, very quickly, right?
Quickly and suddenly, right?
This is what a nervous person looks like, right?
Like a super scared person, right?
That I'm exaggerating, but you, you get the idea.
You can even see in like my old, old, old videos from YouTube.
Look at my oldest ones.
I'm kind of moving too much and too fast.
So you can kind of see some of the nervousness there.
Now I don't feel any nervous.
So I move more slowly, more calmly.
Okay? So you focus on how you move.
The next thing you focus on is your breathing.
Confident people, calm people, relaxed people breathe more deeply and more slowly.
So again, we're focusing on something physical.
We're not trying to directly change the emotion.
That's very difficult.
Instead, you just focus on something physical.
Now you've got the body position.
You've got your movements are slower.
Now you want to breathe more slowly and deeply.
Now this is hard to do in the middle of a job interview or the middle of a speech.
It's hard to focus on your breathing while you're talking and doing that.
But this is easy to do before.
So before you go on to stage to speak, before you sit down for the test, right before you start your presentation, you can just focus and just very consciously you can even hold your breath.
Every breath you hold your breath for like four or five seconds.
So you breathe in deeply and really focus on thinking big exaggerated large breaths and then hold it for a few seconds and then focus on letting the breath out exhaling means the breathing out more slowly exaggerated make it super slow and then you do it again of course slow long breaths in hold slow
long breaths out this will help to calm your body a little bit and it just again you do this with all the other things they all work together you have to do all of these things you know in a tough situation but when you do all of these things you will start to feel more confident you might still feel
nervousness but very importantly you will look confident you might still feel nervous inside but people outside they won't notice they won't realize if you tell them afterwards oh I'm so nervous so scared they'll say oh really oh wow you seem so confident you seem you seem fine you seem really relaxed
okay so you're being an actor here we are faking it a little bit we're pretending a little bit but hey that's okay just realize it's a performance job interviews a performance a speaking test the IELTS speaking test the OET speaking test it's a performance it's just your it doesn't matter how you feel
inside just be a voice and you're speaking speed two problems happen when we feel nervous with speaking one problem is some people will speed up and they'll talk too fast right and so you can hear it it's unnaturally fast you know someone's nervous and they start really talking fast and quickly and again this is a problem
I had in the past right well I got nervous and I start I would speed up speed up speed up and it's obvious you start to and when you speed up your speaking then you start speeding up your you know your your movements your face everything starts getting faster and you start to look kind of weird and and you
know crazy so this is a problem so you want to try to slow your speaking down and this is you know this is funny because a lot of people think especially you know English learners they think I need to speak fast so then it looks like I'm fluent but no you just need to speak clearly and correctly and of course
you need to speak fast enough but speaking a little slowly is actually better this brings me to the second problem of speaking speed other people when they get nervous what happens is they can't like it's not just they speak slowly it's they start saying oh they start taking these weird breaks and they're
looking down and they and they're constantly thinking and trying to find the perfect word and then this also it looks terrible right it's not confident so I'll give you a tip about this and this if this is a habit you must break that if you need a break to think of something or you need to pause it's
totally fine just don't make any sounds so silent pauses silent pauses look confident might be kind of long you're thinking of your answer you can even look away while you think hmm right but see that noise I made hmm no good when you make sounds like well that sounds nervous it start you start to sound
and look nervous but if you train yourself for silent pauses it looks confident even if it's quite long it's okay to have long pauses to think there's no need for super fast speech not for tests not for interviews not for presentations and in fact when you pause silently it can actually add some a little
bit of drama a little bit of power to your speaking you'll notice that some very top -level speakers do this a lot they'll make these long pauses better must be silent okay if you you so I just did some pauses there now listen to again if I'll do it again but so you take some long pauses and and then
you know you keep talking again and you know and that's totally different isn't it can you feel the difference when I start adding in the sounds or the filler words yeah you know well then it kills it then it does sound terrible and it looks very nervous okay and then you feel a little nervous too so I
think you're getting the idea right so now you change all of these things your posture the way you move the way you breathe the speed of your speaking including pauses and when you put all this together you will appear very confident your speaking will sound very confident and actually you will feel
more confident you might it's not a hundred percent okay you might still feel some nervousness but no one will notice your nervousness okay and that's the most important thing in these kind of situations so that's the instant approach and you need this because you know you might have a job interview
coming in a few months or tomorrow maybe you're taking the IELTS test in three weeks okay you don't have time to do any kind of long -term thing you need something that works immediately right now so all of these things will help you and we'll work right now in any situation you can do them in just a five
minutes and this is going to help just practice these things so this is the instant this is the first thing you should do this is gonna help your English speaking your communication in general even your own language sound much stronger more confident you will appear more confident and you will feel
more confident too it will change your feeling when you change your body you change your energy and that does change how you feel and when you do this a lot this is the fake it till you make it it actually can become real you practice it so much you practice the postures and the way of speaking and moving
it becomes part of you becomes a habit you actually then do start to feel much more confident and much less nervous because all these physical habits change you over time and the changes become permanent so this is a great way to do it okay highly recommended now the second way the long -term way to
feel more confidence is to just be better success is to succeed succeed and you will feel more confident right success breathe we say success breeds confidence success creates confidence so this is obvious right if you if you give a speech and everybody at the end cheers oh my god you're great oh you're
a great speaker you're gonna like oh wow you're gonna feel some more confidence then you give another speech and the same thing happens everyone's jumping and clapping and going crazy you're the best speaker oh my god you're great you're fantastic oh we want to hire you we want you to come back and speak
again well this happens three four or five times and you're gonna be like I'm a good speaker you are going to feel much more confident right because this is based on real world skill real world real world feedback real world success right it's the same I think someone in the comments just mentioned
like girl talking to girls a guy wants to go up and talk to girls right and single guy and he's trying to get dates well again if you if you for the long term if you go up to girl a girl and you say hey well you want to go to dinner with me and she's like oh yes oh please yes right and then and then
two days later you see another girl you walk up hey you want to go to dinner with me yes yes oh my god you're great please let's go to dinner if this happens five or six times you're gonna be like hmm yeah oh my god I'm confident with women not women love me right so that's the that's the dream situation but the problem
is you probably are not at that point yet that takes a long time you need a lot of skills a lot of practice a lot of experience to get those successes right it doesn't matter in any situation it takes that takes a lot of time so that's why the instant techniques are so important because I think most
people are thinking well AJ yeah that sounds great but how do I get success how do I get the first success I'm so nervous that I always fail I go talk to a girl oh man and then she just is like is like huh no thanks I get away from me right and then I talked to another girl get away so you just have failure
failure failure and this starts to destroy your confidence and your confidence gets lower and lower and lower that's why you need the instant methods that's why you need to do in some ways some acting some pretending using you know specific techniques so that you appear very strong and confident you
feel a bit more confident but there's still a lot of nervousness inside that is normal and that's you know for quite a while you need that you need these techniques these instant techniques these pretend these acting techniques you need them so that you will get some success and then you get the success
ah now that adds to your confidence now you feel a little more confident and then you use the techniques again and you get another success okay now you've got the techniques you're getting better at those you're feeling more confident but you also have two successes and this is more of that deep level
of confidence and so you can see they start to work together and then eventually you feel super confident in this area whatever it is speaking English job interviews presentations talking to a girl taking an English test they become like you know it's nothing and I'm so confident I know I can do it
right so that's how you do it the instant technique and the long -term deeper method I was getting some quick comments and questions and then I gotta go I got about I got a few minutes so Jonathan Austin Austin August says how you speak to a girl because it's different when you speak to a girl in another
language well indeed right so this this is the problem with English for you not obviously not for me but for you is that everything becomes more difficult when you are doing it in a foreign language so these situations are all already stressful they're already difficult even in your own language taking
a test is still stressful for a lot of people even in your own language job interviews are stressful for most people presentations are stressful for most people right speaking in a meeting can be very stressful for most people so they're already stressful situations then you add the the foreign language
and now it becomes super stressful right so this is again this is why you need to use these techniques because you're right of course I mean it good to see you as always and I mean it just says how are you doing how are your kids I'm doing well starting to feel better I was sick taking various medicines
right now and slowly getting better I went back to jujitsu yesterday for the I was off for a few weeks it felt weird but went back and had a great day training yesterday so feeling good kids are doing fine to Alejandro Esparza says hi from San Francisco place I used to live hello here says you're the best
teacher with the most beautiful accent that's very nice thank you this person says how much will all of your lessons cost me I want them all at once well right now we don't have like abundant actually you you can get a discount what you can do is buy one of the courses I say power English buy it then
what's gonna happen is after you buy power English you'll get an offer like immediately you'll you'll get a page will come up and say oh you you can add the pronunciation course if you want for a 30 % discount if you add it now so you just click add it now then you'll get another offer you know you can add
the business English course now if you want and again you get a discount like 35 percent 30 percent something like that and you can say add it now and you can say add the VIP so you can just add them all that's the best way to do it because you'll get a discount on the other courses you'll pay the full
price for power English but the other all the other courses you'll get a very nice discount so that's the way if you want to buy a lot of my courses at one time and have the price lower that's the best way to do it by I would say power English because it's the lowest price so buy power English and then
add on the other ones just you know that's the way to do it cool loyal RD said in with just three months of your podcast I reached an intermediate upper level I listened to Wow I listen to 600 episodes of your podcast already is that all of them Wow that's a lot you've been listening like crazy Wow
thanks you're my hero says loyal RD well well RD you know clap and you know congratulations to you you rock so you only use my podcast but I obviously you are listening a lot of hours every day you're doing a ton of listening so good for you that is fantastic great success story Fuen says can I learn
from books about collocations and idioms combining with effortless English you can if you like if you enjoy it right you know it's not necessary at all but if you if you're curious if you like studying that kind of thing it won't hurt Oh this is nice Abdul Kalik Abdul Fatah says once I started your
course of 27 lessons and my friends were mocking me so they were kind of laughing at him like haha what are you doing with this that crazy course what's wrong with you now after three years they came to me and told and asked me how did you learn it you know cuz he had a huge sick huge success huge improvement
and he said I told them AJ is the key hi from Iraq awesome yeah don't worry about what other people think right this is a great example so good for you fantastic that's great Vanlal Dika says I appreciate your teaching a lot you energize me always I'm from Myanmar awesome I'm just gonna go back a little
bit see if I missed any comments here I think I got them all Kratos says it's been a while I've been here since I've seen you I'm from Julius Julius from Colombia hello hello Tata talk says I love you man you have changed my life the art of Quranic education says hi hello okay good all right I'll take
a see if I might have time for a couple more I got a couple minutes and then I gotta go I gotta watch my kids my wife's going out and I gotta watch the kids okay Amara Wade says hi AJ how to join your VIP program well okay if you're watching on the screen you see on my screen there's a website go there
and you can enter your email if you like and get my book for free and then you can just go to the website effortlessenglishclub .com not the seven rules part just effortlessenglishclub .com and go to the bottom of the web page you'll see there's a list of all my courses you'll see VIP just click VIP and then
just join so that's it's effortlessenglishclub .com if you're listening on the podcast just audio effortlessenglishclub .com and we have a course catalog so you can just look at all of the courses and compare them and choose one if you want a VIP program if you want power English business English pronunciation you
know whatever just go down to the bottom of my web page there's a menu you see the courses just click on the course catalog and you can compare them all cool Anantu says I like to listen to your podcast while I am working thanks so much for your effort it is really helpful for my listening excellent
thank you Joseph says I'm a beginner I do not have many vocab no many vocabulary I do not understand a lot of grammar no problem I decide to participate in an effortless English course is this a good decision well of course I'm gonna say yes and you the fact that you don't understand grammar is a good
thing because it means you're not gonna confuse yourself trying to remember you know ten different verb tenses and 20 rules for using the word the and all these things that people get confused about because they've studied too much grammar in school so you're gonna learn grammar with my course you're
gonna learn it in a natural way the same way that babies and kids learn the same way my kids are learning you know just as native speakers listening to the me their dad right I'm not teaching them the present perfect tense and how to conjugate verbs of course not right they're just listening to me and they're
I mean their grammar is already quite good and with speaking but it's just natural they just just they they have a feeling for it but they could never explain it to you and that's what you need to do so it's actually good listen to those point of view stories and mini stories as a beginner you might find
some of the main lessons a little difficult there might be a lot of new vocabulary in the main lessons say for power English for example you might say oh wow this is a little difficult don't worry as a beginner if the main lessons difficult if the commentary lessons difficult focus more listen more
to the mini stories and the point of view because they're easier and they're also the most important lessons that's where you're gonna learn the grammar naturally that's where you're gonna really improve your listening and speaking ability the mini story mini story lessons and the point of view lessons
really the main lesson what we call the main lesson and what we call the commentary is really more for just building vocab okay what you can do with time so focus beginners focus more time on mini story and point of view as your level goes up then you can do all of those lessons but you can come back
you know when you get my courses they're yours for life right they don't disappear once you pay it's yours so you can just save them and come back to them if you need to some if some seem too difficult did you make a book yeah semester Z long get my book for free I'm giving the e -book right the electronic
the PDF version of my book is now free look on the screen it's that's the website effortlessenglishclub .com slash seven rules really just anywhere on my website enter your email and I'll send you an email with a link and you get download my entire book over 200 pages download the whole book for free
just go to my website and enter your email effortlessenglishclub .com I'll go with the last question why not I mean it says uh how many hours do you sleep in a day since the kids it's been about six hours a day glass night was six if I'm lucky on a good day if I can manage to get to bed early and the kids
if I'm lucky and the kids sleep in a little later then I might get seven hours a night and if I'm super lucky on a magical day I'll get eight but that doesn't happen much usually six to seven hours a night all right that's it so let's just summarize very quickly hey what's going on with me there we
go sorry I just had a little problem with my screen there all right to summarize how to feel more confident there are two basic methods strategies the one that's probably most useful to you right now it's the instant method these are this method uses acting techniques where you you first focus on changing
your posture right your body position shoulders back heads up anyone with power English my course you know that phrase because I say it constantly in the course right and VIP to shoulders back heads up shoulders back head up right chest out right all these things you're just you're gonna put your body
into a confident position and you can focus on your breathing slowing your breathing down slowing down your movements a little bit you know not too much right you don't want to be frozen that looks weird but just don't set a moving quickly which looks nervous yeah move just more slowly and more smoothly
then you actually slow down your speaking again not too much obviously but be careful don't speak too fast most people when they get nervous speak too fast now doing it as it with a foreign language like English for you maybe that's not a problem but it still can be focus on your pauses when you pause
be silent no sounds and no words to fill up the space no mmm it though abat none of that silent pauses and of course good eye contact these things are all great so start combining all those things you will feel more confident most importantly you will look confident even if you feel nervous and nobody
will know and the second thing is long -term of course is just get more successes as you start to succeed more and more just naturally at a deep level you'll start to feel much more confident but that takes time so the instant methods are probably the most useful for you now all right get my book for free
effortless English learn to speak English like a native the entire book free for you learn my whole system enter your email at effortless English club calm effortless English club dot -com mmm lots of love to you see you next time
