BE 374: Describe Your Progress - Getting Started
16:35 Share

This is the Business English Podcast, Episode 374, Describe Your Progress, Getting Started.

Welcome to the Business English podcast from All Ears English. Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business. For a presentation, a meeting, or your office party, this is Real Business English with your favorite American hosts, Lindsay and Michelle, coming to you from New York City and Colorado, USA.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Hey, Lindsay, how are you? I'm feeling great, Michelle. I'm glad to be recording with you today on the microphone. All good, all good. Are we gearing up for anything new at All Ears English here?

- Well, we actually are. We are gearing up for this series that I'm excited about, Lindsay, right? - We are? - Yes. Today we are going to do part one of a series about how to discuss where you are in a process. And, Lindsay, this is gonna be huge for our listeners because, and this is important for the business world and outside the business world, your personal life, whatever it is.

In the business world guys, I mean we want to be able to share where we are in a certain set of steps right Lindsay exactly, I think

all of life is preparing to do the thing, doing the thing, and then kind of reflecting on the thing or finishing it. And just being excited that you're done with the thing. So this is such a cool skill and you guys are going to see how incredibly useful this is. For example, here at All Ears English, one thing that we're gearing up for is we, this week exactly, we're gearing up to start building our new brand new professional English level one course.

And so we're laying the groundwork. We're doing a lot of research, talking to students, thinking about what we want this course to look like and how to make it amazing. So we're gearing up for that right now at All Ears English. Very exciting. Yes. Very exciting. Yeah. So this is going to be a really fun series. I'm excited for this one. So, but guys...

This is the first episode. Then the second episode is actually going to be on our other podcast on All Ears English. So to make sure that you don't miss it, make sure that you hit follow on the All Ears English podcast and the Business English podcast. So just we don't want you to...

let these episodes get past you because these are going to be really helpful. Exactly. So the next one will be over on All Ears English and we'll talk about how to describe kind of being in the middle of it, right? Michelle, being in the middle of the process. Exactly. And then when we're ready for it, we'll be back over here for episode three in this series on business English to talk about ending the process, finishing up, right? Definitely. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. So this is going to be fun. So today we are, because this is the beginning episode of the series, we are going to talk about different expressions you can use to say that you're kind of getting ready for something. And we already have, we already, sorry. I was going to say it's such an important phase. Right?

- Super important, especially with business, I feel. So this is gonna be really useful for you guys. So we've already been saying this one several times in this episode, it's gear up. - Yes.

this means to be preparing for something. Maybe you're preparing for a project, a presentation, a meeting. Maybe you're preparing emotionally or mentally. And it may like maybe busy season is coming. And so you're kind of preparing yourself mentally for this busy season, right? Yes. And that will resonate with any of our listeners who are accountants because now we are in around February and I know it's

they are probably gearing up or already into the intensity of accounting season, right? - Yes. - Exactly. So let's do some examples of how you would use gearing up. Lindsay, what's the first one? - All right, so we are gearing up for the holiday season. So we're really focusing on our December promotions and sales.

Yes. Nice. Yes. Or I have three presentations coming up next month. So I'm gearing up for those right now. Or I guess it's time to start gearing up for our big staff meeting next week. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. So, Lindsay, what sorts of things do we gear up for here at Business English or All Ears English? I mean, so many. You know, when we build a course, we break it down into essentially three or four phases. We have our design phase, our build phase, our test phase, and our launch phase, right? So that design phase is crucial, probably the most important part, because we want to feel relaxed and know that we're building the right thing for the right person.

I can't overemphasize how important this preparation is. It's that whole idea of measure twice, cut once. Incredibly important, especially when you're involving team members. People need to know exactly what they're working on. So we gear up for things like building courses. We gear up for our team meetings. I'm going to start gearing up for our next team sync pretty soon. We gear up for lots of things, Michelle. Wonderful.

Yeah. And I love gearing up because it's pretty versatile. I mean, like I said, it can be more about this mental state or it could be about the physical, the literal preparations. You're, you know, printing things, you're researching, but it could also just be this. Oh, I'm

gearing up. I mean, in your personal life, you could say, oh, I'm gearing up for a run that I'm going to go up later. I hope I don't, you know, back out, right? You know, it's like mentally preparing yourself. That's something you say. And

And you know, it's really interesting. I find that sometimes the two happen at the same time because when I'm not mentally prepared, if I go through the motions, like let's say I'm going to run a marathon, which I've never done and probably never will do. But let's use a different example. Let's say getting ready for a trip. I don't feel prepared. My mind is still at work.

If I go ahead and start putting together the physical things, like go buy the things I need, maybe the bug spray or backpack, that kind of thing, I actually in that process become mentally prepared. Right. Interesting. Yeah. It helps you along that you kind of have to have both of them together. So, yeah, very interesting. So we are going to go over a couple more after the break. Okay.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. ShopPay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer cards going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.

All right, we are back from break. So there's a couple other ways we could say this in this early phase. For example, prep for. I like it because it's short and sweet. Right. So what is this short for? Prepare for, right? Prepare for, but prep for.

I like that. Yeah. You can use prepare for as well. But if you want to be a little bit more casual, a little bit more succinct, you could say prep for, and that's totally fine to use it to shorten it for business, I think. Yeah. And I hear this a lot when it comes to chefs in the kitchen too, like prepping the kitchen prep. Yes. What do they call it? Mise en place where they take all their pieces and it's all prepped. You hear that a lot in the kitchen for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, this could be, you know, gathering papers together and making slides, whatever it is, but you could say it's time to start prepping for the event. Do you have the folders ready so we can start putting the packets together? Love it. Or you might say, get everything set. You could also maybe say, get everything set up. It would also work. It doesn't change the meaning too much. Does it Michelle? No. Set up or set? Not really. Yeah. No.

- No. - Any example here, sample sentence? - Yeah, so it's March, so time to get everything set for our next team building activity. - Or do you think you could help me get everything set for the survey? There's always preparation. When you write a survey or you prepare an activity, there's always that preparation phase. - Yeah. - Yeah? - Yeah, exactly. I mean, Lindsay, so why are these important? Why are these useful? How are these gonna help us connect at work?

- Well, I think it can be kind of signposts to show your coworkers where you're at. I know when we build courses, for me, it's incredibly helpful to put it into these four phases because it just makes it feel like, okay, I'm not building the course yet, I'm designing it.

And that's a very different thing. It's kind of a mental shift and it kind of feels relaxing because it doesn't feel like this overwhelming thing like we have to build. No, it's going to be phases. Right. Right. Right. It's always nice when you kind of can mentally

mentally separate things into more manageable chunks. To me, that always helps me with any sort of overwhelm that I could be feeling. Oh, for sure. If you don't do that, it just all looks the same.

But if you take the time before you start a project or a task and break it up into, okay, this is phase one, this is phase two, step one, step two, it just feels more manageable. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I think that this is just also good for sharing your situation with your coworkers. Maybe you're talking about what you're doing. Maybe sometimes you're at a meeting and they might go around and say, okay, so what's

Where are you in this process? How's the project going? Everybody might have to go around the table and report what they've been working on. So that's why this series is going to be really, really helpful. But it's really good for those meeting situations.

Exactly. So you would be able to use this. This language is natural, right? I'm gearing up for the next phase, right? It's incredibly native and natural, but it's also professional at the same time. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm excited for the other two episodes of this series that are going to be coming out soon. But should we do a role play with the ones we've covered today? Okay, Michelle, let's do it. So here we are colleagues and we're getting lunch. All right. Okay.

Oh man, I can't believe it's already April. Yep, already time to gear up for awards season. Oh yeah, it's going to be busy. Have you prepped for the voting yet? A little bit. I still need to get everything set with the computer system to make sure things will go through. Makes sense.

yes so yeah coming into that busy season for our industry maybe right yeah maybe we work in the movies I don't know right right wasn't it was there an awards uh show on recently a couple weeks ago was it Golden Globes I think so I can I can't I can't either you know when I was

When I was younger, I loved watching the award shows. I know. I don't know. It's interesting how that's changed, hasn't it? I don't know what it is. They've lost a lot of audience for some reason. Maybe just because the nature of TV has changed, movies have changed, Netflix and Amazon Prime and things. But anyways, good conversation topic. It is a good conversation topic. So let's get into it. So I said, already time to gear up for awards season. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So again, this is another preparation phrase, right? To gear up for, get ready for, gear up for, and literally think about the gears of a car. You need to shift into the right gear. Right. You're going to go faster, right? Exactly. Exactly. And then what did you say? All right. So I said, yeah, it's going to be busy. Have you prepped for the voting yet? And we said that again is have you prepared for, but we like prepped for, it feels like

A little snappier, right? A little zippier. A little snappy, yep. And I said, a little bit. I still need to get everything set with a computer system to make sure things will go through. So again, this is really before the meat of what's happening, right? The meat is this voting system. Sounds like I have some sort of tech problem.

technical job. So I'm getting everything set. So to make sure things run smoothly. All right, good. I love it. Good stuff. So what should our listeners do right now before we move into our final thought for the day? What should they do to get themselves geared up for this series? Gear up for this series by hitting follow on two podcasts. Number one, if you haven't hit follow on the Business English podcast, please do that. But also episode two about being in

in the activity, in what you're working on. That's coming up next in a couple of weeks on the All Ears English podcast. So make sure you search for the All Ears English podcast, look for the yellow and hit the follow button so that you don't miss this series. Yeah. And then of course we'll be back here for number three, talking about, you know, finishing up the project. I'm excited to see what we're going to learn over there. That will be back here on Business English. So Michelle, what's our final thought for today?

Well, this is just, these are super important words that we may not think about every day using these types of words. But then once you start, you realize how helpful they are, especially at work, to be able to express where you are, to connect with others, to ask other people what they're working on. So it can, I mean, it can be used anywhere.

everywhere at the office, I think. Yeah. Benchmark, signpost, orientation. Where are you at in this process? And also, if you're someone who tends to get overwhelmed with big projects, it is incredibly helpful to get yourself some wins. Even if it's just you that's working on it, you can break up your project into phases and you can get those wins by moving through those phases with the right cadence.

I love it. It's such a smart hack, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. I love that. So I'm excited for the series. Guys, listen up for, keep your ears open for episode two on the All Ears English podcast. And anything else, Lindsay? That was great. I love this topic. I can't wait for the next one, Michelle. I'll see you there. All right. Bye. Bye, guys. Bye. Take care. Bye.

Thank you for listening to Business English, a podcast just for you, the high achieving global professional. Want more from All Ears English? Don't miss our biggest and best podcast with 8 million monthly downloads. Just search for the All Ears English podcast and hit

follow to get four new episodes per week on fluency, American culture, grammar, and so much more. Or tap the link in the show notes. Remember, we believe in connection, not perfection when it comes to learning English. Follow the All Ears English podcast now.