Learn 3x Faster by Finding Your Focus | English for Global Business Professionals
11:52 Share

This is the Real English Conversations podcast, where we help you to communicate clearly and confidently in the conversations that matter most in the workplace and your professional life. Hi, everybody. My name is Amy Whitney, and I'm from realenglishconversations.com. Today, I have a really great podcast coming up for you where I'm going to be talking about how to manage where you focus and which skills you're working on.

I know that this is something that a lot of us face because, let's face it, learning a language is not a simple thing. It doesn't happen very quickly. And at the same time, we feel like we have to work on all of the different skills, reading, writing, speaking, listening, learning grammar, and we don't really know how to approach this.

So I'm going to share with you a simple two-step formula that's really going to help you to put things into perspective and to help you to come out of that overwhelmed state and really focus on the things that are going to move you forward. One of the things that I notice with my students when I ask them how long they've been learning English, a lot of people are kind of ashamed to admit that they've been learning for a really long time.

In most cases, it's more than five years. And in a lot of cases, it's more than 10 years. For most of us, we went through some sort of language training system or education in elementary school when we were kids following that traditional way of learning, which, as we know, is not very effective.

And later as adults, we come into this world and we decide, wow, I really need to learn a language. And it's usually for a specific reason. It might be because you have to use English at your job. Maybe you're like me and you live abroad. You live in a country where you need to be able to speak another language to get things done, to meet different people, and to really feel like you're part of the culture. And it is a very daunting thing.

to have this massive skill that you need to develop and not really having that clear roadmap about what you need to do next.

The thing is, when it's your first time learning a second language, you're kind of walking around like a blind person. You don't know what you need to do next. It's not clear. There's no path. There's no instruction manual. And that's why these little tips can make a massive difference to help you feel more in control and less overwhelmed.

Something that I have been doing as a student for a very long time, and in fact, this is something that our entire teacher team does now with each of the students they're working with, is we always look at which skill is the weakest or which skill at this current time is affecting us the most. And sometimes it's a combination of both of those things.

Giving you an example based on my particular situation, I'm living in Mexico. The native language that's spoken here is Spanish. And for the purposes of my life and what I like to do and what I need to do, my spoken English and listening skills are the two most important things. The truth is that reading is pretty easy for me and writing is okay. I would say that it's probably my weakest skill because

But when I look at how much of an impact that has in my life and what I really need to focus on and what I need to improve, I would say my writing skills are also the lowest priority.

So although we want to be able to do all four of the skills for each of our own lives and situations, we're going to have different skills that are going to be more important and things that we need to put more focus on at this time for one reason or another.

To help you understand which skill is probably your weakest one and the one that you should be putting more priority on, I'd like you to stop and think with me for a couple of seconds here while you answer these questions. So the first one is, which skill do you think is the weakest skill that you have?

considering speaking, listening, reading, writing, and maybe even grammar. All I want you to do here is to identify your weakest skill, and I'm going to give you a couple of seconds to think about that now.

Now that you've done that, I want you to think about which of the skills affects you the most. And I'm talking about when you're actually using your English for the things that you need to do in your life, which of these skills impacts you and affects you the most.

And the last question is, which one of the skills is the one that you feel like you always have to improve more? This is kind of just a feeling that you have like, oh, I really need to improve my speaking or I wish I could understand people better. Whatever it is that you always feel that you have a tendency that you want to work on it. Which skill is that one?

The next step is to try to figure out from those three different questions that I asked you, there should be one skill that stands out. But if you're not sure which skill it is, I would go with the second question, the one that really affects you in your day-to-day life.

And for a lot of people, that's probably going to be speaking and really the confidence that you feel when you're having to speak in English. You worry about what other people think, if you're making mistakes, what is your fluency like, all of those things. But yeah,

Just think about which skill is really the one, if you improve it, which one is going to help you to feel more comfortable in English communication. The second step of this or the second stage is really to make a plan for ourselves and to focus on that one skill.

And the advice that I'm going to be giving you here will be a little bit counterintuitive, and it's going to go against a lot of the things that you have been told. But I'm going to put it into perspective for you so that you understand that by doing this, it's actually going to help you to see more progress in that skill in a shorter amount of time.

Typically, what we hear in different areas from our teachers or different courses that we want to attend is that it's really important for us to work on the main skills, which are reading, writing, speaking and listening. But outside of that, we also have grammar and vocabulary that we need to build.

So for a person who's learning on their own to have to manage independently these six different skills, needless to say, that is completely overwhelming. And it's actually really ineffective to try to do each of those skills in a single week. Most of us are adults. Most of us are busy. We don't have hours and hours and hours every day to be working on English. So we need to do things a little bit more strategically.

And in my case, and with a lot of our students, and I mean, I'm talking about hundreds of people that we have helped to really move their skills forward in a short period of time. This strategy has worked extremely well. What we do is we focus on one skill and we identify it as our top skill. And then we identify a secondary skill. And we're going to focus on this for a two week period of time.

The other skills, if they happen, like if you're reading an article and that's not your main focus, that's okay. It's just exposure to the language. But you're not intentionally working on your reading. If you have identified speaking to be your top skill and maybe brushing up your listening skills as your secondary skill, then those are the two things that you're going to focus on.

But most of your focus and every activity that you do needs to be related to improving your speaking, if that's your top focus. And don't worry about the other skills for this two-week period of time.

And I'll tell you why. This goes back to the beginning of the podcast where I had mentioned many of you have been learning for years. When we think about two weeks compared to five or 10 years, we could say that that feels like a drop in the bucket. But at the same time, you're going to see much more progress because you're focusing specifically on that one skill, putting most of your time, practice and interest into

to improve the things that you need to improve. When we compare this to trying to do everything, your week might look something like this. On Monday, you work a little bit on your speaking. Maybe you have a lesson with a teacher or you have certain activities that you like to do.

On Tuesday, you work on your listening skills. On Wednesday, you decide to review your vocabulary that you learn from those speaking and listening activities. On Thursday, you decide to learn a new grammar rule. And on Friday...

You practice your reading and your writing skills. By the time we get back to Monday and it's time to practice speaking, it's almost going to be like you didn't practice speaking the week before because anything that you improved or learned on Monday, you've already forgotten again once again.

one week later. I know this isn't exactly how studying goes. We usually work on multiple things in one session, but the point is that if you only work on your writing one time per week, you're probably not going to see very much progress. But if you worked on it every day, you would see very fast improvement because it's concentrating all of your effort within a shorter period of time. You're spending less time trying to remember what you did last time and more time moving forward.

I hope that hearing this perspective has sparked a little bit of motivation in you and you feel like taking action to really start working on those skills and moving forward. I hope that you've enjoyed this podcast today and you learned something new. Maybe it changed your mindset or helped you to see things in a different way.

That was a great conversation. And as usual, we used a ton of interesting vocabulary and expressions. Of course, these conversations are great for improving your listening skills. But if you were like most of our listeners, you have a job where you work in an English speaking environment or you are living abroad.

And even though you speak enough English to communicate, it can feel difficult to speak with the fluency you want. And it can feel frustrating trying to understand fast spoken English, especially with native English speakers. If this is a problem that you're facing,

I would love to help you. Every day I work with students just like you to improve their skills and finally speak English easily and with confidence. Each of my lessons is totally personalized to your needs, which will allow you to feel progress and to get results within the first few lessons. If

If this sounds like something you need and you'd like to get started, you can visit realenglishconversations.com and check out our courses. Or you can click the link in the description area to book a trial lesson with me and get started right away.