Improve Listening in English

- Last week you enjoyed improving your English

by watching a real-life video created for native speakers.

And today, we're going to continue that exercise

with part two of Understanding Real-World English

with Videos Created for Native Speakers.

Hi, I'm your English coach, Christina,

and welcome to Business English with Christina,

where you become better at English and better at business.

Now, as I said,

this is part two from the little series

that we started last week,

all about taking that video from one of my favorite authors,

James Clear, he's the author of "Atomic Habits",

you see a book right there.

There's my cat, there's the book.

It's a book that I highly recommend for you

if you can read in English.

So, if you missed the video from last week,

I definitely recommend that you go back

and watch part one of this little two-part series,

just so you kinda know what we're talking about.

It'll make this video a lot more useful and enjoyable.

All right, so picking up

where we left off in the last video.

That's a lot of phrasal verbs.

It means starting in the place

that we stopped the last time.

We're gonna talk about changing your environment

to change your habits.

You know, thankfully,

we don't have to be victims of our environment,

we can also be the architect of our environment.

And that means creating a space

where it's easy to make the decisions

that make it easy to make the changes

that you want in your life

so that you can build those good habits

and reach your goals.

Now, just to give you a concrete example

that I'm sure you maybe are familiar with.

You know, if you're trying to eat healthy food,

because you want to be healthier,

maybe you want to lose weight,

you want to change your eating habits,

but then someone brings over a box of cookies for you

and they put it in your kitchen,

well, that makes it hard to change your eating habits

because those cookies are there

and they're so easy to just grab one,

put it in your mouth.

But if you just don't have any cookies in your house

and you only have, I don't know, carrots,

it makes it easier to eat healthier

because that's all you have in the house.

- Thankfully,

you don't have to be the victim of your environment,

you can also be the architect of it.

You can decide to design something

to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behavior.

- As James clear points out in his video,

"You don't have to be the victim of your environment,

you can also be the architect of it."

Like I said, you decide how your environment helps you

or prevents you from building those new habits.

And he also says,

"You can decide to design something

to make your good behaviors easier

and your bad behaviors harder."

- So when it comes to habits,

if you want to practice your guitar more frequently,

put it right in the middle of your living room

so you run across it all the time.

If you want to read more,

when you make your bed in the morning,

take the book you want to read, put it on top of the pillow,

when you come back that night,

pick it up, read a few pages, go to sleep.

- Then another idea from his video

is focusing on starting, not focusing on finishing.

You know, a lot of times we think about the goal,

the objective, the thing that we want to get,

and it seems like so much work.

You know, it takes a long time to get to that goal.

And that's the thing that discourages us,

because we see all the work we have to do,

all the time it's gonna take,

you know, all that effort, the difficulties,

and we maybe just don't really do it

as well as we would like to

because it seems like such a big challenge.

But James Clear talks about

not focusing on the end result,

but focusing on just starting.

And one thing that he says is:

- You should optimize for the starting line,

not the finish line.

- "You should optimize for the starting line,

not the finish line."

In other words,

put your effort into getting started on that new habit,

do the best that you can at just starting.

Like I said, even if it's something super tiny,

you know, just very, very, very small,

but just focus on getting started,

starting to get that habit,

and then you can improve on it from there.

And really doing that consistently,

that is the best way that I've found to reach your goals.

- If you can optimize for the starting line

and make it as easy as possible

to get started and get your reps in,

often the outcomes just come as a natural result.

- As I say, if you don't use it, you lose it.

So here's how you can use what you learned today.

In the comments below,

tell me about a small change

that you can make to your environment,

to help it to encourage your good behaviors

and discourage your bad ones.

Maybe that's a behavior about learning English,

but maybe it's another habit that you want in your life.

Doing more sports,

eating more healthy food,

whatever it is,

but tell me about the small change that you will make

to your environment to help you start that good habit.

It's a perfect opportunity for you to practice your English,

to make it concrete,

and to, as James clear said,

optimize for the start line, not the finish line.

And if this type of lesson was helpful for you,

where we take a real-world video

created for native speakers,

break it down and help you to understand the ideas

and the vocabulary, I would love to know.

And there are three ways that you can tell me.

Give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube

and subscribe to my channel

so that you can continue learning business English with me.

You can go over to christinarebuffet.com/worksheets

and get the free worksheet that goes with this lesson,

but also with last week's lesson.

So it's one worksheet for the two lessons.

You'll have plenty of things to learn

and to make this a part of your active English vocabulary.

And go ahead and watch the next lesson,

I don't know, it's not the next lesson,

it's the previous lesson,

but you can go back and watch part one

of this little two-part series if you missed it.

All right, thank you so much for improving your English

and yourself with Business English with Christina,

and I'll see you next time.