Is learning English important or urgent for you? Or both??

- Hello everyone and welcome to

Speak English with Christina

where you'll learn

American culture and business know-how

to become confident in English.

Today I am here with another of our special

bonus video episodes

and I'm with Kristina

who is one of our expert teachers

and also one of our fluency club leaders.

Kristina, how are you doing today?

- Pretty good, how are you Christina?

- I'm doing good, doing good.

Now, last week with Trisha,

we talked about the program

Speak Business English Confidently,

and how it combines customized private lessons

with fluency practice sessions

and how it's really the perfect program

for busy professionals

who don't have a lot of time,

who are tired of feeling held back

in their English.

And today, Kristina,

we're gonna get deeper into

some of those topics as well.

But before we do that,

do you wanna just introduce yourself?

Because some of the students may not know you yet.

- Oh, well, I'm from Virginia, in the United States.

I've lived in Nicaragua in the past

for several years,

so I speak Spanish.

I also love Sign Language,

I'm fluent in Sign Language.

I'm learning Hindi at the moment, actually.

- Oh wow, okay, wow,

that's probably challenging,

because it's so different.

- I love languages,

I love to experiment with cooking international dishes,

I love to dance.

- Oh yeah, nice, yeah.

Lot of fun stuff, yeah.

Right, yeah, now, you know,

speaking about some of the things that we hear

from our clients all the time.

One of the big hesitations is

"I just don't have time."

And I think you and I can both relate to that

because we have so many different projects

and things going on in personal lives,

professional lives, so maybe we can talk

a little bit about this idea of finding time

and important versus urgent things.

What do you think?

- Sure, absolutely.

I do find one thing to be quite helpful,

is the Eisenhower Matrix, - Yeah.

- President Eisenhower used it.

It helps us to do more things

and to reduce stress.

It divides our tasks into four groups.

So, at the top of the matrix it's

between important and urgent.

So, sometimes an important task

is rarely urgent.

And many times urgent tasks are rarely that important.

So, what we do is we divide into

what is important and urgent,

those are the things that we do first.

And then you go to your important things,

but then they're less urgent,

and you do that second.

- Right.

- This might be something like

for example going to the gym.

We know it's important,

but it may not be urgent necessarily,

so we do have a tendency to procrastinate,

to put it off.

- Right, exactly.

- Like if you're training for a competition,

obviously that's going to be urgent,

time sensitive.

But we do know that working out at the gym

is important for our health.

So with the Eisenhower matrix,

you divide things into things that are

not only important, but also urgent first,

then the second things that are important

but they're less urgent.

And then the third thing you move onto is

the urgent things, but they're less important.

These are many times

things that you can delegate to others.

And then number four, the less urgent

and less important things,

many times you'll find that you don't even have to do them.

- Right, it's like you feel like you do

or you spend time doing them.

So like if we take that matrix

and look at it from like English point of view,

just looking at maybe important plus urgent,

and important, but maybe less urgent.

So something that's important and urgent

might be like if you have a job interview

in English coming up in three days

and you've got to prepare for something like that.

Whereas maybe if it's not so urgent,

but it is still very important,

this might be where a student has this goal

of improving their English for their job

because it's important for their career,

it's gonna help them be more comfortable in their work

and just their personal satisfaction.

So kind of like what you said about going to the gym.

It's not super urgent,

but if you do it,

a lot of other aspects of your life

are going to improve

and you're going to feel better.

Just kind of in your every day life.

- I have the matrix,

do you want me to put it up?

- Yeah, actually, if you've got that,

maybe we could show that to people

and kind of let them see visually

what that looks like.

- Just to kind of have an idea, right?

- Yeah, great idea.

- So this is to kind of give a visual there.

- Okay, yeah.

- First, focus on important tasks

to be done same day.

- Right, preparing the job interviews

or presentation that you have to do

at the meeting today, yeah.

- Number two you move on to things

that you can schedule.

Number three those are the things you can delegate,

and then number four

the ones that a lot of times

you find that you just really don't need to do.

- You don't need to be doing those.

Yeah, so scheduling, I think, actually,

I always tell students,

if you want to improve your English,

you really have to put it into your schedule

and make the time.

Otherwise it's never going to be done.

And actually, that's a really good point.

Because in the program,

Speak Business English Confidently,

it really helps the student

to schedule their English improvement.

But at the same time,

it's also very flexible

because you're working with your private teacher,

so that could be you or Kara

or Trisha or Matthew

or any of the other teachers.

So you schedule your individual lessons,

but then you've also got the conversation sessions.

It's a bit flexible

because there's four of them every week,

but the student can come

to any one or two sessions generally.

Or all of them.

But the ones that fit with their schedule,

so it's in their schedule,

and that really I think helps to make it

much more concrete.

So yeah, what's been your experience

with that and with working with the students?

- Yeah, much like going to the gym,

I find that people tend to put it off.

They procrastinate, procrastinate,

and they don't schedule.

But if you don't schedule

the things that are very important to you

and your career,

then you'll never do them.

So, Speak Business English Confidently

gives you the plan,

you commit to it,

you improve your English,

you feel confident,

and you stop those feelings

of painful emotions for example.

And you get to with a colleague

and you can't communicate in English

and now you're embarrassed,

now you're upset, you feel like

you can't speak professionally like you really want,

you can't express yourself like you really want.

And you don't have that confidence level.

It affects your career,

it affects your confidence.

- And it just makes you feel bad,

and we can just eliminate those bad feelings, I think.

With some work.

Maybe another hesitation sometimes

for students is the investment for the program.

Because this one, it's around 1000 Euros,

we can do monthly payments.

But you know when you look online

at some of these platforms

where students can pick a teacher or whatever,

they might find a teacher for like $10 an hour,

something like that.

And students may be thinking like

what's the difference?

From your experience, I guess working

as part of the Speak English with Christina team,

what's the difference that you've seen?

- Well the difference is quality.

A lot of the teachers that you see online,

they teach general English,

they teach children,

they teach a variety of different subjects and so forth.

But the teachers in Speak Business English Confidently

only work with professional adults,

they're very specialized in this type of pedagogy.

It's very personalized and very specific to your needs.

So that's what gives you that quality.

- Yeah, and I think that's

when it's something that is as important

as your career,

it's worth going for that extra quality.

Like those platforms are fantastic,

I've used them to learn German and Italian,

but my objective was to be able to

order food and just kind of

make a little bit of conversation

when I'm visiting those countries.

But when I do coaching programs

for my own work,

I do want to have a coach

that I know is gonna be

really an expert in their field.

Yeah, it's gonna cost more,

but I know that I'm putting my money in the right place

because I'm gonna get a better result from that.

And that's kind of why I like working with you guys

with all the teachers,

because you're such good teachers.

You guys have all got --

- You're very kind.

- No, like honestly.

I don't know if you saw,

I sent an email that we got from a student today

and she was super happy about

one of the other programs

that she worked with you guys on.

So we're always getting feedback.

Because you guys, you're trained,

you're qualified, and I think you bring

that sort of fun touch

that we like to have in our courses

as part of Speak English with Christina.

It's serious business stuff,

but it's also fun and enjoyable

and community and that kind of thing.

- I like the community aspect very much so.

Because you have your one on one lessons

with your teacher,

but you're also a part of the international community

of teachers and learners

when you're doing the group sessions,

because all of them are business professionals.

They are all in the same situation.

They want to improve their English

for their profession, for their job, for their work.

It's very uplifting.

So, this accountability also you get to know

the others, they're looking for you

to be in class because

they're enjoying the conversation,

and you're helping one another,

you're motivating one another.

The teacher is always there on hand

to help whenever you need them,

but you get that comfort level with English.

- Exactly, yeah, and you know,

speaking of community and working with

the other members in the conversation group.

A lot of times,

sometimes students will contact me

before they join the program

and say "I'm a little worried

"because there's a teacher in there

"but if I'm speaking English with other students

"or other people who are learning English,

"am I gonna learn their mistakes?

"Am I gonna learn the wrong thing?"

And you are one of the fluency club leaders,

so what have you seen

just in terms of that?

- Well actually, I've noticed that

the students, yes they do have speaking errors,

but they never have the same errors.

- Exactly, right, yeah.

It's like they don't learn each other's mistakes.

- No, what's gonna be your mistake,

another student will know it correctly.

And what their mistake will be,

you will know it correctly.

You can help them.

And then you both feel comfortable

because you're both learning English.

So there's not that intimidation.

- Yeah, exactly.

So I think that's really helpful.

And plus, in addition to the conversation sessions,

there's the one on one session,

the private lesson with a teacher.

So if you have a question or anything,

you can ask in the fluency club

because the teacher's there,

but you can also go deeper

in the individual session as well.

And you know, also,

the professionals in the program

who are working internationally,

they have to be able to also

manage conversations with people

of other nationalities,

different levels, different accents,

and you don't always speak with native speakers

who articulate clearly

like we teachers do.

- Exactly.

Actually, that's a really very good advantage,

the fluency club gives you that advantage

because so many times we hear it,

"I'm from Spain,

"my colleagues are from China,

"we both have accents."

- Exactly, "and I can't understand their accent,"

so you have to work on, yeah.

- The fluency club helps you to get

completely comfortable with all those different accents

that you're hearing and listening to.

And then the next thing you know

you're making jokes and you're having a great time.

It's a great environment.

- Yeah, it's really a lot of fun.

And you know, that's why in

the Speak Business English Confidently,

we've got the two things.

The individual lessons

so that you can really work on

your personal situations,

your grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation,

whatever you need help with,

and then also the conversation groups

for the community, the fun, the international aspect

of working internationally today.

Right, so Kristina,

I just wanna say thank you for taking some time

to share your experience

and share your advice

and share that Eisenhower Matrix with us.

I think that's gonna be a lot of help

for the students to think about.

So, you guys, if you want to join the program,

Speak Business English Confidently,

go ahead and go to the link

that will be below this video,

and if you join before Saturday,

March 21st, you're actually gonna get

10% off the enrollment fees.

There's a code in the notes as well.

You're gonna get, as a bonus,

an individual live speaking evaluation

before you start your program,

and you're also gonna have some live

monthly question and answer sessions with me

to answer any additional questions you have

about English, business communication, anything.

Kristina, thanks a lot

for sharing with us,

and I'm sure the students are gonna

really look forward to seeing you in the program.

- Well it was a pleasure.

- And I'll talk to you later. - Take care.

- Yeah all right, thanks a lot,

talk to you later, bye.