How to stay motivated to learn

I just don't feel like studying.

E, I'm with you.

I don't feel like doing it.

I have no motivation.

Hi.

James from engVid.

I know that you're watching this channel because you want to learn English, but I also

know because you're human that there have been many times when you just didn't feel

like doing it.

Perhaps this is one of those times you didn't want to study, but you put on this video in

hopes that I can help you.

Well, you're in luck because I'm going to.

I'm going to give you four steps to help you get motivated to study English even when you

don't really feel like it.

Because I've got a...

There's a guy named Archimedes, and what he said was "Give me a big enough lever".

I'm paraphrasing, which means I'm not using the exact words.

So he talked about giving a big enough lever, or lever, and a fulcrum.

So this triangle is a fulcrum, something you can use.

He said you could move the world.

Well, my thing is if I can get you to motivate yourself to study your English, you, too,

will be able to change your world or move your world.

So let's go to the board and find out what four crazy methods I have for you.

Now, these look really weird.

I know when you're looking at it, you're going "What the heck is all this?", but I promise

in the end it'll make sense.

So the first thing I want you to do is think about why you're there and you don't want

to do it.

Try and figure out why you wanted to do it in the first place.

You wanted to learn English...

You wanted to learn English for a reason.

It could be for a vacation, it could be to meet some cute English girl, it could be for

your job in a promotion, or it could be just because you like learning languages.

But you've got to get back to that why.

Why is important.

There's a man named Simon Sinek who wrote a book, "Find Your Why", right?

And in this book, what he said was when we find our original why, we get passion.

We get passion.

It gives us energy.

It's the thing that drives us to change.

Sometimes that why is to change society to make it better, so it gives you that passion

to fight.

Well, we need to go back to that passion to get energy to help us with our motivation.

So one of the first things I want you to do is find your why.

Go back, sit down, take five seconds and think "Why did I want to do this in the first place?"

Instead of thinking "I have to do this", think about why I wanted to do it, how it was going

to change my world, and why I found it important enough to start.

That will at least get you moving a bit, because usually lacking motivation means you feel

stuck, unable to move, right?

So we're going to find our goal, and this is important because without your why, it's

like trying to fire a bow and arrow with your eyes closed.

You're going to miss the target.

So we find our why, we find our goal, we fire, and we will find we usually hit what we aim

at, and it's getting what we desire, in this case, motivation to learn English.

Let's move to number two, emotions.

Finding your why, I told you, releases passion.

Passion is an emotion.

Emotions have energy, but I want you to imagine your emotions as being an invisible wind,

and I want you to imagine that you're trying to walk in this invisible wind, but it's very,

very strong.

If you don't acknowledge, and that means pay attention to those emotions, and you don't

understand what they're trying to tell you, they're going to hold you back.

That's that invisible force, you know, your emotions.

You cannot see them, you feel them, they have an effect on you.

There's a Dr. Steven Peters who has a book called The Chimp Paradox, and what he talks

about is this chimp or this monkey inside your brain, right, is always trying to take

care of you and protect you, and it tries to do that by giving you emotions to tell

you to either fight, run, run is flee away, fight, or freeze.

Freezing is when we lack our motivation to do something.

We freeze, I don't want to do it.

If we can just talk to ourselves and acknowledge those emotions and say, "Listen, I am afraid,

but I will take a step forward because doing so makes life better", or "I am anxious,

I won't do a good job, so I will study more and that will help me move forward", if we

don't acknowledge or, you know, say, "Okay, these emotions are real, that wind is real",

they will hold us back.

So we want to acknowledge our emotions because when we acknowledge our emotions, that

energy that is holding us back is given to us so we can fly forward.

Kind of cool, right?

Just by saying, "Hey, I'm afraid", you can stop being afraid by saying, "I'm afraid,

and why am I afraid?" and thinking about what I can do to help my fear, because that little

monkey we were talking about holding you back can then help you move forward.

Now, let's move from there, from acknowledging our emotions, finding our why, acknowledging

our emotions.

A lot of you may not know this, but in North America we have something called the carrot

and the stick.

It's about a donkey, and we talk about how do you motivate a donkey.

Now, if you're a parent and you love your children, the carrot is like giving them candy

and praise and saying nice things to get them to do something to motivate them.

That's the carrot, do something good.

And the stick is military, the stick of discipline.

They won't listen, make them listen.

Okay?

So, a lot of people think, "Okay, carrot and stick, but here I have it reversed.

It shouldn't be this way, it's usually reversed."

First try the carrot, do something nice, then use the stick if that doesn't work.

Now, do you remember I talked about the emotions and feeling them?

Well, one thing you can do with emotions here is you can take the bad emotions, which would

be the stick, and we're going to maximize this, make the stick bigger, because what

we want to do is make the person so afraid of what might happen that is bad if they don't

finish what they said they were going to do.

What do I mean?

If you think of something like this, okay, I am getting a little bit fatter, and then

you say, "Okay, well, what happens if I...

That's not so bad.

We know it's bad, but you don't care.

But what would happen if we said, "Hey, what if you kept eating bad foods, just kept eating

them, kept doing no exercise?"

We would go, "I'll get fatter and fatter, then I'll get heart problems and knee problems,

I might have a heart attack, I might die, I might not be able to take care of my family."

And it's like, "Do you want that to happen?"

You go, "No, no, no, no, no, no."

So we use the stick to get you to move and not the carrot.

So by acknowledging it, one method we can do from acknowledging these emotions, first,

if that doesn't work, that you say, "Okay, I acknowledge my emotion.

Let me work."

Then you can say, "Okay, now imagine the worst thing that could happen.

Why am I mentioning this?"

Well, there's a guy named Dr. Jordan Peterson, and in his clinic, they did a study with a

mouse.

And they had a maze for the mouse, you know, a maze, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah.

And they had some cheese, and the mouse was hungry.

And what they would do is they would time to see how long it took the mouse to go through

the maze to get the cheese, and the hungry mouse did it pretty quickly.

But do you know what made the mouse run even faster to get the cheese?

You think they made the house...

The mouse...

Sorry.

The house...

The mouse even hungrier?

No.

They put a smell of a cat in the maze, and the mouse would run faster through the maze

to escape the cat than when it was just hungry for cheese.

When it was just hungry for cheese, it was motivated, the carrot, to eat, but the cat,

the smell of the cat, and possibly the cat catching it, made it run even faster.

So from there, they determined if you can think of what's the worst thing that could

happen and how you don't want that to happen, it's going to get you to move.

Now, I keep talking about emotion, emotion, emotion, and moving.

There's a reason for that, and it's going to come up here where we look at E + M. When

I was talking about emotion, if you separate the word "emotion", you're going to get something

interesting, which is this, E = "energy", and motion actually means "motion".

Okay?

By using these two tricks, we're trying to get the energy to get you into motion, because

when you're mentally stuck, you become physically stuck.

But the reverse way of doing it is if you get your body active, then your mind will

become active.

I want you to imagine for a second or two a rocket, you know, a rocket ship, standing

there, and the rocket, you're hearing, "Five, four, three, two, one, we have blast off."

That rocket takes off with tremendous power, yeah?

We can use the energy in motion, right?

And this is from a book by a woman named Mel Robbins called The Five Second Rule, to give

ourselves a limited amount of time to move.

Once we've used these two techniques, acknowledge our emotions and probably thought about this

one, that stick, we can use a limited time, which is a "five, four, three, two, one",

because the "five, four, three, two, one" enables us to keep our focus on what we wanted

to do, that's why we looked at our "why", keep our "why" in our mind, and just enough

time that you don't lose focus and you can jump right into the activity.

Before your brain says, "Stop, we don't want to do this", because if you wait for 10 or

15 seconds, you start to think and maybe you won't do it, but when you only have five seconds,

by the time you've moved, it's too late for your brain to say, "Stop", you've moved forward.

And by taking that energy, creating physical motion, we can then get mental motion to get

motivated to do what we have to do.

Cool?

I know.

So, it's a simple system, and I promised you four steps, it's four steps.

And all you have to do is just start with the first one, which is remember why you're

doing this, and then try and figure out what are the fears holding you back, because lack

of motivation or people being lazy isn't usually that they don't want to work, it's that they're

afraid of something, and that keeps them stuck.

Remember?

Fight, freeze, or flight?

They freeze.

So, what we have to do is get them to find out or acknowledge what is getting them to

freeze, and then maybe making that stick a little bit bigger so it scares them off

to move.

And once we get that energy in motion, and we limit the time that they have to move from

five to one, then we'll find that those people will move towards what they want to do, which

in your case is English.

Okay?

I hope you enjoyed the video, and watch it again maybe when you're getting a little stressed

out about what to do, and they'll take these steps that go through them mentally, and you

might find you're getting more done besides English each and every day.

Anyway, listen, thank you very much.

I'd like you to come back to engVid for...

If you liked this video, more videos like this.

Of course, your usual grammar, prepositions, and whatnot, reading and writing skills, because

we've got lots of that with some brilliant teachers, you can go to is www.engvid.com

and seek out those extra videos.

Anyway, for now, have a great day.

Stay motivated.

Keep studying.

Ciao.