Want to Speak PERFECT English? Start Doing THIS!

"My weakness? Well, I'd say  I'm a bit of a perfectionist."

How many times have you heard  someone saying that or have even  

said that yourself? It's quite common to repeat  this over and over as an excuse to not take the  

next step towards a goal or a dream that you have. Now, you may be thinking "But Ethan, I am proud of  

myself for being a perfectionist because it means  that I care deeply about the things that I do." 

Now I understand why you might believe  that calling yourself a perfectionist  

makes you feel that you work harder than  others to achieve the things you want to do.  

And there is some truth in that. However,  our admiration for perfection is so universal  

that we never really stop to think  about what this concept is doing  

to you and your language learning journey. Just like Alejandra who even after 5 years  

studying English is still paralyzed  by the fear of making mistakes.

So if you watch until the end, you will get more  than 50 years of experience from teachers and  

experts who have battled with perfectionism,  just like you have, so that you can get the  

tools that you need to overcome the anxiety and  barriers that having to be perfect is causing you.

Now, the default game language learners play,  when they enter into conversation is be perfect,  

get grammar perfect, pronunciation perfect,  right. And the thing is, your emotional state  

is dictated by your performance against your  goals. So if my goal is to be perfect, and then  

I get a, I say the wrong word, I mispronounce  something or I misconjugate something,  

then I will experience negative emotion.  When I experience negative emotion,  

it'll deteriorate my performance, I'll get into a  vicious cycle of, the whole thing will be painful.  

I'll walk away, and I'll say, Ah, do I want to  do this again? Maybe I do a couple more times,  

but it's even worse. And then eventually I give  up, right? This is, this is the scenario. This  

is a story line for the vast majority of  language learners ever who ever existed.  

So how do you get out of that? Well, you have to  play a game that you can win and feel good about.

'Don't let perfection be the enemy of good." I think it's really important to realize that  

you can never reach "perfect". If you strive  for perfection at all times, you are only  

going to cause yourself pain and struggle. What is much more effective is to strive for  

personal best. Just like for a casual runner it  is not healthy to strive to be as fast as record  

holder Usain Bolt. It is more important that you  are faster than you were last week or last month. 

The same is true for you. You only sabotage  yourself when you believe that your English won’t  

be good until you speak like a native. Rather than  seeking perfection, it is more important that you  

are trying to improve a little bit every day. If you put yourself in a vulnerable spot  

and you are resigned to the understanding  that you will fail, you will fail. If you  

are resigned to that understanding, then you  don't have to worry about sounding perfect.  

All you have to worry about is did I try  today? That's it. That's your only worry.

So your best English doesn't mean perfect  English. If you think too much about having 

perfect English, you won't be able  to ever communicate with people,  

which really is what languages are for! This  is our main purpose since we started RealLife  

with meetups where people would connect and  speak English regardless of their level. 

Look how Justin talk about the transformative  journey learners go through once they relax,  

accept their mistakes, and start speaking.

​​So people are going beyond this whole, like  judgment standing back. And which I think is  

typical, there's, you know, people stand back  and look at each other, and like, kind of,  

there's judgment going on, people are scared of  being judged and everything. But it's so clear  

after this, that nobody cares, everybody is just  supporting each other. And I think that's the most  

amazing thing. People walked away from that,  with this transformational experience, like,  

Oh, my gosh, like really living your English,  I don't need to be perfect. I can just speak,  

I can just connect. And that's it, I'm on my way!  I may not be perfect now. But I'm speaking in like 

that, that's so empowering. Because then you can  take the next step, the next step, next step, and  

then you're speaking English in the real world,  you're living your English in the real world.

So Lindsay also put it interestingly when she  emphasizes that seeing the language as a tool  

for connection is so much more crucial  than your fear of not sounding perfect.

So the 'connection, not perfection', the way I  connect to that is, I never want our learners to  

feel that, right I never want language to get in  the way of human connection. That's what that's  

all about. It should always be the number one  goal is to maintain the connection. So if you  

make a mistake, don't drop your eye contact,  don't feel embarrassed, don't move away, look  

at the person in the eye and keep the connection  going. It's up to you at that moment, whether you  

lose the connection, or you keep it, right. So  we have a lot more control than we think we do.

The more effective way to overcome your  perfectionism and fear of making mistakes  

is to get out there and start making mistakes.  With our RealLife app you can have conversations  

in English anytime, anywhere at the touch of  a button. The great thing is that you will  

speak to other learners around the world. Now  they are going through exactly what you are,  

they know how challenging it is, so they will have  empathy for you. Conversation the conversation  

you'll see yourself becoming more comfortable,  confident, and natural in your speaking.  

In addition to this, you can learn to understand  fast speech by listening to the full interviews of  

the teachers that you are seeing today with  an interactive transcript and vocabulary.  

And guess what, all this is absolutely free so  you really have no excuses to not get started now.  

Download the app by clicking here  or in the description down below  

or you can simply search for RealLife English  in the Apple app or Google Play Store.  

Go ahead and give it a try. The confident  future you will be so happy that you did.

So a big lesson perfectionists need to learn is  how to get out of your head and enjoy the journey  

by not focusing on thoughts like, "Am I making  mistakes" or "I have to be like other people who  

I see are speaking perfect English", just like  Gavin Roy learned how to do with his Portuguese.

When we're speaking, when I'm speaking in  a foreign language, and when I'm speaking  

Brazilian Portuguese to my followers, there  in Brazil, it helps them to see that I'm not  

speaking perfectly, that I still have a bit of  an accent, you know, and it makes them realize  

that they can let go of their standard of  perfection and need to sound like a native 

speaker with zero mistakes. So did you have anything  

that really helped you to overcome that  perfectionism after that year and a half  

that finally pushed you to, to start speaking? I think I realized I only saw results when I was  

letting go of my perfectionism and  just allowing myself to make mistakes.  

There's a specific piece of advice too that,  there is a polyglot named Benny Lewis that when  

I read this thing that he said, saying, you need  to make 200 mistakes a day, or else you're not  

going to improve. To hear someone of that stature  say something, which to me seemed crazy, but,  

and to see that it was working for  me kind of made everything okay.  

So I'm still very much perfectionist in terms  of I like my videos to be edited perfectly,  

I like all of the videos in my English course,  for example, to be perfect products, but when it  

comes to my actual speaking, my language learning,  it would be imperfect to assume that you're not  

going to make any mistakes. So the moment that  I accepted that, like truly accepted, not just  

like I might make sense, but truly owned, that  I'm going to make mistakes, and not be perfect  

was when my language improved. And so now I'm  okay not being a perfectionist when I'm speaking.

My students have told me countless times  that they are afraid of speaking English  

or that they are not fluent because they don't  know enough. However the real problem is that they  

can't do it because the program, which is English  or any other additional language, is currently too  

heavy. It takes up too much energy and their  brain just can't work fast enough. So if you  

have ever suffered from fear or stress related to  learning and speaking English, meditation can be  

a huge help. Some of your favorite teachers have  told me about their experiences with meditation  

on Beyond Borders, so if you watch until the end  you will learn about the benefits of meditation,  

how to get started and even continue and  how to connect it to learning English.