Master Your English Skills & Confidence — 4 Steps for Effective Practice

Hey,

it's Annemarie was Speak Confident English and welcome to this week's Confident

English lesson.

This is exactly where you want to be every week to get the confidence you want

for your life and work in English. Let's talk about muscle memory.

Have you heard those words before?

They're a bit confusing because of course your memory does not have a muscle.

So what could that mean?

Muscle memory is the idea that you have repeated something so

many times that you no longer really need to think about it when you do

it, it's almost automatic, like walking,

riding a bike or typing an email on your computer keypad.

Those are all things that at one time took a lot of effort and a lot of

thinking, but now you just do them and you don't really think about it.

This also includes a skill like playing the piano.

Maybe there's a song that you've played 873

times by now. You no longer need to read the music.

You don't need to worry about thinking where your fingers should go on the

keyboard and you don't really worry about making mistakes either.

You just play the song. It's easy.

You do it fluently or smoothly and with confidence as well.

When you've mastered a skill like that, you've created muscle memory.

So how does muscle memory,

or perhaps a better word when we talk about learning a new language,

automaticity, happen?

To practice effectively and master your English skills and

confidence, there are four steps you can follow.

And that's exactly what we're going to talk through in today's Confident English

lesson,

not only will we look at those four specific steps and how they can apply to

language learning so that you can master the skills that you're working on,

but I've also got a free download for you that will help get you on the right

path

In their wildly popular Ted Ed video on this topic of how to practice

effectively Annie Bosler and Don Greene define effective practice

as "consistent,

intensely focused and targets, content,

or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one's

current abilities." I'm going to leave that here for a moment because that's a

lot to think about effective practice is practice

that is "consistent,

intensely focused and targets, content,

or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one's current abilities."

In other words, learn how to do something correctly,

learn it with intense focus and repeat it often,

slowly adding challenge or level of difficulty so that you're

always moving forward.

Now in their video on effective practice Bosler and Greene are focused on

physical or motor skills,

such as learning to play a musical instrument,

perfecting a fine art,

like painting or improving athletic skills.

But I think it's always useful to observe something that you're learning

and think, what can I learn from this?

And how can I apply it in other areas of my life?

That's what we're going to do today.

We're going to look at their method of effective practice and how we could

use that same strategy in language,

learning to master your skills so that you gain ease,

fluency and confidence. Bosler and Greene.

Break that down into four simple steps.

We're going to walk through each one of those steps and break it down into

practical things that you can begin doing today to start mastering

the skills that you're working on in English. And as I mentioned,

I've got a free download that I'm going to share with you that will help you get

started on the right path immediately. So step number one,

focus without distraction.

You and I both know that this is true for anything that we want to do

well in our life. The more we can eliminate distractions,

the better we're going to perform.

The problem is of all four steps.

This one might be the most difficult. It requires the most self discipline.

Not only do we already have family members, kids,

coworkers around us that distract us,

but many of us are also addicted to checking

email, responding to text messages,

looking at what's happening on Facebook or Instagram every few minutes.

And that is a disaster when it comes to focus.

So here are two tips that I have for you to help you eliminate those

distractions.

When you're focused on achieving mastery in your English skills,

number one, keep your practice time short.

It's much easier to turn off your email and to turn off your phone

or even shut yourself in a room. If you know,

it's just for a little bit of time, maybe five, 10 or 20 minutes,

the key here is making sure that you can give a hundred percent of your

attention and your energy to that one thing that you want to do better.

The second tip that I have for you is you can make this even easier by

scheduling it. I know for me that if I don't schedule something,

it's super easy for me to forget about it or say that it's not so

important, I can do it tomorrow or next week when I schedule something,

it becomes a priority.

It's something that I make time for. Step number two,

start slow, learn it right the first time,

slowly increasing with your speed or level of difficulty.

This might seem counterintuitive to language learning because of

course in language you want to speak quickly.

Many of us think that fluency is about speaking fast.

If you're one of my Fluency School students,

you absolutely know fluency is not about speaking fast.

It's about being in control,

being smooth and being clear.

That is fluency.

And you can only do that when you start slow and you perfect

or master a specific skill.

And then with time build up the speed or level of difficulty

until you have absolute confidence in what you're doing.

That's exactly how I help my students in Fluency School.

And it's one of the reasons the program is so effective.

So how can you do this? Well,

there are a couple of things that are important. Number one,

you have to learn something correctly from the very start.

What that means is finding an instructor.

You trust to give you the right information.

Now whether that's me,

someone else on YouTube or another teacher where you live locally,

that is a hundred percent fine,

but it's important that you have someone who can teach you the right skills.

Once you've done that,

start working on those skills slowly.

I'm going to talk a little bit more about this when I share the free download I

have for you. How do you start slowly?

So if you're thinking that if you're wondering about how to apply this,

I'm going to help you do that in just a moment.

But first let's talk about step number three, repeat often,

but give yourself breaks and avoid burnout.

If you've ever tried to improve your ability in playing a musical

instrument or perhaps playing a sport,

you know that if you only do that thing one time a month for

two or three hours,

you're going to lose everything that you've learned the next month.

When you practice again, four weeks later,

you're going to repeat the same thing that you've already learned,

because you never mastered it.

That's why sports teams and clubs meet every week or even

twice a week.

Children's sports teams might practice every day after school during the season.

The reason for that is of course,

repetitive practice allows you to build on what you've already learned

and make gains going forward.

This is absolutely true for language as well.

This goes back to that idea of short,

committed practice time.

It's so much easier to get regular

repeated practice when it's short and focused.

If you practice 15 minutes a day, five days a week,

that is so much easier than trying to do three hours a day.

And finally, step four on the list. Use visualization.

What that means is to practice in your brain,

imagine those specific skills that you're wanting to use and how you would

use them. How do you apply this to language learning?

If you've been following me for awhile, you know,

I'm a huge advocate of preparing for conversations in

advance by imagining what you would say in that moment.

My Fluency School students definitely know about this and in my

lesson on how to be interesting and cool and English,

I actually talk through my method for this.

I share with you exactly why it's useful to imagine or

visualize what you might say in a conversation in advance and how to

do it so that when that conversation happens in real life,

you feel prepared, confident and at ease.

If you want to link to that lesson where I talk about how to visualize or

imagine what you'll say in a conversation,

I'll leave a link to that in the notes below this video.

But now let's talk about practical ways to apply all of this.

And how can you do this to improve your English language skills?

As I mentioned,

I have a free download available for you at the start of this year.

I shared a lesson on how to accelerate your English confidence.

And with that lesson,

I included a download with 30 speaking prompts for daily practice.

If you haven't downloaded it yet,

I want you to go to today's lesson on the Speak Confident English website,

where it's available for you to download. And if you've already got it,

get those speaking prompts out.

We're going to talk through exactly how you can use that to follow

all four steps we've talked about today and begin to gain mastery in your

English skills.

Once you've downloaded the 30 speaking prompts for daily practice

(notice I said daily,

we're talking about that consistent repetition) here's exactly what I

want you to do. Number one,

create focused time to practice, make it short,

but make it focused. So if you can find five, 10 or 15 minutes,

five days a week, schedule it and make it a priority.

This is your committed speaking practice time.

Once you've done that,

I want you to follow the daily prompts that I've provided in that

download.

I've given you specific topics and skills for you to practice in your

English.

And here's where we're going to talk about what it means to go slow and then

slowly build up your speed or level of difficulty. With each prompt,

I have a question for you,

and I want you to give yourself some time to practice speaking on that topic out

loud, the first time that you do that,

I want you to speak slowly.

I know that sounds strange. And it's counterintuitive. Again.

You might be thinking that fluency is speaking fast.

It's not it's about you being in a hundred percent control of

what you want to say and how you want to express yourself.

So I want you to start slow and don't worry because no one else is

in the room with you. This is your practice time.

So no one's going to hear you going slow.

It won't sound strange to anyone because they can't hear you.

I want you to practice speaking as slow as

possible. Give yourself time.

As you speak to think about what you're saying,

think about the words that you want to use,

or the specific grammar I've asked you to focus on.

Think about your pronunciation.

Speaking slowly gives you time to think about all of that.

It helps you improve your accuracy.

Once you've done that, you can do the activity again,

this time speed up just a little bit.

If it's a topic that you already feel really comfortable with and you think, Oh,

this is so easy. Well, then I have a different challenge for you.

Instead of focusing on increasing your speed slowly,

try to increase the level of difficulty speak slowly.

So you can focus on using advanced level vocabulary

that is more difficult for you to use or use more challenging

grammar and sentence structures. No matter what the topic is,

there's always some way to make it more difficult.

And when you do it the first time, if you do it slowly,

you give yourself that opportunity to really refine perfect what

you're doing as you master it,

you can increase the speed and gain that confidence you need going

forward. All right,

so we've talked about giving yourself some intensely focused time

regularly to your practice with these speaking prompts,

we've talked how you can apply the strategy of going slowly and

increasing your speed or level of difficulty over time.

That allows you to continue building on what you've already learned and move

forward. Step three is do it consistently.

That's exactly why I included the words daily practice in this download.

If you can,I want you to do this five days a week,

give yourself breaks. You need them. It's healthy,

but commit to regular practice. And finally, step four,

visualize or imagine again,

when you have those speaking prompts before you immediately begin

speaking, give yourself a couple of moments to reflect.

Imagine that someone has asked you that particular question in a real

conversation,

take a few minutes to think about what you might want to say.

Give yourself just a little bit of time in advance to prepare before

you immediately begin speaking.

I know that we don't always get those opportunities to just sit and think in a

real conversation, but this is your practice time.

This is the time that you're using to master those skills so

that when you're in that real conversation,

it comes easily, fluently, and with confidence.

With that,

you have an effective way to practice and gain mastery in your

English skills and confidence.

My challenge for you this week is simple.

Download the 30 speaking prompts for daily practice and get

started today. Follow the steps that I've provided here.

And as you implement this practice, let me know how it's going.

You can share your practice journey with me in the comments below this video,

with that have a fantastic week,

and I'll see you next time for your Confident English lesson.