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Hello!

Welcome to another episode of the Feel Good English Podcast. Today is the first Ted Talk Tuesday ever. And I’m going to talk about I think probably one of the most useful Ted videos that I know of, useful because it’s so practical, it’s so short, and it’s also quite motivating. This is a video that I watch pretty often. At least once a month, I go back to this just to get a nice, quick dose of motivation.

What is the video? The video is the 8 Secrets of Success by Richard St John. He gives eight traits that lead to great success in business, mostly.

What I’m going to do today is I’m going to take these eight traits and I’m going to tie them into English to help you connect what makes people successful to your English and what you can do to make your English successful.

I’ll go through each of these, briefly explain them, and then give you some ideas on how to use this so you can become a successful English speaker. Let’s go!

So, the first one, the first trait that Richard talks about is passion. You hear a lot about this passion thing. You should do work that inspires you, that you’re passionate about.

Personally, I find this a little difficult. Not everybody can do exactly what they love all of the time. I think it’s a little shallow to say that you can do whatever you want at any given time.

Not everybody is going to love their work. Sometimes, we have to accept what we’re doing and maybe find aspects about our work that we are passionate about. If you can’t find anything at work that you’re passionate about, you need to work, maybe outside of your job, you can find things that you’re passionate about.

I have known people that they’ve worked for the government or they do some job that maybe they’re not passionate about, but they’d find activities and hobbies outside of work that they are passionate about.

With English practice, with English learning, something that I think is very important is to find certain ways of practicing your English that you are passionate about or at least that you enjoy. You need to find out what is fun, what gets you excited, be it going online and having classes with somebody or listening to podcasts (like this one) or music, possibly going out and having a beer with somebody and speaking English over beers. These are all different ideas of what might get you excited about English, so finding what’s interesting to you.

Second one is work, hard work. This is pretty obvious, hard work. If you want to do anything really, really well, it takes time and hard work. If you want to see big results, hard work is necessary. And just like English, if you want to see great results in your English, you have to put in the work. It takes time and patience.

But connecting all of these ideas, like finding things you enjoy, finding practices you are passionate about will help you work hard because it won’t’ feel so much like work.

The next one is focus, to focus. I find this is something I’m working on a lot right now in my business, in life, being able to focus on only a few things. I tend to want to do a lot of different things at the same time. Or maybe I’m into something for a day, I’m really focused on something for the day. And then the next day, I totally change focus and get distracted. So, focusing on only a few activities, or even one most important activity, I think is very valuable because you can put all of your energy into this one thing. You put all of your energy and your time. And you also wait until you see results. Wait until you finish. That’s important as well.

With English, if you focus on certain aspects of English, maybe you want to focus on reading or listening or phrasal verbs or speaking to somebody for five minutes a day (maybe that’s a focus of yours), but simplifying all of the different activities you might possibly be able to do, all of the different areas and categories and topics and subjects.

Just focusing on a few, simple things like communication or grammar, and just do that for a month or so, and just get really specific with something. You can always change it in the future.

Number four is push. Push is kind of what we would say is motivation, keeping us going, keeping us moving. I think what really helps in this area is having other people help push you. It could be friends, colleagues, teachers, whoever it may be.

And a big word here, I think, is accountability. Accountability means having other people expect you to do something. So, let’s say you’re trying to lose weight, if you tell somebody else, “Hey, I’m going to lose 10 kilos this month,” that’s a big goal, “I’m going to lose 10 kilos this month. And if I don’t, I will pay you $50,” so your friend says, “Okay, let’s do this.” So then, he will be holding you accountable.

Having somebody hold you accountable can help you push through because it’s difficult. English is difficult sometimes.

You think you’re stuck at the same level. You’re never going to improve. You’re not going to pass that test. You’re not going to be able to pass the IELTS. All of these worries and frustrations come. You need somebody to push you through these tough times. You’ll get through them. Just keep pushing.

The next one is ideas. Ideas is what I would say is creativity.

You have to come up with different ideas. You have to be creative. And obviously, in business, people that come up with great ideas are the ones that find a lot of success because they bring new things.

So, how do you do this with English? Well, being creative with how you’re learning, how you’re improving, and even how you’re speaking, you can find creative ways to communicate when you’re learning a language. But you can also find ideas of other people, people that have come up with great ways to learn a language faster, to become fluent faster, and connect with their ideas and try out their ideas.

Part of it is experimenting with other people’s ideas. And this can also lead to you creating your own ways of learning based on other people’s ideas.

The next one is practice becoming good, improving on something. This just is pretty obvious. It’s just putting the time in. Practice, practice, practice. Becoming better and better and better. And a lot of this is having the patience to know that every time you’re practicing, you are advancing just a little bit.

I always recommend to my students, just a little bit, especially if you’re very busy, you have a lot of things going on. Just practice a little bit every day. Five minutes is even enough. And the practice could even be listening to something. It doesn’t necessarily mean “practice speaking.

But just listening to something, reading something for five minutes, listening to something for five minutes every day, if you do that, you will see huge results over time. I promise you. It’s the little times you put in every day with English that will bring the biggest results. I’ve seen this so many times.

And number, serve, to serve others. In business and in life, I think what really will fulfill us, what will make us feel happy about what we do in our lives and work is if we give to others. We have to help others, serve others. And in business, specifically, figuring out how you can best serve others and bring others value and give them what they want is what will bring the biggest results for you. Finding what they want will automatically bring in results for your business. It’s just a matter of really listening and discovering what other people want and how to serve them.

In English, maybe this one is not so relevant either, but English is communication. It’s speaking with other people and communicating with others. So, figuring out how you could be of service to others, maybe if they’re learning English as well,or even the topics that you’re speaking about if you go online or try to find people to communicate with through Facebook groups or wherever, you could serve people that way through English and help them learn English, help them resolve other problems using English.

That’s possible.

But you don’t really even have to use English I think as much here. I think it’s just more a matter of “if you help others, good things will always come back to you.” I think that’s the main point here.

So, the last one, persists. This comes from the word persistence as well. Persist, persistence is difficult. And I think it almost involves a lot of the other traits here. To persist is to be able to go through something difficult and continue to keep going and keep going and keep going and to keep moving forward.

We get frustrated and discouraged and upset often in projects, in business, in school, in life in general. But successful people, people that find true happiness through that, just keep going. They don’t let these problems stop them. They keep moving forward.

And it’s the same with your English. Don’t think there’s an end. It’s not like you will be done next year if you study or if you go to the U.S. for a month, you will be done with English. No, it’s a constant learning path. You got to keep moving forward, keep persisting to get to where you want to be.

If you connect all of these together, passion and hard work and focus and accountability through being pushed, ideas, good ideas on how to learn and practicing, practicing, and helping others, it will be easier for you to persist.

So, that’s it! I hope this helps. Practical advice, very simplified, I would say. This is not easy. However, even choosing one of these and thinking about it and saying “How could I improve on passion? How can I find things that I enjoy doing through English? Maybe I should research some more ideas on how to become a better English speaker. Maybe that’s something I should focus on.”

Some vocab from this episode. First one is traits, T-R-A-I-T-S or trait, a trait is a characteristic or an aspect of something.

What are his best traits? What are his best characteristics?

He could be friendly. He could be a good leader, responsible, intelligent or bad. He could be mean. He could be lazy. These are traits, characteristics. So, the 8 Traits of Successful People.

Another word I used is shallow. Shallow is the opposite of deep. Superficial is similar to shallow, so just kind of on the surface. If it’s a shallow idea, maybe it doesn’t go very deep.

It just touches the surface only. You can also call somebody – a person can be shallow. “She’s very shallow. She’s very superficial. She just thinks about appearance and what’s on the outside. She doesn’t think about the person deep down.”

So, that would be shallow.

And you can think of this connected with water. You have deep water or shallow water. Shallow water, you can walk in, no problem. Deep water, you probably need to swim.

Tend comes from the word tendency. “He has a tendency to do this” or, “She tends to do this.” So, tend is a verb. “She has a tendency to arrive late to work. She tends to arrive late to work.” So that would be a verb, tend from tendency. Easy to remember.

Bring to the table is what you have to offer, what ideas you have to bring to a group. What are the ideas you have? What ideas do you have to bring to the table? You need to bring something to the table. You have to offer something of value.

And last one, sink. To sink, to go down into the water, to sink, to not float. It’s the opposite of float, to sink. So, the boat is on the water. And then it gets a hole in it. It will sink.

We can use this metaphorically for a business. “Your business is sinking” or “Your relationship is sinking.” You can use this as a metaphor for doing down, for being destroyed.

Got it?

And that’s it for this week’s Ted Talk Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope this helps. Any questions, or if you would like the transcripts to this episode, go to FeelGoodEnglish.com. You can ask me a question, and you could also become a member for free. Becoming a member gives you access to all of the transcripts of my podcast episodes. So, go check it out. I’ll be waiting for you there.

Joke for the day, what kind of music are balloons scared of?

What kind of music are balloons scared of? Pop music!

Talk to you soon. Bye bye.