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052 - Frustrated with English?

Hello there. Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast, the podcast that helps you improve your English and improve your life all at the same time.

Do you consider yourself as someone who worries a lot? Do you worry about the future? Or maybe you worry about what you did in the past?

You feel stressed and frustrated, and then maybe anxious, worrying and feeling anxious are a very common problem in today’s world. So, think about this. If you’re a street cat. Let’s say you’re a cat, and you live on the street, which is a pretty tough life for a cat. But anyway, your whole life is based on reacting to the immediate situation. You see a dog, you get worried, and you run. You are hungry, you get worried, and you find food, maybe you find a little piece of chicken in a trash can. But anyway, you’re hungry, you worried, you find food, and you feel better. You’re thirsty as a cat, you find water in the street, in the gutter, and drink water out of the gutter, and you’re not thirsty anymore.

A cat’s worries are directly related to immediate problems. And as an animal, all you have to do is to solve those immediate problems.

So now, us as humans, a lot of the problems we have cannot be resolved immediately. So, we want a new job, we want to speak English better, we want to move to another country. All these problems, we can’t always solve them right this moment. So, we have to plan for these and we have to think about what we want without being able to get it. This causes worry. “I want to do this, but I can’t do it right now.” This is what makes us different from animals, and this is what causes a lot of stress. What have you been worrying about lately?

Is this all connected with something in the future? Or something that you can’t change right now? Probably.

There are ways to make this better. Just stop worrying so much, and in the book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie, he will do just that: help you worry less. So, I’m going to give you some strategies that will help you not to worry so much. These strategies come from the book, and also from some of my own research and experience. Let’s find some ways that you can worry less and be happier and feel good. Right?

I am recording this in August of 2016, August is going to be the last month you can become a Feel Good member for free to get

transcripts to all of the Feel Good English podcast episodes. All you have to do to become a member for free is leave me a review, once you leave a review, send me an email with the screenshot of your review or if you don’t know how to do that, send me an email anyway telling me about your review, and if you do that you can become a member for free and get free transcripts to all podcast episodes forever, so you don’t have to worry about transcripts ever again.

To find out more information and if you are confused, go to feelgoodenglish.com/member or go to the homepage and look for the button, Join Us! and you will find all of the information you need to know about becoming a Feel Good member, but like I said, August is the last month to do this so don’t wait.

Now, let’s get into the lesson. Let’s learn how to worry less.

Animals, their whole life is based on reacting to the moment, and whatever stresses or worries or anxieties they naturally feel, they find a quick response to that.

So, how do we start dealing with these delayed reactions? So we’re not always worried about what happens in the future. Well, the first point of the book, and I really, really connect with this two, what causes worry is confusion. Again, what causes us to worry is confusion about the future. We’re not built. Our brains aren’t built to handle these delayed returns. Our brains take hundreds of thousands of years to develop, and to evolve into new types of brains. So, imagine how fast technology has advanced versus how fast our brains have evolved.

There’s a very big difference here. We’re talking like two hundred thousand years of development to get to the brain that we have now versus what’s changed in the last hundred years. We’ve had amazing technological advances and societal changes. So, there’s a very big disconnect there. Our society, our world has changed a lot faster than our brains have. So that right there, probably can help you worry a little less. Think about that. Our brains aren’t able of handling all the day–to–day stresses and dilemmas and career and school path and all of these things: marriage, choosing the right partner. All these crazy things, voting for the right president, whatever the hell that means.

So knowing this, knowing that worries are caused by confusion, what can we start doing? The first thing is to get the fact straight. Get the fact straight about your problem. What is it that you are thinking about? What is it that you are worrying about? What are the issues involved in this?

After we figure out exactly what we are worrying about, it might be irrational and something out of our control. If we don’t have control over the weather, what other people are going to do, what our boss is thinking, if we don’t have control over it, then just simply throw it away.

Stop worrying about it because you don’t have control over it. But if we do have control over it, get the facts straight. Start shifting our worries from confusion to daily tasks. Start measuring actions today. Become clearer on actions you can take today, so you are not so confused about the future. You have a goal in mind in the future, you’re confused, you don’t know what’s going to happen, shift those thoughts into “What can I do today?” to get me to that future result. If we measure our tasks, it becomes less confusing, and our brains are able to handle that better. So a cat says “Okay. Well, I’m hungry. If I walk over to that trash can and look in it, I’ll probably find some food.” That’s a very measurable task. Walking there, getting some chicken out of the trash can that somebody threw away, now the cat’s not hungry anymore.

So, I want to become a fluent English speaker. Ten minutes a day, I’m going to listen to the Feel Good English podcast. Yay! That’s measurable. Less confusing.

So that’s the first thing: Shift your confusing, stressful worries, some thoughts about the future into measurable daily tasks.

You’re fat, you want to lose weight. What’s something you can measure? Well, you could measure how much exercise you’re going to do each day. Ten minutes a day of exercise. Measurable.

You want a new career, you’re confused, and you don’t know what to do. Well, you’re worried about the future because you’re not making enough money. What can you do? You can measure how many jobs you will apply for each and every day. You’re going to apply for two jobs every day. That’s measurable. It goes from confused about the future to taking measurable steps today.

The second idea here, second big idea. So I’m going to tell you to not do something. Okay? Do not think of Michael Jackson riding on an elephant, okay? Well, what did you do? You just thought of Michael Jackson riding on an elephant. That’s a crazy visualization.

In order to not think about something, we have to think about it first obviously. Right? So if somebody says “Stop worrying about tomorrow,” you’re going to think about tomorrow first, right? Allow yourself to worry about the future, but for a very short time. So let’s say you’re worried about a job, don’t just try to avoid thinking about the future job; give yourself let’s say five minutes today to worry as much as you want about that job. Don’t worry. Put all of your energy into worrying about what job you are going to have in the future. But after five minutes, stop. This will allow you to go through the process of worrying about the future, and not just pushing it away and avoiding it because it will always be there. So know what you want to stop worrying about, and let yourself worry about that first before you take action and you find those measurable tasks, to take care of the confusion and the worry about the future. Got it?

Some more big ideas here: When we get tired, we worry more. We get more stressed. We are more anxious. Often, we think we’re busy, we’re busy, we’re, and because of this, we get stressed and tired and anxious. Through research, they have found that the more tired you are, the more you will automatically worry and get stressed. If we are responsible enough to rest enough, sleep enough, to take breaks, to exercise, to get away from the desk, to get away from work, if we are responsible enough to do this, we will worry less. So rest first, work second, even if it means being disciplined enough to say “I need to get some rest.” Sometimes, we think “I don’t have time to rest. I don’t have time to sleep. I don’t have time to relax.” What happens is we get tired, stressed, we worry more, and we are less productive. Rest first, work second.

Another very easy big idea: If you are feeling stressed, anxious, worried, sad, depressed, or down, change your actions and act happy.

Simply change your body language, change your facial expression, and act happy. Put a smile on your face. Whistle. Whistle while you work. Simply acting happier, changing our facial expression, putting a smile on our face, and whistling can change our emotions. Often, we think our actions are simply based on our emotions, but we can also reverse that, and our emotions will follow our actions. So, force yourself to be happy. This doesn’t mean denying or negating these negative emotions; they’re going to be here, but why don’t we just, for the moment, switch our minds around and act happy? Our brains can’t be happy and sad at the same time. Have you ever been happy and sad at the same time? That sounds a little strange, right? So if we are acting happy, you don’t have time. You don’t have the ability to be sad. So just look up, smile, take a breath, and act happier. A simple idea with big benefits.

And lastly, if you have a lot of worries on your mind, think about what’s the worst thing that can happen. What is the worst possibility or what is the worst possible outcome? Most people get over just about any tragedy in their life. People have lost their legs, they’ve lost their whole family in car accidents, horrible things. But you know what? They overcome these obstacles and they become happy again and they learn to love life again.

In these extreme cases, people have been able to become very fulfilled, and often even become better versions of themselves through these really tragic situations. So, take a moment if you’re really worried about something and say, “What is the worst possible outcome?” because you know what, even if that happens, good things will also happen again.

You know what else? Even though this might seem bad, there are people that have gone through this and gone through much worse than I could go through. Put your life into perspective. There’s always something worse that has happened.

So again, summarizing all these, the main issue behind worrying is not being able to resolve our problems immediately. As humans, especially in today’s society, we have delayed returns. We have to wait for a lot of things to happen to us. Your brain wants to find the immediate solution to problems. That’s just how it was made. Our brain is a machine. So, the most important thing you can do is to get clear about what you want, start measuring daily tasks that will help you get to where you want. Don’t worry about that future result; think about today’s action: today’s measurable action, what you can do today. Other than that, make sure you’re resting enough, make sure you’re not exhausted. Exhaustion causes worry. When you really get sad or worried or anxious, just simply pretend you’re happy. Act happy. Put a smile on your face. See how that can change it. Don’t let your mind just get occupied with the sad emotion.

Put in some happy emotions, so your mind will focus on that. And lastly, what is the worst thing that can happen? What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? Not only is it probably not that bad, but other people had gone through much worse things than you have, and they turned out to be okay.

Going over the vocabulary from today’s lesson; by the way, going over, to go over, that is a phrasal verb right there, and that means to talk about or to review. So, talking about the vocabulary: Going over the vocabulary. Anyway, I used the word delayed a lot. Delayed returns, so something is delayed; it means it’s not immediately, it’s not right now, it’s going to take more time. A delayed return would be a delayed benefit or a delayed result. So animals, their returns or their results happen immediately.

They’re hungry, they find food, and they eat it, that’s an immediate return. A delayed return is when you want to speak English fluently, you think about it, it doesn’t happen immediately. It’s delayed. A common use of delayed is for flying around on airplanes; “Your flight is delayed.”

Another phrase I used here, societal changes. Society. This is the adjective form, “societal.” So, “societal changes” just means changes in the society. So, it’s just a different form of the word “society.” Another big word here, shift,“shifting our worries.” So you’re shifting your worries from making you anxious, to measurable actions. So, to shift is to change. To make a shift is to make a change. Cars that are manual have a stick shift in the middle of the car. This is what changes the gear of the cars. So, shift is the synonym of change. A mental shift would be a mental change. Outcome, we talked about outcome. An outcome is a result. So, what is the outcome? What is the result? Here again, we had a very good outcome. We had a very good result.

And then, we also used a phrasal verb, …and get over, and this is when I’m talking about: you need to put your problems into perspective because other people have gotten over much bigger problems than you. To get over is to overcome. To get through is to persevere. You get over a problem means it’s not much of a problem anymore. You get over a bad break–up with your girlfriend. Your girlfriend cheated on you with your best friend, it was bad, but you got over it. You forgot about it. It’s not a big deal anymore. Putting your problems into perspective. What’s the possible thing that can happen? And you know what, even though it sounds horrible, we, as humans, are very capable of getting over even the most difficult of problems. So, whistle.

And that will do it for today’s lesson. I hope you took some valuable tools from this. You know, worrying about life is very common. We all do it, sometimes, and do not think that it’s something you can completely erase from your life. What this book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” does is to give you some tools to help you start worrying less, and I think that’s one of the things we should be doing in life: is trying to be happier more often and worrying less often.

Worrying too much can keep us from doing more valuable things for ourselves and other people. So, try out some of the ideas from this book. See which works for you, and start taking some of those worries out, and putting happier thoughts in there. Treat our brains like the machine it is. Treat our brains like the tool it is, and learn how to use it more wisely.

Speaking of wisely, if you want to stop worrying about not becoming more fluent in English, you should get the transcript to the Feel Good English podcast, as I mentioned in the beginning of the show, August is the month where you can become a Feel Good member for free which gives you access to free transcripts forever. Pretty unbelievable, right?

All you have to do is write a review on iTunes, put a review on iTunes, let me know you did that and send me an email and I will put you on the member’s listing and you will have login access to the website, feelgoodenglish.com.

And instead of a joke, I will leave you with a quote for today: “Today is the tomorrow that we worried about yesterday.” Something for you to think about. Thanks again, for listening. I will talk to you soon in the next episode of the Feel Good English podcast.