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023 - Have a Meeting? Take a Walk

Hey there, Kevin here with the Feel Good English podcast. Today’s Ted Talk, Tuesday. So what I do here is take a short video from Ted, talk about the English used in there that you might not know and also talk a little bit about the video itself. So a nice quickly to learn not only some new English but also share some of the great ideas and lessons from ted.com.

And today is on a video called Got a Meeting, Take A Walk by a woman named Nilofer Merchant. I don’t know how to say her first name. But she brings up a very simple idea that could have a big impact on your life and business. So without further delay, let’s get into the lesson.

So this idea, so kind of summarizing her idea, Nilofer Merchant, or how about I just call her the speaker? The speaker in this video brings up the idea that to find better ideas to, it’s good to get out of the office and to literally walk around, go outside and walk around.

At thirty seconds of this talk, she uses the word “tush”. Tush is the same as “butt”.

So we sit on our tush. Tush is a nice way, kind of a child way to say butt, or ass.

Tush is very polite, so you’re probably sitting on your tush right now, or maybe you are walking around, whatever, but tush.

Then she makes a connection between smoking and sitting too much. She says that sitting has become the smoking of our generation. So these days I think people aren’t smoking as much as they used to, but they are sitting a lot more. So we are sitting a lot more which is also very bad for our health, there’s health consequences to this.

At a minute fifteen, she uses another word for butt and tush and the word is “duff”. I have never said duff, but from the context you can kind of assume that he’s talking about your butt. Have you ever heard of duff beer? Maybe that come from there, duff beer sitting on your butt. “Homer sits on his butt drinking duff beer.” That’s easy to remember.

So, a phrasal verb she uses and this kind of got her thinking about this whole idea is she was trying to plan a meeting with somebody and this person couldn’t fit her into her normal schedule. To “fit in” is “to find a space for something”. To “find a space” for a meeting, or for an object.

But anyway, she couldn’t fit her into her schedule so she decided to have a meeting while walking her dog. This woman wanted to have a meeting with the speaker while walking her dog because it was the only time she would fit her in.

And at a minute thirty four, the speaker says “This seemed kind of odd to her.” “Odd” means strange. It seemed kind of strange to her to have a meeting while walking the dog and so she thought this was kind of odd.

At a minute forty she uses the expression “Huff and puff”. Now if you have ever read the story about The Three Little Pigs and they built their house and the wolf comes and wants to huff and puff and blow their house down. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” There’s a song or, whatever. It means to blow hard to make a lot of wind with your mouth, huff and puff. But you’re never going to use this, this is more of a literature type expression from the fairytale, The Three Little Pigs.

So she was worried that she was going to be out of breath during this conversation, she was going to be breathing too hard and out of breath, so it was worried.

However, this actually changed her life and she decided to take this idea of going on meetings while exercising, while walking and to make it her own.

So instead of going to a horrible fluorescent lit room, you know what those are with the bright light white lights, she tells people to go on a walk for 20 to 30 minutes during a meeting. And for her, this has two real benefits, and this can benefit you in these two ways, according to the speaker.

For one and maybe you have found this to be true, when you get out of the house or when you get out of the office and you go walking around or maybe after work while you’re exercising or doing something, a lot of times you will come up with great ideas, these ideas will flow, will come to your brain. These ideas didn’t come however once you get out and you start moving around, and you change your environment, you come up with some great ideas, you create some great ideas.

So that’s the first thing, if you are in a meeting and somebody and you are outside, you both can have this natural air in this environment to come up with bigger ideas.

And the second one is connecting two problems, trying to solve two problems together and this is the end of her talk, she talks about how if you really want to move ahead and we really want to problem solve, we can connect problems and not isolate them, separately.

So coming up with big ideas, thinking out of the box and she said thinking out of your office box, so thinking out of the box in those two ways and also doing something that is healthy are two problems solved at the same time. Okay?

Cool little idea. Try this out if you can, if you can ever have a meeting with somebody. You know what I used to do sometimes with my English classes in Brazil is I would go out and I would walk around the streets and I would have the student with me and we would talk about things that we saw, I would point things out. This works really well with any level. I could say hey, is that the car? Where is that car? The car is over there. And, what’s the color of the paint on the car?

Or you could make it an advanced lesson and say to me about some of these car parts on the car here. So doing things outside can really be beneficial. See if you can convince one of your colleagues or your manager.

The next time the CEO of your company wants to have a meeting, say “Hey no no no, we’re going to go have a walk outside okay, I am not coming to your office, you’re going to come walk with me.” No, just kidding, don’t do that, you’ll probably get fired.

So great, go watch the Ted Talk, go to ted.com, type in the search “take a walk”, you will find this. So when you watch the video you will hear some of the words that I talked about today and you would really really integrate those into your own English, it’s a great way to learn.

And also, take some lessons from the video and become healthy, get off your tush, get off your duff, exercise, think out of the box by going on walks during meetings.

And how about a little butt joke for today? What do you take when you’re butt hurts? Aspirin of course.

Talk to you soon.