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116 - How to Be Yourself

Hello there, Kevin here. With another episode of the Feel Good English Podcast.

The only podcast that teaches you all about prepositions in English. That’s right. I focus 100% on prepositions. Prepositions all day, prepositions all night. No, no, no. Just kidding. Prepositions are stupid.

What I do do here is help you become a stronger, more confident English speaker by teaching you, more like sharing with you ideas I learn from reading fascinating books on topics mostly related to personal development. Ideas that make life flow a little better, help you deal with all that life throws your way. And I make these lessons just right for those English learners out there who need to go from pretty good at English, to awesome at English. Let’s kick English’s ass together.

Oh, and back to those prepositions, you know the absolute best way to get really good with using prepositions correctly? Just listen to a lot of English.

And read a lot of English. All the time. Those little corrections will come naturally after you get used to, get accustomed to the sound of English. So you actually are learning prepositions here. You’re quite possibly getting better at using prepositions without even knowing it, cool ay?

To get started with today’s topic, I got a question for you. What kind of person are you? Are you motivated? Are you lazy? Are you always running late? Are you a leader or a follower? Are you good at sports? And where

did those beliefs come from? A former teacher, your friends who have labeled you a certain way, or maybe simply from yourself?

We all have an image of the type of person we are. Some of these images are positive, but some are detrimental to moving forward and making positive changes. We use stories to understand the world, but sometimes we can make ourselves the villain without thinking twice about the consequences of that narrative.

For example, if you think of yourself as a failure, you’ll quite likely fail.

Conversely, if you consider yourself successful, you’ll find ways to succeed.

If you think you’re bad at learning languages, well, you might subconsciously resist becoming a great English speaker. That’s dangerous.

And that’s the basic idea from the book I recently read, how our self image dictates our behavior. The book is called “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Waltz. It was published in 1960, so it’s been around a few years, but the book is great. I read a lot, obviously, and i read a lot of regurgitated ideas.

People take some basic self-help ideas and write their own book about them. Put their name on them. Nothing really special there. But this book, even though it’s from many decades ago, I found plenty of interesting ideas I hadn’t thought of or read about before.

I’m going to focus on one chapter in this book; keep it simple. The ideas in this chapter stuck out to me the most and I want to share them with you because I think they’re so relevant to not just life in general, but to speaking a foreign language. Here I go again, connecting life lessons with English learning. You ready?

Now, let me ask you this:

When you’re around others, how do you act? Are you outgoing or shy?

Confident or inhibited? Loud or quiet? Funny or serious?

One of the lessons I really liked in this book was about personality, a chapter called “How to Unlock Your True Personality.” Psycho-Cybernetics talks a lot about how we can change our self image, how we see ourselves, and in this chapter the author Maxwell Waltz, talks specifically on how to change our personality, to be more liked, happier, more outgoing, less inhibited.

People like others who have genuine personalities, that seem real. The author gives the example of a baby. He says we all love babies because they have tons of personality. They aren’t phony, hypocritical, and express everything they feel without reservations. Babies exemplify the expression, “be yourself”. Babies are also fun, and cute, right? Except when they’re loud and dirty, and annoying.

Anyway, as we get older, a lot of us develop inhibition. We become inhibited. First off, what is inhibition? Well, inhibition is a feeling that makes one self-conscious and unable to act in a relaxed and natural way.

And what’s self-conscious? This phrase is important here, self-conscious.

Being self-conscious means you are thinking about yourself, and you are embarrassed about something you’re doing, or something about you.

Maybe you’re self-conscious about a bad haircut you just got, or you think you’re fat, you’re self-conscious about your weight. Or, maybe you’re selfconscious about your English, maybe you’re inhibited when it comes to speaking English.

And this is why I’m talking about this too. It can be really scary speaking a foreign language, and believe me, I know first hand what it’s like to feel self-conscious about speaking a foreign language in front of others. Being laughed at, ridiculed, judged. God I hate that! Have you felt self-conscious about English? I imagine so. Well this particular lesson from the book can help with that. We feel self-conscious about something we do, like speaking English, and become inhibited because of it, we don’t speak as much as we’d like to. We look shy to other people because we are scared to talk.

In social interactions, there is also this sending and receiving of negative, and positive feedback. Facial expressions such as frowns, body language, laughs or scoffs are all forms of feedback that tell us how we are doing in social situations. The more we are too careful, overly sensitive during our social interactions, the more we will inhibit ourselves. We’ll talk less, interact less, hide our behavior more.

Does this sound familiar to you when speaking English? Learning a foreign language? Do you become more inhibited than normal when you are trying to communicate in English? I’ve seen this a lot. I’ve had plenty of students that were totally confident when speaking their own language, but would suddenly become self-conscious when it was time to speak English. People with big personalities would all of a sudden become inhibited.

And me too. I would consider myself pretty outgoing. I’m not always “the star of the show” in social situations, but I don’t mind talking to people, even if I don’t know them.

But, I’ve also noticed that in some situations I find myself questioning what I just had said. I’ll run into someone I know and come up with something to

say, but right after I walk away I might think, “well that was stupid what I just said.”

And don’t even mention when I would be speaking Portuguese. I made a fool of myself so many times. Misunderstood someone, or made a joke no one got, or said something totally not culturally appropriate. So many times I “paid the monkey” as they say in Brazil. Pay the monkey makes absolutely zero sense in English, by the way, unless you buy something from a monkey and need to pay him for it. Not sure what monkeys sell.

Being inhibited keeps us from speaking well, from speaking fluidly. Now I know speaking your own language is quite different, much easier than speaking a second language, or a third or fourth language, but the ramifications of negative feedback on interacting with others through language are the same. So let’s try to become less inhibited together, shall we?

So an inhibited personality, being shy, nervous, awkward, etc., is a weaker form of your true personality. And what makes someone inhibited according to this book? Well, an inhibited personality is caused by an overly sensitive reaction to negative feedback, or by getting excessive negative feedback.

Kind of sounds scientific.

What’s negative feedback? It’s basically a signal that tells you to stop doing what you’re doing and do something else. It corrects your path. Shows you a better direction.

Here’s a very simple example of negative feedback. When you’re learning how to ride a bike you have to learn how to balance. So when you start falling to one side, your brain sends you negative feedback and tells you to

correct your balance and move back the other direction. It doesn’t tell you to stop, it shows you how to correct your behavior. And this happens with many things in life. We receive negative feedback on our performance, and this feedback can help us, but it can also hurt us, make us afraid, selfconscious, inhibited.

And it can come from your own realization that you’re doing something wrong, it can come from someone else, like a parent or a teacher; there are social cues that might give you negative feedback, meaning you can see on other peoples’ faces that you need to modify a behavior.

So let’s break this down. If you want to improve with something, like speaking, you should, you must get feedback, negative feedback automatically without thinking too much about it; it should happen naturally, and also, you shouldn’t take it so seriously. Don’t cry about mistakes, and don’t get mad at yourself.

And here’s a learning tip for you. You know a great way to get this kind of feedback with your English? Listen to yourself speaking. I record all my calls with students for just this reason. Hearing yourself speaking is powerful. Hearing yourself speaking is very natural and automatic feedback. You can hear the mistakes you make, and because it’s your own voice you don’t have to think too hard and if you’re by yourself you hopefully won’t take it so seriously. Don’t get obsessed with listening to yourself and trying to speak perfectly. Listen, make some small corrections, and move on! Go out and have real conversations after that, with other people, or even yourself.

What we don’t want to do is become too careful, or overly critical. And that brings me to my next example.

Picture this. You have a mug filled to the brim with hot coffee. You poured too much in there, and it’s too full. Now if it’s for yourself, and you’re alone, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. You’re not overthinking it and you don’t care all that much if you spill some. But what if you had to bring this coffee to someone, especially someone you’re trying to impress? Once you get close to this person, you’re trying real hard not to spill, but once you approach this person and hand them the coffee you might start shaking uncontrollably. The coffee starts spilling out of the cup because you’re shaking. But why didn’t you shake when you’re alone? Because you’re not trying so hard, not being overly careful. You’re not worried about what others are thinking of you.

When we try too hard to do something we often perform worse. And in the book he talks about how we have to trust our own abilities and let our subconscious do the work. We have to have faith in ourselves. This is strengthened through a lot of practice of course, and that’s where the magic happens. Practicing as much as possible! If you aren’t prepared when the time comes to perform, being overly critical of your performance won’t help. You’ll end up freaking out. You’ll shake, freeze up, stutter. When this happens we are experiencing excessive negative feedback. We are too worried about fixing every little mistake. So instead, focus on practicing all the time. And then be ready to perform. Trust that you can perform, that your body and mind can perform without you, this illusory “you”, having to control everything. Get out of your own way!

Easier said than done, I know, but there are ways to get better at trusting your own abilities, ways to become less overly critical, less self-conscious.

And let’s talk about those ways.

This will help with speaking English too, learning how to be less inhibited, and here are some practical ways to do that. Practice these, or at least one of these tactics:

#1 Don’t worry in advance what you are going to say. Just open your mouth and say it. Within reason of course. Don’t sound like a lunatic and don’t offend people, but also don’t worry too much about what’ll come out of your mouth. I find myself doing this sometimes, planning what I’m going to say before I say anything. I’ve also experimented with the other way, just saying whatever, letting it flow. It’s quite freeing doing it this way.

#2 Don’t get mad at yourself or criticize yourself about what you just said. I do this a lot too, well I’m trying to it less, but often after saying something I’ll instantly think to myself “well that was dumb what I just said. What an idiot!” Don’t do that! Realize that people probably don’t care as much as you think they do about what you say, and they’re probably just as unsure of what to say as you are. Just go with the flow. You can always correct any seriously dumb thing you said if need be.

#3 Don’t plan and think before you act. Act and correct your actions as you go along. Have you heard that expression, ready, fire, aim? That means you should act first and redirect your actions, make corrections only after you act. I like this thought. So often we end up not acting because we spend so much time trying to aim first. To plan everything. We get insecure.

But try to change your mindset. Be less insecure. Shoot, then aim (unless we’re talking about guns. This would be a terrible way to shoot a gun).

#4 Stop criticizing yourself constantly. Useful negative feedback is automatic, spontaneous and subconscious. Let your brain take in what it needs to to make corrections. You have to trust yourself, have faith in the process. Be kind to yourself and let your brain do the work.

#5 A simple one from the book, make a habit of speaking louder than usual.

A powerful voice is a great disinhibit-or. Make your presence known.

#6 And lastly, here’s a great one. I’ve tried this, it works well in connecting with others. What you should do is let people know when you like them.

Compliment people. If you like something about them, how they look, what they’re wearing, how they’re performing, tell them. There’s nothing wrong with compliments, right? Just compliment someone when it feels right to you and move on. This will help you connect with others, to get over your inhibition.

And there you go. Those are some ways to become less self-conscious, some ways to care less about what others think. Ways to become less inhibited.

Now of course there’s a balance to be kept. We need some degree of inhibition or else we won’t be able to live in harmony with society. But that’s probably not you. Unless you find yourself in jail all the time for disturbing the peace, or everyone you know thinks you should be in a mental hospital for the clinically insane, you probably could use a bit more disinhibition.

And through putting intention into some of those exercises I mentioned above, through practicing them you’ll find that balance.

And change takes time, of course. Be patient with yourself, and most importantly, quickly forgive yourself for any mistakes you might make, forgive yourself for those times when you end up doing exactly the opposite of what you would have liked to do.

It happens.

And that will do it for today’s episode. I hope you learned something. I’d say I decided to share these lessons because they were beneficial to me.

When I read that I should be planning less what I’m going to say and also not worry about what I just said, trust myself more, be less self-conscious, stop worrying as much about what’s going to come out of my mouth or what just had come out of my mouth, I felt good about it. And you as a language learner and me as a language learner, it’s important to start thinking a little bit more this way. Feeling a bit more free to say what you want, to let the words come out, to let your brain figure out what what it’s got in there and to express yourself more freely. So try one of these tactics out and see what works.

My suggestion would be starting with number two from above, after you say something someone, don’t criticize yourself and don’t say “oh I wish I wouldn’t have said that” if those thoughts come into your mind just ignore them, stop them, just say “whatever” keep moving, “I said what I said, that’s it it’s not that bad I’m going to move on”. That was very powerful for me you should try to.

Also, if you like this episode, if you like what I do and you want to go deeper, I offer premium lessons for this which include a transcript,

definitions and examples of some of the more advanced vocabulary I used here. Also exercises to help you integrate these words and expressions and the ideas from the lessons into your life making them come to life, in your life, uh, that’s poetry.

If you want to learn more about these premium lessons go to my website feelgoodEnglish.com/go , you can learn how to become a premium member. And if you’re already a premium member, hello there! how are you? Hope you’re having a wonderful day!

Until next time, be yourself, because you’re the best at. Bye bye!