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046 - How to Stop Feeling Like a Loser

Hello there. Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast, the podcast that helps you become an excellent English speaker, while also becoming an excellent person.

Today, I have another episode based on a book I’ve recently read, and this book is called “The Psychology of Winning” by Denis Waitley. This book is actually thirty years old, so it has been around a long time, but there are some ideas in here that I think are going to be useful for you and your English learning and your life learning as well. I’m going to talk about five ways, in which you can have more of the winning mentality. Be thinking more like a winner than a loser.

And what do we mean by winner versus loser? Well, this is obviously personal to you.

We can’t just judge people as winners or losers, but according to this book and I agree, winning is about having a positive attitude about life. Being positive about life, being optimistic, and also helping others do the same. It’s not all about yourself winning. It’s about winning, so you can be happier and more fulfilled, but also be able to bring these experiences to other people around you. “The Psychology of Winning” by Dr. Denis Waitley is today’s episode.

If you want a transcript to this and past episodes, go to feelgoodenglish.com/member, learn how you can become a Feel Good English member which gives you access to the transcripts so you can be a winning English speaker, after the episode, go over to feelgoodenglish.com and find out how you can become a member. I’ll see you over there soon. Now let’s get into the lesson.

The first idea I’m going to talk about is how our minds, are very powerful, in helping us get to the place where we want to get and helping us create the lives that we want. This could be summed up in a point that what we focus on grows; where we put our attention, where we put our time and attention, these areas grow. If you are focusing a lot of time on English, that area will grow. If you’re putting a lot of your mental energy into work, that area will grow in your life. If you’re putting a lot of mental energy into food, in chocolate, in cakes, well, your belly will grow, right? So, where we focus our minds, grows. If you’ve seen some, there’s many examples of people in the past that they have their minds set on where they want to be in the future, and they stay to that and they become that. Some people say when they’re five, they want to be a soccer player; but at the time they’re twenty–five, that’s all they’ve ever thought about: they’re probably still playing soccer, but yet they’re playing professionally. Where you focus your energy, your mental thoughts bring you to where you want to be.

Whatever area you want to grow in your life, simply by focusing mental energy on that and thinking about it, it will grow. So that’s kind of refreshing to know that the first step is to direct our thoughts somewhere. We don’t have to always act, act and go, go setting up our mental foundation for getting to where we want to be is a good first step.

Second idea here is that we need to develop winning habits and lose losing habits and get rid of losing habits. This is obviously a personal thing: what is good for some is bad for others. We could say losing habits are: being lazy, not taking risks, trying to always stay comfortable, sleeping too much, drinking too much. So that’s a pretty negative losing habits I think, for everybody, but other times, maybe you don’t have to work twelve hours a day. For somebody, that might be a winning habit, but for you, you want balance in your life. So you want to be able to spend time with your family and work a very set amount of hours each day, so that could be a winning habit for you. This is relative. You have to be self – aware, but looking for the habits that are keeping you from being happy and positive during your day, finding those habits and trying to get rid of them. And how do we get rid of that habits? Well, we place them with better habits. We replace them with a better, more positive habit; and talking about habits, start small, daily practice of these is what helps you maintain them and retain positive habits. So, the first step is just to notice some bad habits and try to delete these from your life.

Third idea here is being very, very clear on where you want to be in the future. Setting very clear goals. Did you ever come across those people that are just so clear on what they’re doing and where they’re trying to get? Often, these are the leaders of companies, the founders, the CEO’s, or the managers, and they say “This is what I’m doing, and this is why I’m doing it, and this is where I want to get.” If you work in a company, and they have very set goals and clear targets, it makes it a lot easier for you to spend time focusing on activities that get you there. And for yourself, knowing what you want and knowing where you want to be can really help you think more like a winner. Making a decision on which goals you want to focus on and sticking to that path which takes a lot of faith sometimes. Sometimes, we get an idea, we set a goal, and then after a few weeks or a couple of months, we start to lose faith and that we can reach those goals. So having faith: I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about faith in yourself and faith to that if you put in the work, and if you focus your time on something, you will get there. So, having faith in choosing and having self – confidence to choose something and to go for it. You can’t just be blind, you have to use feedback, you have to see the results, and make necessary adjustments so you can keep moving forward, but do it in a better way and make sure that you are doing things that get you closer to your goal, but trying to become as clear as possible on our goals is how winners think.

Another big idea here is that we have two emotions. Two key emotions that motivate us. Two key emotions in most of our actions are based on these two emotions. These emotions are fear and desire. If we’re using fear as our basis of decision– making, this would create a negative tension that will keep us from doing things, and often, our fears are unfounded. We aren’t being very rational. We avoid doing things because we have this fear. Well, the more risks you take, the more you become good at dealing with fear and setting fear aside and continuing to move forward, and often, it’s the things that scares the most that we need to do. With English, if you are scared to talk with people, if you don’t think you’re confident enough to go out in public and speak English with native speakers or people at work, don’t stay home and think you need to read more and learn more vocabulary and become perfect in grammar. That’s not going to help you with this fear.

What’s going to help you with the fear is going out and doing exactly what you’re scared of. So, finding situations where you can speak to native speakers, going out there, putting yourself out there, and dealing with the fear little by little until it goes away. That’s how you deal with fear, not by continuing to avoid it. So, be honest with yourself. What are you scared of? Can you do things to get over that fear?

The last idea I’m going to talk about is how important it is to have a positive self–image. There was a study done several years ago, where the arbitrarily–labelled students in a classroom has high achievers. So some are labelled as high achievers, others didn’t get labelled at all. They studied the performance of these students, and ones that were labelled as high achievers actually performed better through testing, and this simply means that by telling them they were high achievers, they were smart, they did better than the other ones. So you can do this to yourself, and our brains can’t decipher between reality and what is just thought. If we tell ourselves that we are capable of doing certain things that we are high achievers. Our brain doesn’t really know the difference between that, and if somebody else tells us that. So, feeding your brain positive thoughts, telling yourself that you are capable of certain things, can actually help you perform better in the end.

And to summarize, anyone can adopt confidence and a positive lifestyle, which the author calls “winning” like Charlie Sheen.

Winning, but that’s another definition of winning, anyway. So what we should do is start off by crafting an image of the person we want to be, and become this person, but just create this in your brain. Who do you want to be? You want to be a certain person at work, or in English, who do you want to be?

What do you want to look like when you’re speaking English?

How do you want to be perceived when you’re speaking English? Then, focus on the habits and the little things that we can do every day to make this self– image become a reality.

Going over the vocab from today’s episode. First phrase I’m going to talk about is a phrasal verb. “Summed up,” or “sum up,” S-U-M. To sum is to add. It’s to put things together. What is the sum of four plus six? It’s the total amount. But to sum up is to summarize. So, you’re literally adding up all the information and talking about it as a conclusion or as summarizing everything. So you would say, “To sum up this point.” So, to sum up is to summarize.

Next, also a phrasal verb, “get rid of.” To get rid of is to throw away or to delete or to exclude. “We need to get rid of this from our house.” “We need to get rid of him from our company because he’s stealing supplies.” That’s not good. To get rid of something.

“To come across” is another phrasal verb. A lot of phrasal verbs in this episode. To come across is to find something or to see something without specifically looking for it. So you’re surfing the Internet, and you come across an article about about Kim Kardashian, which is very easy to do. So you come across it, meaning you weren’t looking for that, hopefully not, and you came across something. You’re cleaning up your house, and you came across an old photograph. You weren’t looking for that, but you found it.

Another word I used here is “unfounded.” Fears are unfounded.

If your fears are unfounded or something is unfounded, it means it doesn’t have a foundation. It’s not based in reality.

Your fears are unfounded. Your fears are not based on reality.

They don’t have a foundation. You could say your anger is unfounded, meaning your anger is not based on reality. Why are you angry? There’s no foundation to why you are angry.

Specially used in English, “putting yourself out there.” “I was talking about if you are not confident in social situations using English, you need to put yourself out there. You need to get out and be social and talk to people.” To put yourself out there means to be out in public and to expose yourself not in a dirty way, but to expose yourself to put yourself out there with people. You’re very shy, you’re not around people a lot, you feel lonely, and the press say “Hey. You need to put yourself out there more.” Or you’re looking for a job, and you need to connect a network with people. You need to put yourself out there.

“Crafting an image,” that’s another expression here. To craft an image is to create. To craft, C-R-A-F-T, is to create. We craft an image. We create an image. When you’re talking about handmade things, handmade materials, handmade furniture, you could say handcrafted furniture.

In the past, not really these days, we used to say “What is your craft?” Back when people would do a specific craft, they would make materials for horses or they would build furniture, or they would build houses or they were a chef in the kitchen.

That was their craft. So nowadays, we don’t really use that. We use field or career, but to craft is to make something.

And then a joke you’ll hear at the end of this, you haven’t heard it yet, or maybe you’re repeating the lesson, is something tastes funny. It means it has a strange taste or something looks funny. If something sounds funny. It means it sounds strange or sounds weird. It doesn’t sound normal. When we say “looks funny,” “stays funny,” “sounds funny,” it’s not really talking about that it’s funny. Hahaha. It’s more about it’s strange, like “Something feels funny about this,” “Something doesn’t feel right,” or “Something tastes funny about this milk ‘coz maybe it’s spoiled milk.”

Hope you enjoyed this book. If you wanna know more, you can go to feelgoodenglish.com, find this episode, and go deeper into this book, I always post the link to the book so you can find the audio version, the full audio version of the book. Go to feelgoodenglish.com to also get transcripts to this episode, become a Feel Good member and get transcripts to this so you can win the day.

And I have a food joke for you day. What do the cannibal say to the other cannibal while they were eating the clown? “Does this taste funny to you?”

Have a wonderful day. Be a winner. Help others win, too. See you in the next lesson.