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089 - Magic of Thinking Big

Hello there, Kevin here with another episode of The Feel Good English Podcast, the English podcast that is helping you become not only more fluent in English but more fluent in life; bringing you lessons and ideas based on some of the best Personal Development, Business Leadership and Entrepreneurial books.

And today I am going to talk about a book called The Magic of Thinking Big; this book is by David J Schwartz. And when you hear the title of the book The Magic of Thinking Big, you might think, “Oh, it’s another one of those books that says all you have to do is think of your dreams, think of your goals and they will magically happen.”

I kind of thought this too, and I try to stay away, especially recently, from books that just give you philosophical, theoretical concepts, thinking that if you have the right mindset everything will happen magically. And that’s not true, behind every big result, every big goal, there is a lot of work.

And a lot of these books can give you practical strategies on how to make things happen; and actually this book is full of great practical advice and I am going to share a couple of the big ideas from this book that can help you with your English, with your business, with your career, and other areas of your life.

And the main idea behind the book is how and what you think about is critical, it is the foundation of everything that we do. If you have a goal and the goal is small, well the farthest you will go is that goal; however if you have a big goals, you can go farther.

And there are couple of tips I’m going to share that too can help you specifically with your English learning from this book and I think they are very valuable. So listen in, learn something new that can help you become better at life, become more fluent at life.

By the way, if you want a transcript to this another Feel Good English Podcast episodes, go to feelgoodenglish.com, you will find transcripts there and you will also find some other resources, free resources, that can help you get more focused and give you some learning strategies to help you see bigger results faster.

So without further delay let’s get into the episode on The Magic of Thinking Big.

So the first idea I’m going to talk about from this book and as you can see it is a very practical idea, it is not something that is just based on thoughts. And in the book the author talks about the power of sharpening your creative thinking skills, so instead of memorizing facts, sharpen your creative thinking skills.

When you are memorizing facts, and this is absolutely relevant to English learning, you’re learning pieces of information and storing them in your brain. So you’re learning vocabulary, lists of words, grammar rules, all of these facts, this information, and you are storing it in your brain so you can recall it later.

But like I have mentioned many many times, if all you’re doing is memorizing vocabulary and expressions and slang, think of a storage room where you are putting all of these boxes, and these boxes are little bits of information, and you’re putting all of these boxes in the storage room but they’re just sitting there getting old, because you’re not finding situations where you can use those.

On the other hand, if you are developing your creative thinking skills, you are finding solutions to problems, and in a business sense this is very relevant, you’re learning how to improvise and come up with innovative ways of finding solutions to problems, and with language you are learning how to navigate.

Remember a few weeks ago I talked about navigating through English based on a question somebody was asking me, how do I keep up with conversations, how do I keep the same speed when I’m learning all this new vocabulary?

Well, learning how to navigate through a conversation using the English that you know is very powerful. You don’t have to know all vocabulary and expressions and every possible way of saying something, you just have to learn how to navigate, how to use your English creatively, and this is connected exactly in the book here with the power of improving your creative thinking skills.

Now obviously memorizing vocabulary, learning new words is important, I would definitely not say it isn’t, but creative thinking gives us the ability to quickly and efficiently overcome any hurdles we encounter.

Remember a hurdle is an obstacle, it’s an Olympic sport to jump over hurdles, you know where they’re running down the track and they jump over those kind of bars that are up, raised off the ground, those are hurdles.

So, in general fact, memorization makes our brains rigid, we are stuck in these concepts of oh, we need to say this, we need to say this fact, we need to say this word, we need to use this vocabulary.

Where creative thinking makes our brains adaptive and flexible; some of you may be thinking, or maybe I will I make you think, now think of school, a lot of the schools that we’re educated in just teach us facts.

They give us a book, we are supposed to memorize these facts and then take a test on all these facts; versus an education where they teach you how to think creatively and find solutions to problems and innovative ways to problem solve.

This is very relevant these days especially if you’re trying to create a business or an entrepreneur, we come up with creative solutions to existing problems.

So there are three ways in the book they talk about that can help you boost your creative thinking.

One of them is to be receptive to new ideas. So like me, I’m talking to you about being a navigator in English, learning how to use the English that you know to communicate more effectively and to express yourself more effectively and to keep up with conversations.

“To keep up with” is to stay at the same level, stay at the same time; so the opposite of “Keep up with” would be “Fall behind”, two phrasal verbs there. So you’re trying to think of all of these vocabulary and expressions, “Oh I remember that slang word I used the other day, oh that would be perfect right now.” You are not going to keep with a conversation if you’re searching through your memory trying to find the perfect word; instead learn how to use what you’ve got.

Another one is to take as many opportunities as possible to try new things, so in business you want to put yourself in many different situations, using different skills, communicating with different people, learning how things work, developing your ability to creatively think through different problems by knowing different tactics and different strategies and different skills; so being open to different opportunities.

An easy way to connect this with English is you have to find different types of conversations and situations to practice and use your English.

Very commonly people think, “Oh, all I need to do is to get good at business English and then I will be totally confident.” But you’re confident maybe in a business meeting, however, when you go out to lunch with your colleagues afterwards, you are stuck, you don’t know what to talk about. It is because you haven’t taken opportunities to get comfortable speaking in different situations, so try to use your English in as many different situations as possible.

And the last one they talk about is devoting ten minutes each morning to reflect on the question, “how can I do a better job today? What can I do better today that I didn’t do that well on before?”

So in business or school or whatever that may be, think of the mistakes or problems that you made and think of how you can avoid that in the future. So it is taking the time to deliberately problem solve and to put intention into fixing the mistakes and the problems that you came across.

So if you had an English conversation recently and it didn’t go very well, think of why did that happen, were you not prepared in that certain area or you didn’t even know how to talk about that certain subject? So maybe you do need to boost your vocabulary a little bit in that area or maybe it was the opposite, maybe you were trying too hard to focus on the vocabulary that you had learned and you weren’t able to keep up with the conversation. So spending some time every day thinking about how can I avoid making the same mistakes.

And also make sure you are around people that challenge your creative thinking, make sure you are in situations where people are pushing you to think differently, to think outside of the box. And with English, make sure you are around people that are challenging you and making you talk about things that you are not used to talking about.

And if it’s your teacher, your English teacher, make sure they are forcing you to think creatively and not just pushing a bunch of facts and grammar and boring stuff on you. Don’t let that happen, that is not cool.

So the next big idea here is talking about what often gets in the way of, obstructs us from achieving our big goals and that is fear. Fear according to the book is the number one enemy of success and I could agree with that, worrying, thinking we are not good enough, not taking chances based on fear really can affect us negativity and can leave us feeding discouraged, disappointed, sad, inferior.

Well, the antidote, the cure for fear is what? Is confidence; confidence is the opposite of being afraid. I think in language learning in general, one of the biggest if not the biggest obstacle to feeling confident and to feeling fluent in a foreign language is lack of confidence.

I really really really hope more than anything, I hope that I am helping you become a little more confident and giving you ways that you can build confidence because confidence is key. If you are struggling with confidence you don’t know how to build confidence, send me an email, kevin@feelgoodenglish.com and I will give you some tips and some quick advice on what you can do to start building confidence.

So knowing that confidence is the antidote, is the cure for fear, what do we do to build confidence? In the book he talks a lot about acting confident even if we are not feeling confident, that whole “Fake it until you make it” idea.

Some of the ways that we can act confident and we can make a decision, “Okay I am going to do this today, I am going to act like this today to help me feel and look more confident.” Well, part of it is looking confident, literally dressing well and dressing in a way that makes you feel confident and wearing clean clothes and clothes without holes in them if you kept clothes without holes in them; if not then figure out how to fix the clothes with holes in them.

Grooming yourself, grooming, groom; to groom is to clean yourself, to shave, to brush your hair, to look like you care about the way that you look. Walking a little bit faster through the office, down the street putting your head up, walking faster with your head up, this can build confidence quickly.

Being nice to people, being kind and generous, sometimes we are scared to talk to someone or we are scared to give a compliment and it is based on fear. However, just giving a compliment which other people like can help boost your own confidence.

Speaking slower, especially as an English learner, I have seen nervous speakers they speak really fast, they try to speak fast because they are nervous. Try to slow down a little bit, this could increase confidence as well.

So just a few ways to start building confidence, I have a cool course where I would have students call businesses in the US or in an English speaking country that speak English obviously and they call these businesses through Skype asking questions and trying to buy things but pretending they are buying something, they are pretending they are a customer and having very very real genuine conversations with people over Skype without video, they don’t know who this person is, they don’t know this student is practicing their English, they don’t know they’re not actually going to buy anything, but they are on the phone with real English speakers building confidence.

So by thinking creativeily… creativeily? I pronounce that word wrong my sometimes…creatively, creatively, not creativeily…where did that come from? See, even native English speakers can make mistakes sometimes.

So thinking creatively like in the last big idea, to come up with ways to build your confidence, it is a slow process but it can help.

Confidence is something that we really need to build, really need to focus on in order to keep moving forward. We have big ideas, we have big plans, we have big goals, the number one thing that will get in the way of this is fear.

And I think even sometimes fear can lead to laziness, to not doing something. At first it’s fear, “I don’t want to do it”, but then we trick ourselves, our mind makes excuses and say “Oh, you know what? We shouldn’t do that anyway, we will start next week.” Or, “We will start next year.”

And we are tricking ourselves out of this fear by becoming lazy and just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. So be careful of that, be aware of, pay attention to these excuses that might come that disguise fear in other ways.

And that will do it for today’s episode, I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you learned something new, hope it got you excited about taking action on some of this; hope it gave you some encouragement on how you might become a little more confident with not only your English but also in life at work whatever that may be.

In summarizing, instead of just memorizing facts, thinking that is the key to English fluency, thinking that is the key to business fluency, sharpen your skills at becoming a creative thinker, at problem solving and in English become more of a navigator, learn how to use the English that you have, to get through conversations more effectively by being creative.

Also, confidence is key. Why? Because fear is the biggest obstacle that gets in our way of achieving our big goals. So if you want to make your life easier, focus on building confidence in the areas that will help you achieve your goals. So in English, if you lack confidence, in you don’t like to be in situations where you have to use English, very understandable, start building your confidence in certain situations that rare not so intimidating. Go on Skype, call some business in the US, pretend that you’re an interested customer, and have real conversations with real speakers.

It’s basically, free. And that’s a Ninja tip right there. ;) Until next time, keep learning, keep striving to be better, and also keep being happy with everything that you do, and everything that you are.

Don’t forget that!

Speaking of forgetting, I won’t forget the joke to leave you with…

And the joke goes…

“So I bought one of the cds that helps you learn English while you’re sleeping. But during the night, the CD skipped, so now I can only stutter in English”

Sssseee you in tttheee neext epiosssode. stuttering