کمال گرایی دشمن شماست

112 - Perfection is the Enemy

Hello there, Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast.

The only podcast helping you become more fluent in English and life.

The Feel Good English podcast is where I. Kevin, talk about many different topics related to personal development, personal growth, and other lifechanging ideas, many of which are pulled directly from popular books and Ted Talks.

But I don’t just talk about this stuff, I make very practical and effective English lessons based on these ideas. You ready?

Today I have something special for you. Well, I guess it’s always special, right? But today is extra special. It’s not going to be just me on the show, I brought someone else on the show to talk about life-changing topics.

Lindsay McMahon from AllEarsEnglish will be on the show today, talking about the main premise behind her very popular show The AllEarsEnligsh podcast, the importance of connection not perfection. More specifically, what gets in the way of connection when trying to communicate with others.

Get in the way of means, by the way, to obstruct, become an obstacle, prevent from happening. So we’re going to talk about three things that prevent us from connecting with others when speaking English.

And I’ll also be stopping the interview periodically to ask you some questions. I’m also going to stop the interview to go deeper into what was talked about, help you understand what we’re saying, and to slow it all a down a bit.

I hope you enjoy it. But more than that, I hope today’s episode helps you focus on connection more than perfection, because perfection can be such a terrible enemy!

So you ready?

Let’s go…

Kevin: Hey, Lindsay. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show.

You are actually one of my first—I think my first interview on the Feel Good English Podcast a couple of years ago way back. How are you?

Lindsay: Thanks, Kevin, for having me on today. I am feeling good. I’m excited to be on your show.

Kevin: Great! And I’m sure a lot of my listeners recognize your voice.

Where have they heard your voice before?

Lindsay: So, we run the All Ears English Podcast. It’s another show. And we’ve been happy to have you on our show a couple of times as well.

Kevin: Yeah! And I’m glad to have you back. And I think what we’re going to talk about today is it’s so important. And it’s what our show is all about.

And I do a lot of heavy topics and read books and try to teach life lessons to English learners. But when it comes down to it, I think when learning a language, when becoming a fluent English speaker, it comes down to connection, not perfection. You could say I stole this from you. What does “connection, not perfection” mean to you, Lindsay?

Lindsay: Well, it’s all about priorities. In the moment that we are speaking with someone, we have a choice of what to focus on. Are we going to focus on being perfect or are we going to focus on connection with that person, getting our message across, or even connecting with an audience if we’re giving a presentation, and we want our listeners to choose connection? And whichever one we choose really determines how we conduct ourselves in that interaction.

Kevin: Well, yeah, that makes tons of sense. So, what’s the difference between connection and perfection?

Lindsay: I think that when our listeners hear this phrase, they get it intuitively. It’s like coming home and it makes sense. So, perfection is getting locked up and stuck in grammar, in vocabulary, “Did I say it right? Did I pronounce it right? Did I make a mistake? Is the native speaker not wanting to speak to me because I’m not perfect?” versus “Did I get my message across? Are we having a nice moment right now as human beings one-to-one? Are we getting each other on a human level?” Kevin: And it’s so common. People seek to be perfect. They want to speak perfectly. They worry about grammar. They worry about accent. They even “Perfection is the Enemy” - Episode #113 4

worry about how they sound when they’re speaking? Why is this? It’s almost like an automatic approach until people learn a different way. Why do you think people seek perfection in speaking, in conversation?

Lindsay: Well, I think it’s just kind of our way of our minds trying to take care of us—like our bodies, our minds. We try to take care of ourselves and we want to succeed. And we think that’s the only way. But there is another way. However, there are things that get in the way. There are things that hinder our pursuit of connection. And that’s what I was going to talk about today.

So here we go. Let’s talk about what was just discussed. Let’s go deeper!

Deeper to help you understand this very important topic.

So Lindsay talks about our priorities. We choose between two things when we are communicating with others. To be perfect with our English, or to choose connection. So let me ask you, what are the two options we choose from, choose from, when communicating with others?

We can choose to be perfect with our English, or we can choose to connect.

And you know what Lindsay and I stand for, you know what we think your priority should be. Connection, of course.

What priority have you chosen lately? Have you been prioritizing perfection over connection, or do you focus on connection over perfection?

Well, if you need to start focusing more on connection, I have a piece of advice. And do this in your own language first. Often what I teach are communication skills in general; how to communicate better in any language, including your own. So try to focus on connecting with others, in your own language. Listen to them more intently. Focus your energy on their feelings and their words. Then develop this skill to improve your ability to do this in English. And be patient with yourself. Change takes time.

So, before moving on, think for a few seconds about how you can better connect with others. Think about it…

So back to the interview, I ’m going to ask Lindsay why people avoid connection. Let’s listen in….

Kevin: So what are a few of these reasons that we do this?

Lindsay: Absolutely! So there are three reasons that I can see that really get in the way. Number one is that we define success and failure incorrectly.

So, if we’re going to take on this new mindset of “connection, not perfection,” we have to rewrite our scripts. So the problem is we’re coming into learning English with the old mindset. And it’s not going to get you beyond the upper intermediate level. I think a lot of our listeners—and

probably your listeners too, Kevin—are at that upper intermediate level where they get the grammar. They mostly get it. They know the vocabulary.

But now they need to kind of take that leap of faith and start reaching towards connection because, at that point, you’ve stopped. You cannot connect if you’re still focusing on being perfect. So, you need to start redefining what success is. So success should be, in each interaction, did you try to connect or did you at least make an effort? And failure is did you try to be 100% perfect? Did you get locked into that perfection mentality?

So, we’re redefining success and failure. It’s not about being right or wrong with our English. It’s about, ‘did we try to perfect or connect?’ Kevin: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think one thing that I teach as well in successful conversation, oftentimes, a successful conversation is speaking perfectly, not making mistakes, sounding very smart when you’re speaking.

I would flip that around. I think that successful conversation might actually be listening to the other person more, and connecting to them and listening what they want to say and connecting to their intentions and what their feeling more so.

And I think a lot of times, you will leave a conversation feeling that it was a success, or I would say leaving the other person feeling that it was a success if they feel that you listened to them and you were there to connect with them.

Lindsay: That’s a good point. Listening is a key piece of connection. And if we’re too preoccupied with being perfect, we’re not actually listening.

Kevin: You can almost feel somebody just worrying about how they’re performing and getting in the way of listening.

Lindsay says we need to rewrite our script. First of all, what does that mean to you? What does it mean when we rewrite our script?

Not sure? Well, scripts are used in performances, like a movie or a play.

Scripts are what we say and how we say it. So if you’re someone with a script that contains only perfect English, let’s change that. Let’s focus on connection instead.

How do we rewrite our script? In this context, what we mean is rewriting how we perform, how we act in real life. We are changing the way we communicate in our lives, more specifically in our English speaking lives.

Lindsay says we need to redefine what a successful conversation is. She says that success should be: “did you try to connect or did you at least make an effort?” And failure is “did you try to be 100% perfect?“ So, I ask you, what should be your definition of success? What is a successful conversation to you? Think about, or speak out loud for practice.

Great! Do you agree with our perspective? You don’t have to, you know. If you’re a perfectionist, well, you might continue trying to speak perfectly.

And good luck with that! As a reminder, native speakers don’t speak perfectly, just sayin…

But if you have struggled with trying to speak perfectly, if this has gotten in the way of you feeling good about English, try it out! Connection not perfection baby!

Kevin: Let’s go to the second reason or the second thing that gets in the way of connecting with others.

Lindsay: Okay. So, yeah, I think that the second thing that gets in the way is anticipating what could go wrong before you start the conversation. So it’s like you prepare to go in a downward spiral. So, we’ve just started doing this new program called the Urban English Adventure in Boston.

And we’ll be doing new programs in New York soon where we invite our listeners to come and join us and explore the city of Boston using our English. We connect them with native speakers. They come and join us in the challenges. And we have a good time.

And some things that we noticed with our students is certain kinds of ways of preparing to make a mistake.

Let’s imagine that your brain is in the habit of highlighting the mistakes that you’re about to make. Right, but you might not notice that you do this.

It’s like an unconscious activity. So what can you do to solve this? Well, first, notice your body language when you’re assigned a task in English. For example, you’re at work, and your boss asks you to lead a conference call in English, or you’re on a business trip and your colleague says, “Hey, would you call and order pizza?” How do you react? Do you curl into yourself?

Do you protect yourself? We can learn a lot about our mind states through our body language.

Kevin: And so, through the body language. What would happen if you’re focusing on the body language? How does that benefit you?

Lindsay: If we know that we’re curling up, then we can see that we’re anticipating failure. We’re anticipating that this conversation, this task, English task is not gonna go well. And at that point, we have a chance to change that. So, we have a negative expectation, but if we can go ahead and make a 3% to 5% shift in that expectation, instead we can think about what is going to go well here. This is an opportunity to connect. How am I going to feel when I make that connection? I’m envisioning the end point of this interaction being a solid connection with the task, getting something done or communicating something important with someone.

So, we can observe our body language by if we’re crossing our arms, we’re curling up in a kind of a self-protective state. We observed a little bit of this over the weekend. And we picked up on it. We mentioned it to some of our students, like “What are you doing when you’re first assigned a task?

How is your brain approaching that?”

Kevin: Sure! And it’s almost like using everyday experiences as an English learner, using everyday experiences as challenges, as opportunities, to grow…

Lindsay: Exactly!

Kevin: …so that the time when you’re feeling nervous, scared, scrunched up, that’s the perfect opportunity to, like you said, to notice how you’re feeling, how you’re acting in that and to make that—Interesting you say 3% to 5% shift. So it doesn’t take a lot, but just that little bit of change. Using that and growing from that experience, I think it’s such a powerful and effective way to improve as well.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s kind of like we have a choice what to think about. I mean, this is a little bit touchy-feely, this topic, but I believe is important.

We can spend all day banging our head against a textbook and trying to learn those words, learn those grammar points, but it makes no difference if our mind isn’t in the right place.

Kevin: Right! And you know what I see often too is people hiding behind this perfection. They think they’re trying to get to that perfect state. But often, we’re shielding ourselves from taking the courageous route and just putting yourself out there, being a little vulnerable.

So, here we go, going deep again. Lindsay was talking about body language, and how much it can affect our performance, our actions, and affect how we interact with others.

Let’s think about you and your body language. Imagine yourself in a situation where you need to speak English. I’m not going to give you an example because, I don’t want to manipulate this situation. So think about yourself in an English speaking situation. One that is challenging for you.

Visualize that now…. what’s it look like? Who’s there with you?… How do you feel?….

Now look at your body from an outside view. If someone was looking at you, what would they see?…. A confident person, or a “closed” and nervous person? A person who is there to listen, or is totally stuck in their own head, thinking about what they’re going to say next?

Changing your body language, your body position, can instantly make you feel better, more confident, and more able to connect. It’s magic really.

What’s one thing you can do with your body while speaking with someone in English that could help you look and feel more confident?

I think I have to talk more about body language in the future. I’m gonna to do that. Be looking for more on body language in a future episode.

Kevin: Let’s move into this third and final thing that gets in the way of connection that you were going to talk about. Can we get into that?

Lindsay: OK. Absolutely! So I like this. We touched on this earlier. And it kind of speaks to the point of the importance of listening and the importance of being present. What we do is we rehearse before we speak.

So this is another thing that really gets in the way.

When we’re rehearsing what we’re going to say, we’re in our head. We’re not in connection in that moment. We can’t actually be rehearsing and also be connecting with someone. And at that time, they’re probably talking to us. So we’re not listening.

And if you start a conversation already being disconnected and all up in your head from the beginning, it doesn’t start off in a good way.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s almost counterintuitive. People would think they need to practice and know exactly what they’re going to say when they get into a conversation. And actually, I think school has trained us in this way incorrectly.

Lindsay: Oh, gosh!

Kevin: We had those things that I hated back in the days of learning Spanish in schools, those dialogues where you memorize a dialogue and get up in front of the class and go through that dialogue. It’s terrible because it’s totally scripted like you’re in a play. And it doesn’t translate into real life conversations. It really gets in the way.

Lindsay: Oh, yeah. It’s kind of like we need to re-teach ourselves. We need to unlearn what we learned. Especially for our listeners around the world, “Perfection is the Enemy” - Episode #113 13

there are even harsher ways that they’ve gone through learning English in classrooms, really tough methods of learning and sitting in a classroom. We need to unlearn that and learn a new way.

I mean, when you’re rehearsing, you’re also slow. So I’ve heard a lot of our listeners say that they can’t keep up with the topic. They’re listening in a group of natives, the topic moves from one point to the next. Part of that is because they’re too busy rehearsing what they’re going to say. They’re not present.

Kevin: Sure! And I just read something yesterday actually. The basic point is to do all of your worrying and all of your thinking before the experience-I guess worrying, but maybe not exactly worrying, but also of studying, learning, reading, listening, all of that before you’re actually in a conversation. And the conversation is not the time to worry about what you’re going to say.

You either have the words and you either know what you’re going to say or not. Plus, like you said, if you’re just in your head the whole time, you won’t even be listening and you’ll probably say something totally off-topic and that creates an awkward situation and it makes things worse.

Lindsay: Exactly, exactly. I mean, we need this even as native speakers, to stay present. But it’s especially important for our listeners because, yeah, the conversation can just move on. To me, that’s the beauty of life, the opportunity to connect. So it comes down to what do we do about it.? How

do we solve this problem of, well, first of all, all three of the points that I’ve talked about today?

I mean, I think the answer is to rewrite our scripts, our old scripts, through kind of an intensive experience. So like I said before, the thing that we’re doing is we’re putting on this new Urban English Adventure, and that’s just one option. I mean, I talked to some of the students who went through our program in October. And one student said that he jumped on the phone in the middle of the program one evening with his wife, and all of a sudden, he was speaking English and he forgot, because he had been speaking English for 12 hours that day with native speakers, with store owners around Boston. He just was in the English mode.

So, over the course of those three days, to some extent, in a small way, he rewrote his scripts around learning English, his ideas of what should happen and how he should feel. He feels more confident and more comfortable.

Kevin: And that’s awesome! And us as experienced English teachers, we’ve been in this field for a long time, I think a lot of listeners, learners out there, they say, “Okay, that’s easier said than done. How do I get this?” Could you just give a couple of specific reasons why this works? What do you think your program does that helps people get to this level?

Lindsay: Yeah, so I think the program basically helps us change. It takes us out of the old classroom model. So we don’t rent classrooms. We don’t rent space in schools. We don’t have teachers and we don’t have students in desks. Instead, we use the city as our classroom. We hire native speakers to join us and we put on challenges. So an example of one of the challenges, the first one they do, is called The Neighborhoods of Boston Challenge where they’re assigned a neighborhood, they have to go with their partner into that neighborhood, they have to start conversations with store owners, and then they have to get the essence of that neighborhood and then come back and make a persuasive presentation to us on why we should move to that neighborhood. So, they’re using vocabulary that they’ve prepared beforehand through our prep course. And they’re communicating something new.

We also have challenges where we invite the native speakers. One challenge is called the Drama Lab where we are outside in the park on a Saturday and as a group with natives and the students, we’re doing skits and we’re doing telephone practice. We’re doing games and we get working on our spontaneity.

So, through all of these activities—social activities and challenges—we rewrite our way of looking at speaking English. We’re supported and we can make mistakes. We realize these native speakers know that we’re not necessarily native speakers. Our learners feel supported because they can make mistakes, but they’re speaking real English.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s such a powerful, powerful way. And I think through this, they realize that connecting with somebody is what’s important, what gets them through these challenges. Even if you’re making mistakes, if you’re a good listener, people want to be listened to, they want

to connect. So if you do that well, you can make plenty of mistakes I think, correct?

Lindsay: Totally! They realize that the natives aren’t there to—they’re not concerned about their mistakes. They want to connect with them. They want to talk about that article or they want to do this skit, prepare for this skit and get this done. And they want to have fun.

Lindsay talked about the program she runs in NY, and how it helps learners rewrite their script. Helps them use English differently. Helps them be more spontaneous.

Being spontaneous isn’t easy, but with communication it can help so much. First off, what does “being spontaneous mean to you?”….

Do you consider yourself a spontaneous person?

What about when speaking English? Do you think you’re spontaneous enough, or could you be more spontaneous?

And why is it a good thing to be spontaneous when you’re speaking English?

So spontaneity is important. For me too. I’d like to become more spontaneous in my life, and with my social interactions. So much so that I’m currently reading a book on it, of course, and am going to share what I’ve been learning in a future Feel Good episode as well, so much to learn!

Let’s wrap it up now with Lindsay!

Kevin: And so, kind of closing it up for today, with All Ears English—I’m sure a lot of people listen to All Ears English—Lindsay, what are you excited about right now with All Ears English?

Lindsay: Well, I think it’s definitely this new program that we’re doing, The Urban English Adventures. That is a really unique opportunity that’s not for everyone. But for a certain kind of student, it is totally right for them.

We’re also developing a new app which we’re excited about. So we’re going to have a new way for our listeners to interact with the podcast. And it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Kevin: If people want to learn more?

Lindsay: I think a good place to go would be to jump over to our podcast first of all in the iTunes to check that out. And from there, we can send you guys to the app, and we can send you to whatever is right for you. I mean,

that’s a good place to start. So, check out the All Ears English Podcast in iTunes. You can subscribe. And we’d be happy to have you guys over there.

Kevin: Awesome! Well, thanks so much, Lindsay, for connecting with us today. And thank you for what you do, producing so much valuable content for those English learners’ ears out there around the world. Thanks for being here.

Lindsay: No, thanks for having me on the show today, Kevin. I appreciate it.

Kevin: Alright! We’ll talk to you again.

Lindsay: Alright, take care.

Kevin: Bye bye.

Lindsay: Bye!

And that’ll do it. It was really great having Lindsay on the show. If you’re interested in anything we talked about today, like her new program in NY or her All Ears English app, go check her out! If you haven’t already, check out the All Ears English podcast. It’s non-stop English talk with hundreds of episodes.

And, before moving on to the next thing in your life, go back and listen to this episode again. Listen deeply. Answer the questions again in your head, or out loud, and use what you’ve learned here.

This show is not just here to fill 20 minutes of your day, it’s here to transform your life. And what we talked about today can transform your life, and definitely will transform your English.

Speaking of transforming your English, if you like what I do here, if you like this podcast, I also create Premium Lessons for the episodes, like this one.

If you want to take what you’ve learned here and apply it to your life, I’d recommend checking out a Premium Membership.

A Premium Membership gives you access to two monthly Premium lessons.

These lessons contain definitions and examples to all the advanced vocabulary, phrasal verbs and expressions I used in today’s episode, full transcripts to the episodes, as well as a guide that shows you exactly how to use the Premium Lesson for that specific episode. Bam!!!

Basically, Premium Lessons will help you improve your English speaking skills by using these fun and enlightening lessons in my podcast.

Want to learn more? Go to feelgoodenglish.com/go, and read all about a Premium Membership.

And until next time I only have one last thing to say…

Connection, not perfection.

Thanks for that, Lindsay!

Bye bye.