یک جهش بزرگ

Hello there. Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. Today, I have a very special episode for you.

I interviewed Justin from Real Life Global. He’s one of the founders of the fantastic website and podcast and resource, reallifeglobal.com, and Justin is going to talk about a book that has really impacted his life.

This book is called “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks, and in the interview, I’m going to talk to him a little bit about how he got started with Real Life English and Real Life Global. Justin is somebody who’s always trying to be the best he can.

And so, through reading books, we learned lessons on how we can become better, happier, and more successful and whatever that means to you. This is very subjective; not everybody has the same idea of this.

However, the book “The Big Leap” has great lessons, which Justin and I are going to talk about.

Another topic in this interview is going to be about something called your “Upper Limit Problem.” Possibly, you might be sabotaging your own success. You might be actually preventing yourself from reaching your full potential.

We’re going to talk a little bit about that, another topic we’ll talk about, and this interview is how we can change our fear: our fear of business, our fear of being in certain situations, and specifically our fear of public speaking, and possibly English speaking: how we can turn that fear into excitement.

And lastly, we’re going to talk about how we can find something called our “Zone of Excellence.”

This is a zone, where we can bring the most value to others, where we can be our best, our Real Life-Big Leap absolute best in life and business, and how to find this zone, and how to keep looking for this, and Justin’s going to talk about why English can be your path to finding your “Zone of Excellence,” to finding your best self in life and business.

So, let’s get into the interview with Justin from Real Life. Go to feelgoodenglish.com to find more information about what we talk about in this podcast, you can find links to the book as well as links to Justin’s resources.

I’ll see you there after this interview and at the end of the interview, today I’m going to talk about the expressions and vocabulary from this interview that maybe is a little difficult to understand or maybe is new to you, for example, phrasal verbs and things like that so listen till the end of the interview to learn some new English. Got it? Let’s do it.

So here I am with the famous Justin from Real Life English. other than what the listeners already know about you from my introduction or from knowing you online. Justin, tell me about yourself. Who is Justin from Real Life English?

First of all, it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me on your show, and with your audience, I’m really excited to be here, Kevin.

Great.

We’ve had these conversations over at real life, and of course, you know, we hang out sometimes and just chat with each other on personal calls, but yeah.

So, I went to Brazil. I’m from Washington, United States, which is on the North – Western part, not to be confused with Washington, D.C on the other side of the country, but I went to school in Colorado, so I feel connected to you because of that.

Are you in Colorado right now?

I am. Denver, Colorado. So, a question for you, why do you live in Brazil? What brought you to Brazil?

I was just traveling, and I was backpacking, and I just stumbled upon (inaudible), and I ended up starting projects here with Chad, one of my partners in Real Life English. And yeah, it just a great place to be.

As you know, I lived in Brazil for seven years, and it was a great place. I’ve been back in the U.S. now for a year, and I definitely miss Brazil somewhat. I’m ready to go back and visit, for sure, and * is a great city. I really enjoyed that city.

Yeah, a special place, and one of the nice people in Brazil, but you may argue with that.

No. Actually, I’ve visited and lived there, but I agree. It’s really interesting. It’s a nice balance of things, I would say. You know, it’s a city, but it doesn’t feel too big, nice people, great food. So, what are you doing these days? Are you teaching?

Yeah, I’m teaching, and we work on blogs and podcasts as well, and on the Real Life Global platform, which is a good place to go and connect with other English learners around the world.

Which is one of the coolest platforms I think is on the Internet right now, it’s being able to go on there. So, Justin, it’s your thing. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about the platform you’re talking about?

Well, we we started with the community here in, and started sort of organizing events, and then that started a blog, and from there, we launched this platform with our international community, and basically log in, connect you through video chat with another learner from the different part of the world for a 3 – minute conversation.

If the conversation’s going well, they’ll continue to speak for another three minutes. But, it’s an opportunity for you to speak with lots of people, make friends, and really learn English from an international community of global citizens.

Nice. So, you can just go online, click the button, and get to speak English with other learners, other native speakers, and it’s so cool to be able to actually use your English, and see people, and actually communicate in a very open format.

How much do you charge your users to speak with speakers around the world?

Well, it’s actually free.

That’s right, free. FREE. You get to speak with people around the world for FREE. That’s the amazing aspect of that, for sure.

And we kind of use English on (inaudible) global citizenship to expanding a perspective of the world. So, that’s a really cool thing, as well. You can travel without really leaving your computer. Right?

And talking about expanding your world and growing, what we do here on the Feel Good English podcast is that we talk about books and ideas and Ted Talks and things that can improve your life and give you life skills and give you business skills and make you a better person, make you a happier person.

So now, I’d like you to talk about, I know you’ve chosen in the book you’re going to talk about today. Let’s talk about this book a little bit.

Let’s talk about how this book affects your life, what the book can teach, and * with the listeners can take some lessons from this, not only to improve their English but also apply this to their lives. So, Justin, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, first of all, thank you for talking about reading and learning such important important words to me. And so this book I chose is a book that I know you like as well, and we had a conversation about it because it is one of my favorite books.

It’s called “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks, who is a psychologist. His book is about transcending your limitations to live a successful and a fully happy life.

Sure. The Big Leap, like the big jump. So, let’s talk about an idea from the book. You know, the book is quite large. Actually, I listened to the book in an audio format.

I really enjoyed doing it when I’m going to the gym or whatever, you just put it in your ears, and the great thing about that is that you can repeat it. Can we just go into one of the ideas or a couple of ideas? So, starting up, what is one of the ideas from this book that you think is important for our listeners to know?

Well, first of all, it talks about something called the “Upper Limit Problem,” which is kind of like some limit ourselves from really reaching our best. And usually, it’s kind of like an unconscious judgments that we make to ourselves and just appear.

But actually us, reaching our highest level: this could be in English, this could be in the career and anything else, but a really cool idea that I like is that it talks about fear; fear, like you just breathe into it, if you breathe and you’re just aware of your breath and you’re scared, *, and it becomes excitement.

And so, fear and excitement are very similar. It just depends on how you response of.

Can you think of a time, maybe recently or in the past, or maybe a little longer ago? Can you think of a sign where this happened with you or you applied this technique?

Well, I was just speaking with you before the podcast, and you were talking about the Toastmasters, which is a public speaking organization, like a group that you practice public speaking, and I feel like I get a lot of trouble at every hard time I’m speaking in front of people.

So, I can definitely see that’s a place where it’s really easy to apply.

Sure. Public speaking is so scary for a lot of people. And then, you know, obviously, our listeners learning English is even scarier. You have to get in front of people and speak a foreign language.

That can be even harder. And so, from this book, you know, when you feel nervous, when you feel scared, which happens to everybody. We should never think that this is unique to us and that we’re feeling this more than other people or everybody gets scared. Even professional speakers get scared sometimes before they go before an audience.

So, breathing and kind of watching your emotions and watching this fear and trying to turn this into excitement are what you’re talking about from this book. Is that correct?

Yeah. Absolutely. So it seems like an opportunity, right? It’s kind of like when you’re in a situation, wherein you’re scared to speak English, it’s like “What?”.

The worst that could happen earlier is not bad. It’s a great opportunity to meet people, to talk to people, to communicate with some language, and to really develop a new level of ability.

Sure. Yeah, and that’s what I found from my own language learning is: You have to find these uncomfortable situations if you want to progress, and a lot of people spend so much time avoiding these uncomfortable, difficult, challenging English situations, that they cannot just stay at the same level.

You know, you as an English teacher, and me as an English teacher, we’ve done this for so long and one of the things you see is that people get stuck at a specific level, and my recommendation is they have to level up. They have to take the leap.

To refer it to the book, to go higher, to put themselves in a bigger bowl and to be in a place that will make them nervous in the beginning.

Yeah. There’s another idea in the book that I really appreciated.

It talks about the different levels of performance or engagement.

When we talk about different zones, you have your zone of incompetence, your zone of competence, and your zone of excellence, and what you call “the zone of a genius.”

So it’s like where you are really doing what you were put on this earth to do. With excellence is what you’re good at doing, (inaudible), and it’s a good place to be, better than the zone of competence, which maybe is just a mediocrity, possibly.

It’s way better than the zone of incompetence, but maybe it’s not as good as what you’re really called to do.

So, you’re really love doing it. And so, that’s different in each person, but you feel excited, like you do (inaudible) of time, maybe you get in a state of flow, so that’s a genius. It’s where you feel that you’re really going to be at your best, or you can really give the maximum value.

Sure. And this is important to us, and this is going from the zone of excellence, so maybe you’re really good at what you’re doing, but you could become so good at it that you’re too comfortable, and there’s no challenge anymore.

So then, you have to. A lot of people, I think would you agree that a lot of people just define this zone of excellence, they perform well, they’re comfortable, they don’t have to deal with the stress, they don’t fear, and they just kind of stop at that point?

Yeah. Definitely, I think a part of it is just having an idea of what that zone of a genius is. Right? So, to move beyond zone of excellence, to move beyond your comfortable bubble. Right?

So, I think, definitely, that is just a question of digging deeper, and sometimes confronting your Upper Limit problems, and really to take it to that final level, and you can do this and compare this to English or your life.

Yeah. So for you, Justin, can you think of something right now in your life, where you’re trying to get to that zone of a genius? Is there something that’s going on now?

Were you like being comfortable? Or you might kind of need to kind of be aware of your life that you can kind of create some of this motivation to go to that zone of a genius?

I think when I teach it’s like, you know, this is one of the great talks about this, and I think you feel the same thing.

It’s like, you know, teaching English, teaching grammar, teaching the structure of language sometimes, you know, it’s like a time when you get to a point of helping people, but maybe you’re not helping people in the biggest way possible, and I feel like when I talk about global citizenship, which helps people see kind of a deeper purpose of learning English, I feel like I’m in the zone of a genius there, or sharing things like this on this podcast, and having conversations with you.

That’s really kind of expanding my impact.

Awesome. So, kind of wrapping things up here, and I think this is so valuable for us to hear, they don’t have to stop where they’re comfortable and keep moving forward and keep mixing things up. For one, it could help you grow, but also, it’s more entertaining, I think.

You’ll have more fun, and you’ll be more excited about life if you’re applying yourself and trying to do the best you can, and to continuously be striving to do better, and to not worry about this fear and this uncomfortable feeling that you might get.

So, is there anything you want to tell to our listeners now, like maybe one last bit of advice from this book that you could pass to them, something that they could apply today, that they could apply right now?

Yeah. I would say like this idea, like your work, your life, and *your zone of geniuses, and usually, a lot of times, that might imply ideas or much bigger than just your language, right? So, English has the most content, the most media and culture.

It’s the global language. So, if you have access to that level of information and culture, it’s going to help you live in your zone of a genius so much more. So, English is talking (inaudible) genius. English is a great vehicle to help you realize that you’re also a genius.

Totally, that’s awesome, and I hope they take that and enact and move on it. At any interview, this is something I ask all of the people on my show, at the end, we all have problems.

We all have struggles. We all deal with certain things that challenge us. So, Justin, what’s one thing in your life, or what’s something that you tend to struggle with, that you’re always trying to improve on?

One thing I can definitely practice what I preach a lot more, with filming a lot of time like just working on English, the information I consume is in English, most of it so I can definitely apply what I teach and what I preach, what I tell people, it’s my own language learning, so it really creates more work – life balance so that I fulfill my own language learning.

So, that’s the point where I’m struggling the most right now.

Sure. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, you know, we can learn lessons without action. Nothing changes, right?

Yeah. Absolutely.

So, people kind of heard about it. So, they want to learn more about you, they want to connect with you. Where should our listeners go to find you?

Real Life Global, www.reallifeglobal.com. It’s where our global community is. If you want to give me questions for me, my email is justin@reallifeglobal.com. So thanks a lot for having me on your show, Kevin. I really appreciated it, and it’s a great show to our audience.

Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. It’s so great what you’re doing for English learners around the world. You guys in Real Life are bringing a lot of innovative and effective and fun ideas and courses and platforms to English learners around the world, and that’s so important to keep moving on.

Well, thanks for sharing the fight to help people learn English in innovative ways, Kevin.

Absolutely. It’s like what you said before, the world can open up to people so much if they get comfortable and confident with their English skills. And you know, that’s just the way the world is now.

English is what connects us around the world. And so, you know, I think both of us are here to help others be able to experience life through English, and yeah. So, awesome, Justin. We’ll talk again soon, and thanks again for coming on.

Oh, yeah. Take care, buddy.

Oh, yeah. I’ll see you.

So, some of the vocab and expressions from today’s episode. First one, at one minute and five seconds, you heard Justin say “stumbled upon.” He stumbled upon (inaudible). To stumble upon, Stumble, S-T-U-M-BL-E, upon, UPON, and he used it in the past tense, “stumbled upon,” is to come across something.

Oh, there’s another phrasal verb, “come across,” is to find something without really looking for it. You’re traveling, you’re backpacking, in his case, and you stumbled upon a city that you weren’t looking for, so that kind of almost happens by accident.

I stumbled upon something. To stumble is to kind of trip, to fall. So if you think about falling on something or tripping on something, it’s kind of by accident. You find something by accident.

Another thing we talked about in this episode is “Toastmasters.” Toastmasters is an International Organization, where you can improve your public speaking skills. Go to my website, and you’ll find a link there.

At nine minutes and thirty–five seconds, Justin talks about something called the “state of flow.” Flow, the state of flow. This is not a physical occasion; this is not a state in the U.S.; this is a mental state, where you are so involved in something, so connected with what you’re doing that time flies by.

You don’t even realize what’s happening, you’re so involved, you’re so excited, you’re so in tune with the moment, that time passes by quickly, and this is when we can really do our best work: in the state of flow.

Ten minutes and twenty–five seconds, Justin says about your “comfortable bubble.” A bubble, you might know what a bubble is, when you’re chewing a gum, you blow a bubble. A comfortable bubble.

A bubble is when you are inside of something, imagine you’re inside a bubble, and you’re kind of trapped or stuck in this, and you’re not moving outside of it. So, you’re stuck in a bubble.

At the end of the episode, I say “wrapping things up.” To wrap up, wrap, W-R-A-P. So, to wrap up is to finalize, to finish things. So, let’s wrap things up. Let’s start to finish, let’s start to conclude, or you could say “Let’s wrap up this meeting,” or “Let’s wrap this meeting up.”

Twelve minutes and fifteen seconds, I say “strive to do better.” To strive is to really put a lot of effort into something; to strive. I’m striving to do better. Strive, S-T-R-I-V-E. I’m putting a lot of effort into doing better. To strive. We strive to do our best. We put in much effort as possible to do our best.

At thirteen minutes and twenty–five seconds, I, Kevin, say “we tend to struggle with.” To tend to do something, tend, T-E-N-D, came from the tendency, “we tend to struggle with.” So, we often struggle with, or we have the habit of struggling with. It’s a tendency, it happens often.

It’s the kind of thing you do the most, it’s something that we do with frequency. So, we tend to struggle. We often struggle with. Often, tend. The verb, “to tend,” the word, “tendency.”

And lastly, a very cool expression Justin used is “practice what I preach.” This is an expression we use in English quite often: “Practice what you preach.” So, to preach is like in church, like a preacher.

To talk about, to advise people, to give advice, to preach, to suggest something. So when we talk about “I need to practice what I preach,” is “I actually need to do what I tell others to do.” I’m giving advice, in this case, giving advice about language learning, but not taking that advice.

I’m not following that advice. So, we need to follow our own advice.

We need to practice what we preach. Cool expression. Try to use that today.

Wrapping things up for today, I want to thank Justin from Real Life Global, for joining me, being here with me. It’s great to share life lessons with others. I hope you get some value from this.

Again, if you want to find out more about Justin, go to reallifeglobal.com, and find all of the wonderful resources they have created there for you, and to get more info for this episode, go to my website, feelgoodenglish.com, there you can find transcripts to the episodes.

Become a member, which gives you access to transcripts. Any questions, I’m always available at kevin@feelgoodenglish.com. Shoot me a message.

I’ll talk to you soon. Until next time. I hope you are striving to become the best version of yourself, and I will see you soon. Bye!