تفسیر درس

Adversity - VIP Commentary

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to the commentary for this month’s lesson. So, the topic was ‘Adversity’ or the topic is ‘Adversity’ and I’ve talked about this topic, actually, many different times in our program. We talk about it in different ways with maybe a different name, but this theme comes up again and again and again. So a ‘theme’ is a topic that is repeated again and again and again. So you’re going to notice this theme of dealing with adversity is a constant theme, a frequent theme in our program because, of course, it’s a major challenge for all of us.

I mean we all have adversity in our life and we always will. This is really the major thing that stops us from achieving what we want. So if you are struggling with English then you have some kind of adversity. Maybe it comes from school in the past where you had to study all these textbooks and memorize long lists of grammar rules. Now you can’t remember them and now you feel stressed every time you speak English and you’re English sounds unnatural. Well, that’s adversity and it’s something you have to overcome.

Maybe it’s more psychological. Maybe you just feel nervous about making mistakes.

Again, this happens in school a lot. You’re not stressed so much about the different points of English, but when you need to speak you get nervous. You get worried. Oh, you worry about making a mistake and then you get tense and it’s hard to talk naturally.

It’s hard to relax. When you’re speaking your own language you’re relaxed, everything is fine. You start speaking English, everything gets tight. Even though you know the words, you know the grammar, but something stops you. It’s more psychological.

That’s a kind of adversity also and I know because I read our comments. I read on our forums. I read on our site that a lot of people get very frustrated by this and that, of course, just makes things worse. So, we get all these comments from members all the time and non-members, people on facebook and things like that. They’re always saying oh, I still can’t speak English perfectly! They get really stressed about it and they’re focusing on the mistakes they make. They focus on all the terrible pronunciation problems they have.

So they’re constantly focusing on the negative, the bad and then they convince themselves that they will never speak English well, confidently, in a relaxed way and, obviously, it’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to you probably that this is not helpful. None of this is helpful because by focusing on the negative aspects – parts – of adversity with English all you do is create more stress, which makes your speaking even worse.

When you’re thinking and worrying all the time about making a mistake or all these grammar rules from the past, all of this, you’re not really listening. So if you speak to someone in English you’re thinking about all this other stuff so you’re not really listening to them so you’re comprehension, you’re understanding goes down. That adds even more stress because now you get stressed because oh, I don’t understand everything.

So you’re just making things worse, worse, worse and I see this all the time with students.

That’s why I called it Effortless English, even though it’s not totally effortless as you know, but I wanted to give this idea of being relaxed, of kind of welcoming the adversity, welcoming the challenge of speaking English in a relaxed way. Not worrying about mistakes. Not worrying about being perfect. Just focus on improving a little bit, a little bit, a little bit each month and month by month you’ll get better and better and better.

Where you can really see the result of this is when you listen to our teleseminars.

Sometimes we do live teleseminars. We’ll talk about a topic and people will call from different parts of the world, our members, and we’ll chat and you can hear that some of these members speak English very, very confidently. They seem very relaxed. They’re funny. They seem very natural with English. They might have a bit of an accent. You know that’s no problem. I understand them fine. You’d probably understand them fine, but what’s clear to me and what I really love is that they are focused on the communication, not on the stress, not on perfection and so their English is very natural, very easy, and very automatic.

They’re speaking English basically how I speak English in a very natural way, the way they speak their own language and that’s what you want too I’m sure, but to do that you have to welcome the challenges and relax about the challenges of speaking English because the more you focus on the mistakes the more stressful you become and really the more mistakes you’re going to make. So you have to just take a deep breath, relax and realize this is going to make me stronger. It’s going to make me better and just chill out. That’s a nice slang phrase. To ‘chill out’ means to relax. You need to chill out about English. Just relax about it. Keep listening every month. Keep your reading. You’re going to get better automatically. You don’t need to force it. You don’t need to push it too much, so very important.

Now, in your general life, you know outside of English, this is also an important idea and an important topic. This is where we get to our homework. The commentary is where I give you homework. Don’t worry, it’s not like school. There are no grades. I’m not going to check if you did your homework. It’s really a suggestion so that you can grow and get something more beneficial from the lesson.

This month the topic is adversity, so I’m going to give you some quite difficult homework.

The homework is this. I want you this month to go out and find or create adversity for yourself for the purpose of growing stronger. Just for the purpose of showing yourself that you can handle it, that adversity is not something you need to fear.

Now, this word adversity is a strong word. I gave you meaning as difficulty or challenge, but adversity, the feeling of that word adversity is really a tough challenge, a big difficulty. It’s not something small. If you have some little small problem we don’t call that adversity. You know it’s a little problem. Adversity, when you think of that word or you use that word, it has this feeling of something big, like a big challenge, a big difficulty or some difficulty that lasts a long time. It’s not just really quick. It’s something you have to keep fighting for. So what do I mean? Why would you want to do this? Let me give you an example from my own life and then it might help you think of something.

So, one kind of adversity that I chose willingly to take or to do or to overcome from my past was running a marathon. I think I actually ran two marathons, but the first time that was a big adversity for me. I was a runner and kind of ran short distances, like three miles or something like that and I don’t know why I just wanted a challenge. I thought you know oh, if I could run 26 miles. You know four hours of running ah, that would prove something to myself. I didn’t have a clear idea I just knew it was a big tough challenge.

I also knew it wouldn’t be fun, right? Sometimes adversity is not fun it’s painful and it was painful. The training was painful, because you don’t usually just go run 26 miles if you’ve never done it before without any training, so it took many months of training for me. What I did is every weekend I would make my runs a little bit longer, a little bit longer, a little longer and many times my legs were in pain and I got tired. There were many weekends from my long run where I just really didn’t want to do it and I had to kind of push myself to do it. You know I kind of l slapped myself and let’s go, let’s go!

Finally the day came for the marathon. It was the Atlanta Marathon, which I was living in Georgia at the time in the United States. It was a really cold day, this was in November.

It was a winter day, so more adversity. I had to go and run in the cold. It was this gray cold day. I imaged a sunny day with people cheering and almost nobody was out there to cheer us.

So the race started and I ran and I ran and after about three hours of running my legs were killing me. My knees were so painful. I was kind of talking to myself like a crazy person. I was saying keep going. Yeah, yeah, just keep running, keep running. I’m kind of like this. I’m shuffling along and I’m just talking to myself like some crazy person from San Francisco, another place I’ve lived, but I just kept going. I kept going. I kept going, but when I finally crossed the finish line it was an amazing feeling of accomplishment.

So was the process fun? No, yet I chose it because it did teach me something. It taught me that I could handle more than I thought I could. It taught me that when I was in total pain and I thought I couldn’t take another step that I still could. It taught me that I had more willpower and mental strength than I thought I had and then since that time I’ve used that experience in my life many times. So in later years when I faced some difficulty and I thought oh, I can’t continue. I can’t keep going. I would remember that race. I would remember the marathon. No, no, I can do it. I’ve done it before.

That’s why these kind of challenges can be so empowering, give you power. So what I want you to do this month is I want you to choose some big challenge. I don’t mean something small. I mean something that’s going to be tough, difficult and possibly painful, physically painful or emotionally painful or extremely scary. I mean a big one.

We’re talking about adversity. We’re not talking about something small. So something like running a marathon or climbing some mountain.

I don’t know what it is for you, but I want you to face something that is a challenge and something that lasts for a while. Like bungee jumping might be an idea you might have.

Oh, I’ll face my fears and I’ll jump off, but that’s too fast. I want you to do something that’s going to be a tough challenge that lasts that requires some endurance, some willpower to keep going, keep going, keep fighting.

So that’s your homework. You can do it or not, it’s your choice. I hope you will do it and what I would love for you to do is then go to our member site, our social site and I want you to tell us what you chose and tell us what happened or maybe if it’s going to require some training first tell us what you’re choosing. Say I’m going to do this and then later after you do it tell us what happened and tell us about your experiences. This will be really inspiring for the other members. I think other members will really gain a lot by reading about your story and the adversity that you chose and that you fought against and that you overcame and I’ll try to choose something too.

All right, that’s it. That’s your homework. As they say in Japanese gambate, which means fight or you can do it or do your best. So that’s your homework for this month.

Good luck. See you on our social site, bye-bye.