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Cycles and Rhythms – Main Lesson

Hello this is AJ. Welcome to this month’s VIP lesson, our topic, Cycles and Rhythms.

This is an extension of some previous ideas we’ve discussed in our program. I’m a bit of a fan of Daoism or Daoist philosophy, which is an old system of philosophy from China.

In fact, the name Effortless English, the name of the company, the name of our lessons and system was inspired by the Daoist idea of effortless effort. But I thought Effortless Effort English didn’t sound very good, too complicated, so we shortened it.

So the idea of this, Effortless English or effortless effort is a little complicated to explain, but it’s a paradox. Meaning, it’s two things that seem to be opposite that are both true at the same time.

So this idea of effortless effort is one of those, it’s a kind of paradox. Meaning, that we can, at the same time, make a big effort and yet it feels effortless and easy and.

And in fact, in life when we can somehow achieve that that’s usually when we get the most done, we have the most success and we have the most fun doing it. Sometimes it’s difficult to achieve that, but it’s a great ideal to shoot for to try and get.

And our topic this month is really about finding that, finding that effortless effort, that magical point where everything seems to be happening automatically, without too much effort. Everything just seems to be working more easily, more quickly. It all feels automatic.

How do you do that? Well, the big thing is to be in touch with your rhythms, with cycles, yours and natures.

I think we’ve lost touch with this. Most of us are urban or suburban, we’re living within cities or suburbs. We tend to be indoors a lot and we’ve lost a lot of our connection to nature.

I have, you have, most of us have, unless you’re living in the wilderness every day with a great Internet connection, you’re probably not as in tune with nature as your ancestors were.

And nature naturally has cycles and rhythms.. Nature is not the same every single day.

Things vary and they vary in a pattern. We have seasons. In some parts of the world, we have four seasons… spring, summer, winter and fall. And we have big changes between those seasons, but they’re predictable changes, they come and go every year.

Other areas of the world have wet and dry seasons, so there’s a time when it rains a lot and a time when it’s dry and these also are fairly predictable.

We have tides, anyone who’s near the ocean or has ever sailed, the tide comes in, the tide goes out, it depends on the moon and we have little charts about all this. Again, it’s not the same all the time but there is a predictable rhythm, there’s a feel to it, a flowing to it. It goes from one to the other and back again.

Of course, then at the most simple level we have these daily cycles, day and night, which repeat again and again.

These are all true and they’re also kind of metaphors for life in a way, because in our own life we also have natural rhythms.. And the problem is, I think, in modern life, because we’re kind of cut off from nature we tend to try to force things all the time and we go against the natural rhythms and cycles of the environment of life and against our own internal rhythms too.

Because it’s not just nature that has rhythms.. It’s not just the tides in the ocean, the sun, moon and all that, we also psychologically and biologically have rhythms.. We have cycles. We have changes in patterns that occur. We’re not exactly the same day to day, hour to hour, month to month, year to year.

At a very simple level, we have cycles and rhythm of energy and we have this on a daily level. Some people are morning people and they wake up and they just jump out of bed with all this energy and they’re immediately doing jumping jacks and calisthenics and they’re ready to work. They’re all smiling and happy.

That’s horrible. Those people make me crazy, because I’m not I’m a night person by nature, which means when I wake up, I’m usually at my lowest level of energy.

I wake up crawling out of bed and I need a few hours to really wake up and be able to do any kind of productive work.

I know myself and I know that I’ll pick up that energy and I’ve got pretty good energy in that late morning to early afternoon period of the day. That’s often when I get my work done, most of my work done.

And then, I don’t know why, but in the late afternoon my energy drops. That’s when I sometimes crash and take a nap or I just don’t want to do work and start feeling kind of lazy.

And then again, I have another pattern and that’s later at night, for me around 8:00 o’clock at night, suddenly the energy starts going back up again and for some reason from about 8:00 to 11:00 or 12:00, I’ve got a great amount of energy again.

Even when I get no sleep the night before I might be tired all day, but for some reason I wake up right when I should probably be going to bed. That’s my own personal energy rhythm and it’s fairly consistent day to day.

And of course, we also have monthly rhythms too, of energy and interest. Sometimes we really want to work hard and other times not so much. Sometimes we’re really interested and enthusiastic about things, about life or certain parts of our life and others not so much.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, the problem comes when we think, oh this shouldn’t be, and we try to force ourselves to be something else. We try, for example, to force ourselves to be energetic when we’re not. Like, for me to try to force myself to be an early morning person.

It just doesn’t work, I’ve tried it. I’ve tried doing it. I’ve tried getting up at 6:00 a.m.. I hear all these stories of these super achievers who wake up at 5:00 in the morning and they immediately go running and they do all this stuff. I’ve tried and it never works for me, and I just end up getting exhausted.

So, to be most efficient and effective, we really just have to get in touch with, we have to know our own personal rhythms very intimately and then we flow with them instead of fighting against them.

This is a subtle kind of skill that is not very sexy, it’s not something exciting and it’s not something we hear about very much. I think willpower and force are generally presented as more amazing, as more powerful, as more desirable.

We admire the big CEOs who get things done. They force themselves to work all the time. They’re driven, and that’s fine, but for most of us that doesn’t work so well.

So this is more about observing yourself and knowing yourself intimately and going with it, and following those rhythms instead of fighting them.

I’ll give you a story from my own life and with my own language learning again, I like to bring up Spanish because I’m currently focused on learning Spanish or improving Spanish. And I’m not a great Spanish speaker at all.

I’ve noticed with Spanish that sometimes I’m very motivated and very excited about learning it, and at other times, I’m not. In the past, I used to just force myself to study and learn Spanish all the time.

I was always going to follow one specific method. I was just going to listen to it an hour a day and no matter what happened I was going to push myself and force myself to do it.

What I found is, in fact, my desire to listen to or learn Spanish kind of goes up and down naturally from day to day, week to week. And I’ve also noticed that with Spanish sometimes I’m very excited to listen to it. I don’t really know why, but sometimes I just want to listen to audios.

But at other times I’m just sick of listening to audios. I just don’t want to do it. And I find that I’m more attracted to just reading. Reading feels a little more relaxing to me, because there’s no time pressure. I can review as many times as I want. I can go slowly.

And then, there are other times when I don’t want to read and I don’t want to listen, that I just want to chat with my friend in Spain with my terrible Spanish and I don’t care, but it’s enjoyable because it’s more human and more social, and that’s what I want to do.

Then, of course, that’ll change again and I’ll feel stressed about that and I’ll want to go back to just listening to audios.

So what I found works best for my Spanish and my Spanish learning is instead of trying to force myself to always do the same thing every day is to just relax and go with my feelings.

So the problem is rigidity. Rigidity doesn’t work. Rigidity means stiffness and tension. What you want to do is flow and be loose, this is the image, this is the physical image of it, but it’s a psychological mindset as well.

The problem with rigidity, even physically if you just force yourself to be rigid and you do this, you’re going to get really tired soon. You will burn out. Meaning, you’ll become exhausted.

The other problem with rigidity is that it’s not fun. It destroys the fun. Flowing, moving and change they’re all fun. They’re interesting to our minds, but rigidity becomes boring.

Finally, rigidity is inefficient in the long run. It’s again one of those things that can sometimes be better short-term, it seems to be working short-term, but when you look at it in terms of months and years, it actually is less efficient.

So forcing yourself to do hours and hours of English when you really don’t want to, when you’re tired and exhausted, it may seem to help over a few weeks. You’ll get better results in one or two weeks.

But the problem is then eventually you will burn out and then you’ll totally avoid English completely, so when you look at it in terms of a year, how much do you accomplish in a year, you actually accomplish more when you’re relaxed, flowing and honoring your own cycles and rhythms.

You can think of this in another way, another metaphor we can use would be surfing.

So instead of paddling, paddling is this idea of forcing. You have the paddle and you’re pushing yourself against the waves or against the river or whatever, against the current. It’s an idea of force.

Surfers, what do surfers do? Surfers do the opposite. They go with the energy. They go with the waves. They’re not forcing anything. They’re using what’s there already, they’re using the pattern, they’re using the rhythm, they’re using the cycle, the wave and they’re going with it, not against it. This is the image and idea you need to have in your mind.

So, let’s talk about English. When you’re really high energy, when you’re feeling great, you’re super excited, you’re super motivated about English. You’re like yes, English I can’t get enough. That’s when you want to go intense. In other words, you want to be very intense with your learning.

Listen to English hours and hours a day. Read novels. Do as many chats in English as you can possibly get with native speakers or not with native speakers, it doesn’t matter. Immerse yourself completely in English when you’ve got that super high energy and motivation. Fantastic.

However, most people will find that after doing this for a period of time, it might be days, it might be weeks, it might be months, but at some point, they’ll find their energy sort of dropping, their motivation for English dropping.

Instead of fighting that and resisting it, just relax. Relax and during those periods when your energy’s dropping, you’re not enjoying it as much, change your focus, change what you’re doing. Focus more on having fun and less on seriously learning.

You might cut the amount of time that you’re learning English. So instead of doing hours a day maybe you just drop it back to one hour a day, even down to 30 minutes a day. And instead of doing more serious difficult content listen to easier things, read easier things.

Just relax the whole thing and respect the fact that your energy’s dropped a bit, go with that cycle instead of against it. When you do that, what you’ll find is then, guess what, it’ll start coming back up again and then you can do another period of intensity.

This also applies to the specific activities you’re doing. As I mentioned with my Spanish, there may be times where, for some reason, whatever reason, you’re most interested in, most focused on listening and generally with Effortless English we recommend that you focus mostly on listening.

But it’s okay if sometimes you’re just sort of sick of listening and you need a break from it. So pick up a book and read and just take a break for a few weeks or a few days, whatever you need. Take a break from listening. It’s okay. It’s not going to kill you. Read a comic book. Read a little easy novel, whatever, or just chat with people.

I constantly get these questions from people, what must I do exactly every day AJ? My answers are usually more flexible, there’s not one right answer.

I’ll say generally try to listen as much as you can and add in some interesting reading. But it’s really up to you, you have to honor these rhythms so don’t fight against it, go with them. It’s okay to make changes from day to day, week to week, month to month.

Overall, as you follow those rhythms, as you surf instead of paddle, you’ll find that your long-term results are much better with English and really with anything in life.

We’ll talk about this more in the commentary, how you can use this in all aspects of your life, not just English learning.

I’ll see you there. Have a great day. Bye for now.