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DIY – VIP Commentary

Hello, this is A.J., welcome to the Do It Yourself Commentary.

I like this topic, do it yourself, because it communicates an idea of self-reliance, which is one of our key values in Effortless English. As the word suggests, self-reliance means to rely on yourself. That does not mean you don’t get help from other people. It does not mean you’re totally alone all the time. It just means you are responsible for yourself and that you’re able to take care of yourself.

It gives an idea of being proactive, meaning you take action you don’t wait for others to save you. Do it yourself, this idea of do it yourself, suggests the same thing. I would say the old way of thinking or older way of thinking, which came especially from the media, is what I would call top-down. That means that you have people at the top of any area in life and they give their knowledge and power down to people underneath them, the rest of us.

For example, medicine and health. The old way and still the way that’s used in most hospitals, and by most doctors unfortunately, is that we have the expert, the doctors, and the hospitals and the healthcare industry. They’re the big experts and the patients come in and they’re below them, and the patient sort of passively does whatever the big experts tell them to do. That’s a top-down approach.

A do it yourself approach is quite different. Do it yourself means that we’re all autonomous, we’re self-autonomous. Autonomous really means power, in a way, that we’re independently powerful, free and powerful. So using a healthcare example again, do it yourself, the do it yourself way for healthcare is that you decide that you are the master of your own health, your own body and ultimately your own medical care even, if something goes wrong and you are the boss. You are the one who takes action. You are the one who makes the decisions.

So do it yourself, meaning you go and if you need experts you go find them and maybe you find many different experts and you get all their different opinions and you compare them. You decide who you trust or which methods you think are best and you don’t have to just go to medical doctors. You might go to nurses. You might go to chiropractors. You might go to nutritionists. You might try all kinds of alternative things.

Then you do it yourself, you put together your own little healthcare plan, not some expert telling you what to do, but you actively going out there and creating this healthcare program for yourself, that’s the do it yourself approach. We can apply this approach to many areas of life. It’s easier now because of the Internet, because of modern communication. It’s easier to do it now than ever before.

For example, you can do it yourself in your career. Before you used to have to totally depend on companies to hire you and there’s this idea that you would get hired by a company and then they would take care of you for your whole life. The take care of you part sounds nice, but on the other hand you’re kind of a slave to one company, totally dependent on them for life, so lots of parts of that idea were not so great.

Now you can be the CEO (Chief Executive Officer), of your own one-person brand, your own one person company, even if you work for other people as an employee, you can still think of yourself as a freelancer. We’ve talked about this topic before. Think of yourself as a little oneperson company, one-person brand and you are the boss of that brand. You can use online

tools, seminars, workshops, connections and global communications to build a whole network of connections and expertise and in many ways, act like the boss of your own little one-person company.

You can be the director of your own healthcare program. As we said you can do that yourself.

You can be the president of your own education program, so instead again of passively going into a university where the university decides what classes you must take and what’s important to learn and what’s not important. You do it yourself. You decide what’s important to learn. You put together your own learning plan. It might include some courses. It might include independent reading. It might include coaches or seminars or workshops. It might include internships and volunteering. It might include anything you want.

The point is you do it yourself. You trust yourself to plan your own education. Home schooling is another version of this. It’s do it yourself education for your family, instead of trusting some government bureaucrats to decide what your child must learn and what’s important. You trust yourself to design an education program.

If necessary maybe you hire a tutor to teach them some subject you think is important and you need outside help, or maybe you do it all yourself, but the point is that you do it yourself. There’s no need to wait for other people. You can dive in and do it yourself, in any area of life.

So why don’t we do this more? I think one of the big problems is perfectionism, a lack of trust in ourselves. In the media, in schools and various other areas, we’re programmed to believe that we need to be perfect or at least super excellent in every single area of life. That’s just not the truth. The truth is that good enough is usually fine. In other words, we don’t need to have a super high standard of top excellent in everything we do, it’s not necessary.

We need to realize that often, good enough is fine. That we can do something good, it doesn’t need to always be great. Sometimes good is better than great, because we can do it ourselves.

It gives us more freedom, more control and it’s more satisfying. When you do something yourself, you gain a kind of satisfaction. You build your own confidence by doing things yourself.

When you look to others to do things for you, it may be easier and they may even do a little bit better job than you, but you gain nothing. You gain no confidence. You gain no skill. You only gain dependence on the other person. The truth is, in most areas of life, good is fine. We don’t need great. There may be for each of us, a couple areas in our life where we really, genuinely want greatness. For some people that might be business or their career. For others it might be family. For others it might be health and fitness.

For some people it’s nothing, some people don’t really care about being great, they just want to be good and have a happy enjoyable life, and that’s fine. If you try to be great at everything you just become burned out and then you become good at nothing, eventually. So good enough is a good standard. Good enough is quite good for most things we want to do and if you think good enough is fine, then you’re less afraid to do it yourself. So getting rid of this perfectionist idea is an important first step for doing things yourself.

Another important first step is to just play a little more and enjoy things, so that you don’t have to be so serious about everything. It’s fine just to play around with something and try doing it yourself and then maybe you decide later that you don’t want to continue. Let’s take a very simple example. Say you own a car. It’s possible to do some things yourself to maintain that car.

For example, it’s quite easy to change the oil in your car, you don’t have to go pay someone to do that. You’ll save a little money doing it yourself, but I think more importantly, you gain a little satisfaction by doing that yourself, instead of just having someone else do it. So it’s worth doing

at least one time, just to realize it’s not that hard. You could learn to replace the spark plugs in your car as well. There are lots of little car maintenance things you could do yourself, that might be enjoyable to you.

It would save you some money and some time as well. Why not try it? If you don’t like it and decide this is not for me, I don’t like doing this it’s all oily, dirty and yucky, then you don’t have to continue doing it, but why not give it a try. You won’t destroy your car. There are lots of areas in life where we can do this, where we can try it out. There’s no need to be so afraid of trying things.

So let’s get started in your life and doing more things yourself. I mentioned car maintenance, that’s one thing you could try. I did that. I learned to change the oil in my car, change the oil/air filters and some other simple stuff. I don’t have a car now so I don’t need to worry about it. Even if I had a car I still might pay someone to do it, but at least I know how and it gave me a little better understanding of my car and it was interesting and fun.

Another area you can choose to do yourself is education. By joining Effortless English you’re already doing that. You chose Effortless English no one made you do this. That’s great, keep doing that. If you have kids, why not take more control of their education? Do that yourself. If you’re not ready to home school 100%, you might as least do a little home schooling and try to reduce the amount of education that’s done by government bureaucrats, who don’t really care that much about your kid, certainly not as much as you do.

Food is another area you can do yourself. You can grow a garden. Some people grow huge elaborate gardens. You can do them indoors with little greenhouses. There’s all kinds of little systems you can use. If you have a yard you can do it outdoors and grow your own, perfectly organic food, you don’t have to worry that some company sprayed something on it. You don’t have to worry if poor workers were treated badly. Grow your own and if you enjoy that then try it out, why not?

Healthcare we mentioned, and certain that’s a great area to do yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to get a medical degree, it just means you take more control, you learn more, you find coaches and experts and others that you listen to, compare what you say and ultimately you’re in charge. The more knowledge you have, the more you do it yourself, the more confidence you have, the more control you have over your own life.

Home repair is another area you can do yourself. Little repairs at home, and this goes for women too, I don’t know why for some reason women act like they can’t do this. I think the truth is they don’t want to do it, but a woman can swing a hammer as easily as a man can, they aren’t that heavy, and do other little small repairs around the house.

You don’t have to do any of these things, but these are areas you might explore or play around with and try. The cool thing is, when you do these little things that you thought before were limits, that you thought, oh I can’t do that I’m not good at that, and then when you do them you gain confidence and that confidence helps you in all areas of life, even if you never continue doing it again.

It removes another limiting belief, which makes you psychologically more powerful. So you choose an area, let’s do that this month. Choose one or two areas where you want to focus on doing it yourself.

The next step might be to read about this area. If you don’t know anything about it then you’ll need to learn what you need to know, how to do it. So, if you’re going to garden then go buy

some books on gardening, watch some videos or if it’s car maintenance then read about that and watch some videos about changing your oil or something.

Finally, decide that good enough is fine, because you’re not doing this to become a master. You don’t need it to be perfect, you’re just going to enjoy the process of doing something yourself, instead of relying on someone else, and thereby, building your self-reliance and self-confidence, which is what this is really about.

After you do this yourself, this area, you can then decide if you want to continue doing it or if you want to try something else. So I encourage you to pick something that you thought in the past you could not do, that you weren’t good at. I gave the example of how some women say they can’t do car repairs or basic car maintenance or home repairs aren’t good. It’s a stereotype, but some women do believe that and some men believe it. If that’s your belief then do that just to prove to yourself that it’s not as difficult as you thought, so you can do it.

I recommend you choose an area where you feel limited and just prove to yourself you can do it.

Again, you do not have to be a master, you can just do it good enough and it’s fine. It’s a great feeling, a great feeling of achievement and that’s really how confidence is built. We can, of course, do lots of little psychological tricks to ourselves to make us feel more confident in the moment, but long-term confidence that stays with us all the time, that really comes from achievement. It comes from doing things yourself, overcoming challenges yourself, not by relying on someone else to do it for you.

That feeling of confidence, of accomplishment, it stays with you forever it’s a great powerful gift that helps you then in all future efforts that come to you, in all future challenges, you have an increased basic confidence that will help you. So that’s the biggest reason, in my mind, for doing it yourself, anything. Give it a try. Tell us what you’re doing yourself this month on our VIP site.

I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.