تفسیر درس

Self Reliance - VIP Commentary

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to the commentary for this month’s lesson. So we’re going to talk more about this topic and let you get a little more repetition with some of these words and ideas. We’ll also talk about some practical things you can do, maybe some homework. I don’t like using that word ‘homework’. I always had a negative feeling about that word homework when I was a kid. I hated it. I would come home and just want to run out and play. So, I don’t know, I’ll think of a better word. Okay, anyway, let’s talk about this idea of self reliance again.

I think one reason I have felt really uncomfortable with this idea of being seen as you know ‘the expert’ instead of a coach is why I always use the word coach. If I’m talking to schools or something I’ll say I’m an English teacher because that’s the normal word everybody uses, but usually with you guys or when I’m being more precise I like to use the word coach. It’s just got a different feeling, right? A coach is someone who helps you, motivates you, helps you get great results for yourself, but it doesn’t mean they’re like the one perfect expert that knows everything.

One difficulty with this is sometimes I worry that you’re going to see me as like this super expert on everything and that makes me hesitate sometimes to share ideas with you like, for example, in the area of health. This is an area that I’m really passionate about myself and that I’ve had some problems with and struggled with and I’ve had this exact issue of reading about and learning from different experts in this area.

They say lots of different things so I had to do exactly what I’ve told you to do, which is I just had to decide okay, I just have to try it. I don’t know. So I’m going to try eating this way and see what happens and see how I feel and see what happens to my body. You know do I gain weight, do I lose weight? Do I have less energy, more energy?

Then more recently I got a little more scientific and actually went to a doctor, a nutritionist and actually got some blood tests and actually tested like the levels of nutrients, of vitamins and minerals and hormones and other things in my body so I could really see what was happening when I was eating one way. Then I discovered that some things were not working for me, that I was having some problems, so then I’ve changed how I eat and then get more tests. Again, notice how I change, what happens.

Do I improve or get worse and luckily I’ve been improving and feeling really fantastic now.

It’s a process. It’s not just there’s one right answer and you find it and then it’s over.

We’re always learning and we always need to be experimenting and this is what I mean by being a true scientist with your life. Gandhi actually had this great quote. I say it all the time, but I love it. He’s like experiment with your life. In his book he always talks about experimenting with his life. He wasn’t talking about finding the one truth. He talked about just experimenting with his own life, trying different things in his own life and seeing what works and seeing what gets better results and seeing what makes him feel better and helps other people.

That’s what I like. So with my health, for example, you know I look back to when I was a kid and I ate terribly, like really bad. Sorry mom, but you know we got a lot of processed food and junk food. I was a sugar addict and all this other stuff and then that didn’t work so well. I started having some problems so then I started trying other things, vegetable juices and started eating better. It was an improvement, but then recently, especially with stress and other things happening like a year, year and a half ago, I started having problems. I discovered there were some things that I was lacking, so made more changes, starting to feel better.

Does this mean now this is the way it will always be? No, because my body will change as I get older. Sometimes I have more stress, sometimes less stress, a lot less stress now that I’m in Hawaii. Things change so it’s a constant process. I’m constantly trying to get information from experts, from research, from other people, but I don’t just trust what they say automatically. I always say well, that sounds good. Let’s try it and then see what happens. Then, also, this is the hard part, is that even if something works for a while, maybe even for many years, you always have to be ready for the fact that something might change. That what used to work doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t know, just a random example, maybe in the past drinking lots of milk and eating lots of cheese was fine. You’re growing and you feel good and that works, but then maybe later in your life you might find that it upsets your stomach or there’s some problem. It’s certainly possible that at one stage of your life a certain kind of eating might be fine. It might be okay or at least won’t cause a problem and then at a different stage of your life it could cause lots of problems. So you have to be flexible, be willing to keep experimenting and keep changing if necessary. It’s true with health and it’s true with everything.

It’s kind of true with English learning too. You know what’s true when you’re a beginner, what works as a beginner is a little different than as an intermediate learner and then as a more advanced learner as you are now. If I teach a total beginner’s level class I would do it quite differently, as you can imagine. I wouldn’t just be talking to them about all these difficult topics, for example. I would be doing mini stories that were very, very, very short and simple. I would have a lot more repetition with the questions.

There are a lot of things I would do differently so when someone says AJ, how should I learn English, what should I do each day, it’s hard for me to give a very, very specific answer because it depends on your level, your motivation, your psychology, what you want to improve, how you want to use English. There are lots of different things. That’s why I give you general principles instead of specific rules, instead of telling you, you must do this, this, this, this, this, this. Like those seven rules, that email course you probably did. I call it rules because it’s really just marketing. People like rules, but they’re really principles. You’ll notice that they’re very general principles. You know you learn with phrases instead of specific words. It’s a general principle. You can use that principle in many different ways.

It’s the same with deep learning. Deep learning, that’s a very general principle. It means learn everything thoroughly and completely. As I said in the main video, what does that mean exactly? People always want me them an exact number, but I don’t like to do that because it’s different for every person and even for you it might be different each month so you have to play with it.

I usually say seven to 10 times, seven to 14 times. We have members who will tell you that it’s good to listen to each lesson 30 times or more and they’ve done this and they’ve gotten great results, but other members will say I can’t do that. I’d get bored, no way, 10, seven is my limit. What is it for you? I don’t know. You have to discover it.

So what I want you to do this month in your life is to look at a couple areas of your life, at least one where you’re really trying to accomplish something, you’re trying to achieve something. Health is a common one. It could be in relationships. That’s another one.

You read about relationships and all these experts they all have different advice and they all sound good. You know which one is correct? Maybe they’re all correct somewhat. I don’t know. It could be in English, whatever it is.

What I want you to do is look at that area of your life and be honest with yourself. Have you been blindly trusting an expert or have you been blindly looking for the one true answer, the one true expert? I mean do you have this general belief, this general idea that there’s one true way and one true person and one true path for this area and I just need to find it or I already have found it.

So I want you to be honest about that. Think about this thing you want to accomplish or achieve and really think and be honest and ask yourself have I been really thinking in this way. Have I been trying to find ‘the’ answer or ‘the’ expert? Have I been frustrated because I can’t find ‘the’ expert? The second step I want you to do then is to change your approach, change your attitude and instead just think of the idea like I’m a scientist. I’m going to experiment. Just ask yourself the question, how can I experiment with this? How can I just try things and then, of course, actually do it and see your results.

Just try this as a process. So pick an area where you’re trying to achieve something. Be honest. See if you’ve been looking for like the one true path. Instead, change your attitude to be more of an investigator, a scientist and then I want you just to do a lot of experiments. Try a lot of different approaches. You’ve probably done this with English. If you came to Effortless English I’m sure you’ve tried many different approaches already.

This was not your first one. You’ve done that with English, so maybe choose another part of your life or not. It’s up to you.

Then, finally, what I want you to do is tell us about it. Get on our website and share your experiments. Even if the result was a failure, that’s still interesting and you learned something or you learned something and you found a new approach that you didn’t expect that actually worked for you. Tell us about that, but just share. Share what it is you’re trying to achieve or accomplish and then tell us about all the different things you tried, about how you became more of a scientist, how you became more self reliant, how you have decided to trust yourself and your own experience instead of someone else.

All right, well that’s it. Go out and do it and then tell us about it. I’ll see you again, byebye.