Hello, Advanced English Learners. Welcome back. Today I am sharing my top five strategies for speaking in English without any fear. If you're ready to learn, let's get started. All right. So I first would like to start out by saying that if you have social anxiety or you feel a little bit nervous or apprehensive when talking to people, that is absolutely a natural reaction to have.

And honestly, over time and by working on your confidence building within yourself, you'll start to feel more at ease. But this is a completely natural reaction to have. So don't feel like you're the only one experiencing that kind of anxiety when it comes to speaking in English, speaking in another language, or just speaking to another individual in general.
 
All right. So let's get into the strategies. The first thing I'd like you to do is to let go of what other people think. And it might sound easier said than done right. But the reality is, we need to shake that feeling of “what do they think of me?” What does that person think of me? Right.
 
Because honestly, it's irrelevant what they think of you. If you're putting your best foot forward and you're doing your best and you're speaking your best and you're just trying your best, that's all that matters. Their opinion of you does not matter. Everyone is going to have judgments about everyone. That's just the nature of human reality, right? So no matter what you do or say, someone will have an opinion and you can't please everyone.
 
You can't be liked by everyone. So don't even try for that to be your goal. Your goal is not to be liked by everyone, and your goal is not to impress everyone. So it does not concern you what others think of you. There's this great quote and it goes something like this. What you think of me is none of my business isn't that great?
 
It really gets you thinking of the fact that no matter what people have in their mind about you, that doesn't concern you. That's their opinion. And it's very possible that it's inaccurate. It could be that they've misjudged, which happens all the time, right? They didn't take the time to get to know you and they don't really know you.
 
And that's on them, maybe. So when you're speaking, I really want you to start letting go of what they think of me? What do they think of my accent? What do they think of where I studied or what I studied or whatever? Right. Because if you're thinking about these while you're speaking, you're not going to speak as well as you could have.
 
You're not going to perform the acts of communication as well as you could have. If you have those little noises inside your head yammering away, saying, What do they think of me? What do they think of me? What do they think of me? All right, that's not your concern. So just remove it from your brain space. It's taking too much valuable space.
 
Just let that go. All right. Number two, treating every opportunity to speak is an opportunity to practice. I really want you to think about this in that way. Every time you communicate with someone, if it's a casual coffee conversation with a friend or a coworker, or if it's a more high stakes, important business type of meeting or interaction, it's all practice. 
There's this great concept that is quite known now in the fitness community. I have a lot of fitness trainers that I train with and they say that every time they do a rep, a rep is essentially just a movement, right? So let's say a bicep curl, right? That's a rep doing one of those. Every time they do a rep or a lunge.
 
Right, a rep could be a lunge. Every time they do a lunge, that's a practice for them. That's practice. That's not supposed to be perfection. That's not supposed to be. Oh, this was an amazing lunge. I did a great job. It's supposed to be, oh, I'm practicing my lunch. And these are top fitness people, right there, elite top professional people.
 
And they treat those reps every time they do an exercise. That's practice. So I want you to treat every single time you have a conversation in English, you open your mouth to speak English, you answer a question in English, you answer the phone in English, whatever it might be, wherever you're using your English, you read an email, you are practicing.
 
Okay? So treat it as an opportunity to practice and once you start approaching it that way, you're going to start to feel more at ease. It's not going to be this daunting, overwhelming situation where you have to feel like you need to be perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. We can never be perfect. We should not strive to be perfect.
 
We want to strive to be better than we were yesterday. All right. So thinking about it as practice, I really encourage you to do that. Number three, welcoming, making mistakes. I love this one because it contrasts that old way of thinking, which is don't make mistakes. Don't show people that, you know, your weaknesses, don't fall, don't make mistakes or make errors.

That's completely false because we need to make mistakes. We grow from making mistakes because when we make mistakes, that means that we put ourselves out of our comfort zone and that is the only place we can learn outside of our comfort zone. We cannot learn inside our comfort zone because we're so comfortable. We've already learned everything that we need.

You are in that space now. We need to go outside of the comfort zone to learn something new and one major indicator of learning something new is failing, making mistakes. All right. Some people consider making mistakes as a minor failure. It's not necessarily a healthy way of looking at it because failure is actually a positive thing. If we treat it as a teachable moment, as a learning opportunity.

Right. And so what that indicates is that we were brave enough to take risks. We were brave enough to try out something new, to take a stab at something that we had not tried before, to use that word, to use that expression to try out this grammar or to pronounce something in a certain way. Right. We're taking risks that are so important.

And I really encourage you to take more risks. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. That is part of the process. That is how you are going to level up. And that's ultimately what you're, what you want, why you're here. Okay. So make more mistakes now for number four, believing accents are cool. I want you to remove this idea from your head that you should not have an accent.

Everyone has an accent. Everyone has an accent. Even within native speakers, we all speak a little bit differently. I speak differently from some other person who grew up in the United States. I will speak differently from someone who grew up maybe two towns over or wherever. Right. It just depends on how you speak. So I always like to say that having an accent is actually cool, because it shows that, you know, more than one language.

And in my book, knowing more than one language is pretty cool. That's an accomplishment. And so don't feel like if you have an accent, you can't speak or you feel intimidated by native speakers if you're talking to them because to you their accent is better or you like it. It's okay to aspire to work on your accent and aspire to someone's accent and way of speaking.
 
I know I did that when I was learning my foreign languages and that's a healthy approach because it helps you try to improve on certain things right? But the unhealthy approach would be, Oh, I have this accent, so I'm too afraid to speak. I'm not going to to speak not to that person because they have a perfect accent or they're a native speaker and they're going to be judging me.
 
No, it's not that way. Right. So I really want you to just get that out of your mind. Don't feed into that. Fear of having an accent is not professional or whatever it is that you're telling yourself. Accents are cool. Think of it that way, okay. And just work on improving it if it really bothers you. But again, the goal should not be to have no accent.
 
The goal should be communicativeness or what we call in the linguistic world, intelligibility, right? The ability to make sense, the ability to communicate. Right. What I'm saying gets through to someone, right? What you're saying gets through to someone. They understand, you understand. And there's a nice connection there. So that should be the goal. Don't worry about the accent.
 
All right. And number five, letting go of limiting beliefs. So limiting beliefs or any types of beliefs that hold you back, that prevent you from doing something that you want to do. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you want to join an event and you have to call and explain why you want to join this event.

Let's say it's a networking event and only the first ten people who call get to go to this event. And you really want to get to this event because they're going to connect you with other people in your industry and you just got new business cards minted and you want to pass those around and so on and so forth.
 
Right. So you really want to go to this networking event, but you're nervous about that call that you have to make because you feel anxiety when you're on the phone and you're speaking in English. And I get it. I get it. But don't let that hold you back from going to this event, because ultimately your goal is to go to that event.
 
So what I'm saying here is don't have these beliefs that prevent you from achieving something. Don't feel like something has to be perfect in order for it to happen. Perfect doesn't exist, as we said. So when you have those limiting beliefs that hold you back, think about, Hey, why am I thinking this way? Why am I holding myself back from this?
 
Is this self-sabotage? Is this to prevent me from doing something that I know is good for me and good for my career? Try to get to the bottom of it. Try to get to the root cause of why you think that way. Is it because someone told you that? Is it because you saw someone talking about it and you feel like you want to commiserate with them and you want to feel like you align with them on that front?
 
Why, why? Why? So I really encourage you to think about it that way, so that you can get to the root cause and eliminate that limiting belief once and for all. Because that limiting belief is not your friend, it is your foe. It is holding you back and you're meant to do great things. So just keep that in mind.
 
And I don't want you to feel the fear because trust me, I felt it too. Again, I've learned different languages growing up. I speak different languages and even in English, right? There might be even in your native language, you might have fears around communicating. It's a very natural thing to have. This is part of social anxiety that affects everyone.

So keep these five strategies in mind because I really firmly believe that once you start thinking about these different approaches to eliminating your fear, you're going to start becoming more at ease. And you're going to, with practice, be much more comfortable in English speaking contexts and even applying these communication strategies to your own l one your native language that could also help you if you feel like you have some anxiety surrounding social interaction when you're talking to people one on one, face to face, on a zoom or whatever it might be completely natural.
 
You're not alone in this. Try to practice these strategies. You can start with one at a time. I encourage you to do it that way so that it doesn't feel like an overwhelming thing. And over time, practice makes progress. That's the attitude we need to have. All right. Advanced English learners, thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you enjoy this lesson.

If you did give it a big thumbs up, if you were watching on YouTube and if you're listening to us on Spotify, then I would love for you to leave a Q&A. It's in the community tab. Leave me a comment, ask me a question. Tell me what you thought of this episode. What other types of episodes would you like to see here?

What would you like me to talk about? What would you like to have in our native English Speaker series? Those are great as well for your listening comprehension, for your pronunciation, for learning new vocabulary and expanding your word choice, all of that great stuff. So I encourage you to check out the conversations that we have on our podcast and on our YouTube channel, and also feel free to subscribe to our blog.
 
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It means the world to us when we get nice reviews from you because it allows us to get the content out to as many people as we can. And on that note, if you share it, that will also help us out a lot. All right. And the last thing I'll say here is if you want to improve your communication, we talked about social anxiety.
 
If you want to work on that, we have another wonderful resource for you. It's called Explearning, Explearning Communication. And you can find that on YouTube as it's Explearning with Mary Daphne. You can find it on a podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. I will also link below so that you know, and then you can also just type it in on your web search.
 
You can go to Explearning so E X P Learning dot co. All right, so check out those resources. Over 500 lessons between Advanced English and Explearning. So a lot of content there for you. You'll never get bored. Lots to keep on improving, right? All right. I will see you in the next advanced English lesson where we're going to continue advancing your English together.

Until then, keep up the awesome work and I will see you very, very soon. Bye for now.

About the Author and the Explearning Academy:

Mary Daphne is an expert in communication, executive skills and professional development. She is the founder of the Explearning Academy, a platform dedicated to helping individuals enhance their social fluency, boost their careers, and elevate their social game. Through immersive group coaching programs like the Executive Communication Lab and self-guided journeys, participants gain the social superpowers and career catapults they've been searching for. If you're ready to take your negotiation skills to the next level and connect with like-minded individuals, visit academy.explearning.co and explore the various plans available. Join the Explearning Academy community and unlock your full potential.

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