We have to find ourselves in repeat situations to understand what behaviour we need to change or stop for the outcome to be different.
You can see the new only in the repetitive and the familiar. People want the curriculum, the teacher, the book, the exercise, the technology to be newer, better, more effective… and I’m not saying these elements are not important. They are.
However, it’s equally important to make decisions with your free will to change your own detrimental behaviours.
Here are examples of behaviours that prevent people from progressing faster (instead of moving forward, they are stuck in a repeat situation):
- “I don’t have time for my homework”
- “I don’t want to learn. I just want to instantly know”
- “I get upset when I realize how many mistakes I’ve made and it demotivates me to continue”
- “I don’t want any corrective feedback. I want my teacher to only praise my efforts, because a good teacher is someone who helps me feel good”
- “I want the change to be easy, I want my results to be perfect, I want learning to be effortless”
- “I just need to endure this one course so that I never have to do any exercises again”
- “I don’t need to learn to do it myself. I have a teacher who gets paid for correcting my mistakes and making me feel good about my progress”
The question is not “How can I learn English better?”, but “How can I become a better learner?”, which is inseparable from “How can I become a better person?”
What behaviors can you change in repeat situations to start moving toward a different result?
Here is an exercise for you:
Write down your behaviour pattern (who do you see yourself do in repeat situations?) If you don’t see your behavior in the examples above, write your own.
Then write the opposite behavior next to it.
For example, if your behavior is “I don’t want to hear any corrective feedback because all I want is to feel good”, the opposite would be “I can listen to the feedback and ask my teacher to help me correct these mistakes. I can ask for an exercise that I can do with the intent to replace those speaking habits with better, natural-sounding phrases in English. When I see the change, I will actually feel good about myself and my results”.
The next step of the exercise is to practice this new behavior in a repeat situation.
What do you need to change?
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