Want to get better at English? STOP comparing yourself to others.

We all compare ourselves to others and most of the time it makes us miserable. In this episode we will look at the mindset shift that will change the game for you and actually help you improve your English rather than just feeling crap about it.

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Transcript

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to your Monday morning kickstart. This is the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator Podcast, and my name is Cheryl. I am here to help you with all things related to the Cambridge Advanced exam and advancing your English from the B2 to the C1 and then to the C2 level. And this week, what are we going to talk about? Well, I'm going to talk about something very, very personal to me. So I used to think that being competitive, and I'm very competitive, guys, I used to think it was one of my biggest strengths, but I was completely wrong. I've helped thousands of students pass their exam. I've climbed to Base Camp in Everest, I've run my own successful teaching business, but I still catch myself comparing myself to other people online, comparing myself to other teachers online, and thinking about what could I do better? Why do they have five million followers? Um having that kind of negative self-talk about myself. So in this episode, we're going to discover exactly how to use your competitive nature to your advantage and what not to do. But before you do that, I'm going to share with you some of the mistakes that I made with being competitive so that you don't do the same. So I want to tell you a little story about one of my first kind of um training sessions that I went to, conferences about running my business. So I'm a big believer in having a coach for anything that you're doing, someone to help you and to motivate you and push you, and someone to tell you all the mistakes they made so that you don't make them yourself. Someone to kind of push you forward with your with your business or whatever your goals are. And I have a business coach for all things connected to to marketing, to Facebook ads, to uh to the ins and outs of running a business because I know I'm a pretty awesome teacher, and I know that I can help you pass your Cambridge Advanced exam. But the business side of things five years ago was completely new to me. I did not know how to create a website, I did not know how I didn't even have Instagram guys before I started a business. I was uh old school, I had my own Facebook account and nothing, nothing more, let alone TikTok and all these other things. So I got a business coach in to help me. And this is mainly online, but a couple of times a year we all meet up, all of the other people um who are um part of the mentorship, uh, we all meet up and uh do some online uh uh in-person training. Now, the first time I went to this in-person training, I was absolutely terrified because there were other people in that room with their Rolexes on making millions, millions of pounds every single year. Some of them were making millions per month, and for me that absolutely blew my mind, and I was very intimidated uh by being in the room with them. And in that first meeting, you can't help but compare yourself to them. Oh my god, they're earning so much more than me, they're so more much more advanced than me. The questions they're asking, I don't even understand all these business terms that they're saying, like I have no idea what their answer they're they're talking about. And you have this little voice in the back of your head saying, I shouldn't be here, this is not the space for me, uh I'm not good enough, uh, I'm never gonna be as good as them. And I think this is all too familiar with learning a language as well. We feel ourselves saying that all the time when you are maybe chatting to someone who's a higher level than you, or you're chatting to someone who's a native speaker, like, oh my god, they're so much better than me, I'm never gonna be as good as that. So very, very common. However, what I realized was that this was not helping me at all, and that I had this golden opportunity to be in a room with these people who were a higher level than me, in this case, not with learning English, but they were a higher level than me with business skills. So the next time that we met up, because we meet up a couple times a year, the next time that we met up, I had a mission in mind and I had a mindset shift. And what I was thinking about going into that meeting for the second time was not, oh my god, they're making millions, I don't belong here. I was thinking, oh my god, I'm in a room with people who are making millions. This is amazing. I have an opportunity to pick their brains, I have an opportunity here to ask them all the questions and get all the advice from them and learn everything I can from them so that I can level up too, and I can get to that level as well. So rather than me thinking of this in a negative way, I started thinking of it in a positive way. Like, imagine if you were in a room with uh Elon Musk or something, um, or Warren Buffett. We can either be like, oh, I'm not as good as you, this is embarrassing, or we can be like, holy crap, people pay millions to get advice from you, and I'm in a room with you. I'm gonna take advantage and get all the advice and help that I can. And this is something to think about with your own learning of English. If you're practicing your speaking, for example, okay, on our courses we have unlimited speaking sessions, and everybody you know is going to speaking sessions regularly, kind of every single day, and because of that, the great thing is that you get to work with a huge variety of different people, uh, people from all over the world, and people at all different levels. Some people are just starting out on their Cambridge journey, some people are sitting their exam this weekend. Okay, so you're always working with someone different. So rather than having that negative voice in your head thinking, oh my god, they are so much better than me, look how effortlessly they're using that vocabulary. Wow, their pronunciation is fantastic. Oh, they use some language there that I didn't understand. Rather than just thinking like that and thinking, comparing ourselves, thinking, oh, I'm so bad at English, they're amazing. Think of the the way that I thought about it with the business meeting. Think, oh my god, they're so much better than me. This is a fantastic opportunity to ask them questions, get advice, get help. What worked for them? Why is their pronunciation so amazing? What did they do to get there? Why are they able to speak so fluently? Why are they able to nail the uh picture task in the Cambridge Advanced Exam and do it exactly in one minute? What did they do to get there? Ask them. And because you're working with loads of different people, ask different people. Get advice from all over the world. This is your golden opportunity to get advice and help from people that are a step ahead of you. This is something that people pay thousands for, and you get the opportunity to do it every single day. So take that opportunity whenever you see someone at a higher level than you. Think of it as a positive thing rather than a negative thing. If they use a word that you don't understand, think amazing, this is an opportunity for me to learn a cool phrase. Ask them what that cool phrase was so that you can learn it too. Okay, we're basically stealing tips, ideas, vocabulary, information from people who are better than us at the moment, okay, or people who we admire or people who we respect. So if you ever find yourself, and not just with English, if you ever find yourself in a room with someone that you think is better at something than you, have that mind mindset change, okay? Uh think about this as an amazing opportunity, a golden opportunity to improve for free, basically. Uh, you have the opportunity to ask them questions that people wouldn't normally pay a lot of money to ask. And then there's people who go the other way, who compare themselves. Now it's not often, most people always compare up and think that everyone's better than them, but there's also a danger of comparing downwards and thinking, oh, I'm better than this person here, so I don't need to try anymore. I have done enough. And I can think of one friend in particular who did this with learning Spanish. Now, this guy has been living in Tenerife for about the same amount of time as me. Okay, however, he has an A1, maybe scraping an A2 level of Spanish, and I have a C1 level in Spanish, more a low C1 level in Spanish, but he doesn't compare himself to me, he kind of thinks that I'm an anomaly, uh uh, and uh that British people generally uh are terrible at languages and only ever manage to learn a few words in a language, and I'm this rare exception, so I should be just discarded from the statistics because uh yeah, it doesn't normally happen. Okay, normally British people learn a few phrases. Hello, can I have a beer please? Uh, much like my level of Polish now, if you listened to the podcast last week, um, and that's enough. So he's not comparing himself to me, he's comparing himself to all the other British people and thinking, well, I can at least say a few sentences more than them. I am so that means I am a higher level than the majority of British people, so that's enough. I don't need to push harder because I'm already ahead of the majority of people. So this kind of thinking can also be dangerous because we can start to get a bit complacent, we can start thinking, okay, I don't need to improve anymore. So what I always think about in this situation, if if I'm the person who has the higher level Spanish, I always think about okay, how can I help them? I think the best way to to improve your level or to to consolidate your level is can you teach that thing? And can you teach that thing in a simple way? Because if you can't, then you don't necessarily have the thing that you want to teach, uh learnt to a high enough standard to be confident and fluent in it. And something I always talk about is passive vocabulary, passive grammar, and active vocabulary and active grammar. So passive vocabulary, stuff that you can read and you can listen to and understand, um, but it doesn't come out naturally when you're you're speaking your writing. If the language is activated, then it comes out naturally when you're speaking and writing. So being able to explain something to someone who's a lower level than you really helps to activate that grammar and that language and the vocabulary. When uh I have to explain uh in Spanish to if I have to explain a like grammar point, like the subjunctive, I always have to explain the subjunctive. No, if I have to explain when to use this, um this is kind of one of the kind of sticking points with uh with British people uh when they're learning another language. So when I have to explain that, that really helps me activate that grammar point for me and make sure I understand it properly. Sometimes they'll ask me a question and think, oh, actually, I I think I need to go check that. I'm not 100% sure about the answer, and that makes me a stronger learner for that, because then I'm 100% sure in that grammar point, and I feel more confident afterwards. So it can be really, really useful in terms of your own skills, but also with things like your leadership in a conversation, your ability to keep conversations going, to ask follow-up questions, all of these are skills for your interaction in English, and this is something that's tested in the speaking exam. Are you able to keep a conversation going? Are you able to involve your partner in the conversation, even if they um are having issues communicating? So it's a very, very valuable skill to have. So to learn from my mistakes, what should we do? If we're in a room with someone who we feel has a higher level of English than us, we should see that as a fantastic, amazing opportunity to ask them questions, to learn from them, and to uh to to get tips and advice and support from them. Two, if we're in a room with someone who we feel has a who we feel has a lower level of English than us, again, this is a golden opportunity for us to activate our language and make sure that we have grammar points and vocabulary 100% nailed by helping them, by answering their questions and helping them out. So it's a win-win situation wherever we're doing, rather than having that negative feeling or thinking, oh, I'm good enough, I don't need to try anymore. And moving on from that, who should we be competing competing with then? What if you're like me, a naturally competitive person? How can we put this to good news? So I think a lovely story my cousin was telling me over the weekend was now my cousin lives in in Australia, in Sydney, um, and she was telling me uh that her son, uh Quinn, uh has just gone off to uh to camp with his school. So they're gonna be there for several weeks, um, and they're doing kind of uh outdoor activities, uh they're learning like cooking skills, uh, they're learning surfing skills because it's Australia, uh kayaking, building huts, all of these kind of uh all of these kind of activities. And one thing I find really interesting that she was saying was that now these are 15-year-old, 14 and 15-year-old boys, they're highly competitive. But uh what the school's doing, and I think this is great, is so they make them do various activities every single day, and one of them is running a lap of the camp where they're staying, and every day they run the lap and they take the time of the laps they're running, however, and this is key, they're not looking for who is the fastest runner, they're not giving medals out to the fastest runner around the camp. What they're looking at is your score from the day before, how long it took you to run round the day before, and they're encouraging and pushing the students to get a little bit better every single day, and the award at the end of camp is not for the fastest scope, uh, the fastest time, the award is for the most improved, and I think that's a lovely way to look at competition is not competing with those around you, is competing with yourself and what you did yesterday. How can you make yourself better? One way we can make ourselves better is by learning from those at a higher level than us or helping people at a lower level than us. This is our fantastic way to push ourselves forward. Um, another thing that I love to do, and I always ask my students to do at the end of the week is think about your wins for the week. What did you do well? What have you improved on? And this doesn't have to be an exam score. This does not have to be uh I got 100% in my reading exam. Okay, your wins can be things like I said I was going to go to three speaking sessions this week, and I went to three speaking sessions this week. Awesome! This is a win. Okay, your wins can be showing up a little bit every single day, even when life is busy. Your wins could be that you learnt five new words and you pushed yourself to actually use them and try them when you were speaking. That is a fantastic, massive win, okay. By writing down your wins or telling people your wins, this is telling your brain that you are improving and it's showing the positives of your journey in learning English, which is gonna help motivate you and it's gonna help keep you going. But if we always look at things from a negative viewpoint, then this is not going to make us better. This is going to well, it's just gonna make us feel miserable, um, and it's going to make us want to give up. Okay, if we're negative when we're in a room with someone who's better than us, this is not gonna make us move forward. Changing the chip, thinking, oh my god, I've got this opportunity to ask some questions, this is fantastic, amazing, is gonna help move you forward. Okay. Um, looking at all the things you didn't do during a week, I didn't do this on my study plan, and uh I got one question wrong here, and uh I didn't use my vocabulary flashcards every single day. If you look at the negatives, then that is not gonna help you stay motivated and keep going. Okay, this is why I'm so big on this, guys. At the end of every week, think about your wins. I do this with my wife every single day. At the end of every day, we sit in bed and we think about our three. Happy things from the day. Three things that we enjoyed, three things that went well. Okay, do the same at the end of each week or the end of each day if you want with your English. It will really change the game, I promise you. Okay, so that is it for this week. I hope you found that useful. And if you have any questions, because questions are gold, if you have any questions, please let me know, and I will do my very best to help you. Take care.