How Not Caring About Your English Can Actually Help

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This month’s newsletter is a bit left-field. I was listening to an audio course and it talked about how people got over their fears. It instantly struck a chord with me because often people are so afraid of making mistakes in another language that they do not speak at all.  

Study after study proved that the most efficient way to overcome a fear is to keep doing the task which causes you the fear. They call it “systemised desensitisation”.  
 
I have spoken about this with other students but I didn’t have such an elegant name for it. But in fact, it is really true. I personally can attest to it being true. It is almost impossible to build fluency if you are frightened of making mistakes.

For example, when I first began to speak German, I was so afraid and nervous about making mistakes. But after making mistake after mistake, I just stopped caring. It just didn’t feel like a big deal any more. And it wasn’t.

Did you know that some sales companies have prizes for the first person to get 10 rejections every day? They found that by repeating this process, the sales people no longer cared about getting rejections, called on more people and made more sales as a result. What does this mean for you? Well... 

The simple truth is: mistakes seem much bigger to you than to your interlocutor. They may not even notice them at all. And if worse comes to worst, your interlocutor will simply ask you to repeat. It's really not a big deal - certainly not something to get nervous or anxious about. 

So your homework from this mail is to speak with as many people in English as possible and not care if you make any mistakes. The goal is to simply speak. After a while, you won’t care if you make any mistakes or not. This will really help to speak English better
 
Try it and let me know how you get on. :)

PS. Did you notice all of the phrases I used? For example, “struck a chord”, "left-field" and "big deal", etc?  Do you know what they mean? If not, just ask. I’m here to help.

This is from my free monthly email. Join here: http://www.learn-englishonline.net/newsletter.html