Fluent English can ONLY be acquired by learning IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS – and that’s why I’m going to highlight them for you in RED!

Here’s how to improve your English listening skills when listening to my video: put the headphones on, playback the video and write it all down while listening to it!

Video Transcript Below:

Hey guys, hello boys and girls and hello my dear fellow foreign English speakers! This is me, Robby from EnglishHarmony.com and welcome back to my video blog!

Today I wanted to tell you something interesting in relation to English fluency obviously because this whole project is about English fluency so what else could I be possibly telling you about, right? Other than English fluency related matters.

Anyhow, the particular thing that I wanted to bring up today was the phenomenon of you being able to perform quite well when it comes to spoken English performance on days when your English is kind of suffering a little bit but still you have those particular situations during those days when you’re capable of performing very well.

And here’s a typical example just to make it a 100% clear to you what exactly I mean by saying all this, right? Let’s say for argument’s sake I go to work in the morning and for some reason my English is not a 100%. My brain is not firing on all cylinders for whatever reason, you know, and my English is kind of sluggish. So it’s basically one of those bad fluency days.

And if you think that my fluency is a 100% at all times, well, nothing could be further from the truth, you know. It doesn’t even hold truth when it comes to your native language. You can’t perform a 100% at all times even in your native language. It’s just the fact of the matter. And you may believe that it’s not true but if you analyze all those things a little bit deeper you will realize that you can’t always have that clarity of thought and flow of words and everything.

Anyway, let’s say for argument’s sake I go to work and I can’t speak a 100% with my colleagues. I hesitate a little bit maybe but then comes a moment when I have to take a phone call. And the moment I take the phone call from a customer my fluency just comes back just like that, you know what I mean? And the reason being, at that particular moment in time I have no other option but to perform. And I think that all of a sudden all your abilities get mobilized and your fluency goes back up just because you have no other option but to perform well!

Basically when you’re speaking with your colleagues, even if it’s a conversation between you and your manager you still don’t have that – what way to put it? – that demand on you to speak super well, you know what I mean? So you can kind of afford to make a small mistake here and there but all of a sudden when you’re on the phone with the customer you have no other option but to be a 100% fluent.

And obviously there’s always the chance that you’re going to make a small mistake even when speaking with a customer but I hope that you get the drift, right? When your fluency is slightly below the average you still have those events on that timeline when the fluency has to go back up, no matter what.

And if you think about it, speaking in a camcorder which is exactly what I’m doing right now at this particular moment in time is a similar event. It has the same effect on one’s fluency. Before I turned the cam recorder on my fluency wasn’t the best. I’ve been obviously speaking with myself all day long but I noticed that today is one of those days when my fluency is slightly lagging behind, if you know what I mean.

But now that I have to actually speak in the camcorder for you guys, I have no other option but to force myself even to pronounce the words clearly, to make myself understood, to get the message across so it just has to happen.

Well, obviously there’s always room for error as they say and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve made a mistake or two during the recording of this video but I hope that you get the message. I hope you get the drift, right? Basically the message is that during a below average fluency day you can still mobilize your abilities, your strengths and you can force your brain to fire on all cylinders when you have to perform, you know?

But I’m not trying to claim that it’s going to happen all the time. Obviously I remember back in the day when I was for example going for different jobs at that particular moment in time and I was doing a lot of interviews and I got this phone call, and this is an event that I’ve actually mentioned before in one of the videos, right?

But it’s an event that has imprinted itself into my brain so vividly that I’ll always remember it. I got this phone call and I had to do an interview over the phone and I was trying but for some reason I just couldn’t speak, you know. And then eventually I was told that my English wasn’t good enough for the job and that first I should actually improve my English and then go back to them looking for the job, right? And I was mortified to be honest with you guys.

But anyway, that was the situation when I should have performed but I couldn’t. And we are all having those days, you now. But what I’m trying to say is that there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. And more often than not when you have these pressing situations when there’s a bigger than normal demand on you, you will be able to mobilize your strengths as an English speaker and deliver the kind of speech that you are expected to deliver.

You’ve just got to believe in yourself and you’ve just got to do it, just the way I did when I took my first phone call in the new job. It was around 6 weeks ago at this stage, right? I was dreading the moment that I couldn’t get rid of the feeling “what is it going to be like if I take the phone call?” Like what I if I screw it up? What if something happens? What if I say something wrong? And I had to get over it.

I took the first phone call and I got over it. I realized that it’s a walk in the park, right? And every next phone call reinforces that feeling. And now I know that even if I don’t feel a 100% on that particular day, if I’m a bit tired coming into work, still when I take that phone call, when I answer the customer I can deliver just at the level I’m expected to deliver.

So that is today’s message basically. The power of your brain cannot be underestimated my friends. So you’ve just got to trust yourself that even in situations when you kind of freak out and you think that you’re not going to be able to deliver, you actually might surprise yourself.

But it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to prepare for those situations. It doesn’t mean that at all. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m not trying to say that you can just rely on the fact that somehow you’re going to pull through. It’s not the case if you’re going for an interview for example or some other speech that you have to deliver and you’ve got to speak for a long period of time there is no other way to prepare for it other than by way of preparation, you know what I mean? You have to prepare it for days just like the way I did when I was going for the job interview, you know. I spent long, long hours on a daily basis to repeat all the questions that I might be asked and then the answers and everything. There’s a lot of preparation but eventually it paid off.

So what I’m trying to say is that all those situations where you have to do preparation apart, if you have moments during the day when you feel that your English is not a 100%, when you have moments when you have to deliver, more often than not you are going to be able to deliver. You just have to believe in yourself.

That’s the message. And thanks for checking out my video blog and obviously if you have any questions please feel free to publish them in the comment section below, my friends. Chat to you soon. Bye-bye!

Robby

P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red? Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!

P.S.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!