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The Four Ps to Achieving Your Dreams
Patience, Perseverance, Practice, and Performance.
With this Posse of Ps it’s hard not to reach your English goal (and hard to keep away from P-words too!) 🙂
So, let’s expand on them and see how they can help you achieve your dream of fluency in English.
Patience
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your English be. If things take time to sink in, make sense, or execute, don’t worry! If you keep on at a steady pace then you will, almost without realising it, achieve the milestone that you are aiming for. One day you will suddenly realise that you know something, really know it in your muscles, that you have been struggling to master for a while. Remember that language learning goes in a series of plateaux and is not a straight, onwards and upwards, line. You may feel that you are not making any progress for what seems like a long time and then suddenly, almost overnight, you get it! With patience these steps will happen and you will see and feel them. This will give you even more confidence to keep going!
Perseverance
This attribute helps you to pick yourself up, even after you have had a setback, and push onward. It is easy to give up. It is easy to say, “I’ll never do this.” Let’s say you took an exam and didn’t get the result you wanted. You can shrug your shoulders and say, “I’m not ever going to get the grade I need” and quit right then. Or you can learn from the experience and get back on track!
Sometimes when you have this experience you need someone to support you and help you to keep going and find out where you went wrong. Knowing when is the right time to get help is very wise. Seeking support, especially the support of someone who is knowledgeable and well prepared to help you as well as give you encouragement can go a long way towards getting you to your goal of scoring well on the IELTS. I have dedicated my life to helping people, just like you, achieve their dreams of learning to speak English and passing the IELTS, and I offer customised support that focuses on you and giving you the support and help that you need. You can read more about me and the programmes I have developed that might be of help to you here.
A mentor, however, can only show you the way and encourage you. At the end of the day YOU are the one who needs to draw on your inner strength and focus on your dream again and take action to move closer to it. Sometimes that action will be seeking the support of someone who can help, enrolling in classes to get the focused learning that you need to succeed. Sometimes that action will be as simple as recommitting yourself to mastering English and moving forward with renewed energy and zeal.
Practice
The difference between practice and performance is that one is ‘real’ and the other is preparation for real. If you speak then your purpose is often other than the words and sentences – it is to communicate something to someone. When you write, it is to convey the message, or information, or get an assessment in an exam. On the other hand, when you practise you are trying to perfect your skills for the performance. It’s rather like training in sport or rehearsing in music. It is in the practice where you can experiment with new words and phrases or a new style or new ideas. Practice is the focused way in which you get your skills to performance level. It is here that you can try things out, experiment with new words and phrases or new approaches to writing. You can ask people if you are right or gauge someone’s reaction to your new style or new vocabulary. Try and test, test and try, and you will broaden your language for the ‘real’ times.
But both practice and performance work together to get you those high-level skills that you desire.
Performance
By performance here I mean actually using the language. Speaking and writing as much as you can and making sure that you have an audience to receive this performance, and sometimes even rate you on it! I speak to English learners every day and many of them tell me how they don’t have opportunities to speak or they can’t find anybody to look at their writing. Then, I speak to others who have found themselves language buddies online and they speak every day and assess each other’s writing! You have to try to create opportunities for yourself and it’s so much easier today with the internet.
One of the very essential parts of many of my programmes that help students excel at the IELTS is that I have a Facebook group where students and teachers of English language can speak together and learn from one another. It is an open forum where you can ask questions and get reliable answers from expert sources! It is also a great way for you to connect with other students and practise your English, written as well as spoken! This practise is invaluable, fluency comes with use! This is also why immersion is such a great way to accelerate your learning, to find out more about my immersion programmes, go here. You have to get comfortable with the language, it has to become like second nature to you. You cannot rely on your books alone you MUST get out there and speak and write.
The more you perform the better (especially if you have good feedback) your performance will get.
So, here you are; the 4P approach to getting your language skills to shine and in achieving your dreams of fluency in English and passing the IELTS!
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