welcome to the fourth lesson. This one is called “Beliefs." Let's get started. The Effortless English Club Automatic English For The People Beliefs Main Text

The Effortless English Club Automatic English For The People Beliefs Main Text

Hello, welcome to the fourth lesson. This one is called “Beliefs." Let's get started.

Beliefs are another important part of managing your psychology, of strengthening your

psychology so that you will learn English, or anything in fact, much faster. And there are

two kinds of beliefs to general categories of beliefs. Limiting and empowering.

Let's talk about limiting beliefs first. Now limiting means, limit is something that stops

you. It's like a boundary. It stops you from going ahead. So a limiting belief is a belief

that stops you from improving, a belief that stops you from getting better. And l'd say

most English students have limiting beliefs and many English students have very strong

limiting beliefs. I call these beliefs English trauma and I got that name from a few of my

Japanese students. They would tell me “AJ, I can't speak English well because I have

English trauma."

What is English trauma? What is that, what are they talking about? Well, trauma

means some kind of injury, some kind of hurt. Emotional hurt, deep emotional hurt. So

what they mean is that they had some very negative, painful experiences with English in

the past. In other words, when they were in school in English classes, even as adults

going to other English schools, they had very negative experiences. And all these

negative experiences have created some very negative beliefs, some very limiting

beliefs. For example, they say "I am not good at English." Well, that's a belief. It may

be true, it may not be true. But it's an opinion, it's a belief that they have.

Another belief, a very common belief, English is difficult. Or, English is complicated.

Well, that's just a belief. For me English is very easy, because l'm a native speaker, just

like your native language for you is very easy. Tomoe can speak Japanese fluently

because she's Japanese, so I might say "Japanese is difficult," and she would say “No,

Japanese is super easy." These are just beliefs that come from our experiences. The

problem is these limiting beliefs limit us. They in fact do limit us. They stop us from

getting better. They cause a lot of problems for us as students, as learners. I have

them, too. As I try to learn Japanese, for example, I have a lot of these limiting beliefs I

realize. I think "Oh, Japanese is so difficult." Japanese is complicated, just look at the

writing system. It's so different from English.

And these beliefs hurt my motivation. They lower my energy, and in fact they're wrong.

They're not true. Japanese does not have to be difficult, it does not have to be

complicated. A small child, even a small American child, could learn Japanese very

effortlessly, very easily. And the reason is, the number one reason is, they don't have

the limiting beliefs. They can sing songs and play games and enjoy the language, and