The Dark Side of Being Good at English

You’ve reached C1 or even C2. Your English is already well above average, so why do you still hesitate, procrastinate or feel frustrated when you make a mistake?

The same qualities that helped you reach an advanced level: high standards, discipline and attention to detail; can also become a trap. You start overthinking every sentence, avoiding situations where you might get something wrong and wasting time trying to make everything perfect.

In this episode, we’ll look at why perfectionism affects so many advanced English learners and how embracing mistakes, taking imperfect action and focusing on progress can help you improve faster, while saving valuable time and energy.

 If this episode helped you, make sure you subscribe or follow the podcast so you don’t miss next week’s training, and if you need help with your English, send me a message on Instagram and let's chat. 

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Transcript

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Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to help you get your English up to that C1 or even C2 level, and of course, absolutely smash your Cambridge Advanced exam. Now, today I want to talk to you guys about something that has popped up several times during the week on our accelerator course for Cambridge Advanced with some of our students, and it's something that I see in myself as well, and I see or I have seen and I've over the past 20 years of teaching in thousands and thousands of students. But basically, the average learner of a language doesn't really get past B1 level. Most people go to about A2 to B1 level in a language. This is average when we're learning a language. If I'm talking about British people learning a language, I'd probably say most people don't ever get past A2 level in a language. Getting anywhere higher than that is the exception. But in most languages, so people learning English or whatever it is, B1 is enough. That gives you enough to travel abroad, understand someone in a restaurant, get directions, get from the airport to your hotel. This is enough at B1 level. Getting to B2 level, so upper intermediate, is classed as a dedicated learner. Okay, this is above average. So if you are, which I imagine most of you guys are at B2 level as a minimum, if you're prepared uh looking to prepare for the Cambridge Advanced exam and get up to C1 or C2 level. So you are already performing at above average level to most people. Getting to C1 or C2 level is the top kind of 5-10%. Most people don't get anywhere near that. Okay, so you are already above average. That says a huge amount about you and your not just your English level, but your abilities in general, your commitment, your dedication to something, your ability to uh to persevere with something. That says a huge amount about the qualities that you possess already. You're already an above-average learner, which is awesome, it's amazing. And I class myself in this as well. I have around a C1 level of Spanish. Um, and the thing is, to be in the top five to ten percent of every of anything is really hard to get there. To be the in the top five, ten percent of earners, not learners, earners. So uh making money in your country, to be in that top five to ten percent wealth bracket. In order to do that, you need to make commitments, you need to be dedicated, and you need to make sacrifices in other areas of your life to get there. And most people want to be millionaires, they want to be rich, but they're not prepared to put in the work and effort to get there. With diets and exercise, having a six-pack. I would love to have a six-pack um to see those abs coming through, but most people are not prepared to put in the work and the effort to get there, to um to work on your nutrition, to be down the gym every day, to be doing your steps. Most people will not put in that effort to get that six-pack or that perfect body that they're looking for. So to be in that top five, ten percent, you need to put in a huge amount of effort and have certain qualities and dedication. And you guys have that with learning English, you guys are in that top five-10%. But the thing is to be above average, I think a lot of us have a certain quality which can help us get there, but it can also have a detrimental effect on learning English or learning a language in general. And I think that quality that a lot of you guys possess, including myself, is perfectionism. In the sense that we're always striving and pushing to make things better. We're always striving and pushing to have everything perfect because I I think it's just naturally inherent in people who are in those top performer brackets. But I the thing I have seen and which has popped up in class um a few times this week is that perfectionism is causing us to procrastinate with our learning of English, especially, especially when it comes to writing um or to showing up to speaking sessions. So what tends to happen is we think that if we're going to write an essay, for example, rather than spending our allotted kind of 45 minutes on our piece of writing, we put it off and we put it off and we put it off. To put off is to procrastinate, right? We put it off, we put it off, we put it off because we think that it's going to take us much, much longer to do. That it's this big giant task, and we want it to be perfect. We want it to get maximum score 20 out of 20 in the exam. We're looking for that. There's not one mistake in it. We want everything to be perfect. So we put it off and we put it off and we put it off, and then eventually we get round to writing it. But instead of spending 45 minutes doing the task, we spend five hours doing the task to write this one perfect piece of writing to hand in so that we can get our perfect score. But the thing that happens here is number one, in the exam, you have 45 minutes to write an essay. So spending five hours doing it is not realistic to what it's gonna be like in the exam, and it doesn't show you what your realistic score would be in the exam. If you can get 20 out of 20, but it takes you five hours to write, well, that's not gonna help you at all on exam day. Um, and if you're kind of looking at your scores, going, okay, I've got 20 out of 20, I'm ready to go for the exam. And then on exam day we get 10 out of 20 in 45 minutes and wonder what happened. This is because we're not preparing under exam conditions and we're not being realistic with the timing because of our perfectionism. It's holding us back that perfectionism. Secondly, we're that five hours that it's taken us to write that essay, four of those hours could have been spent doing something else. Four of those hours could have been spent improving our English rather than trying to make one thing perfect in an unrealistic setting. I would rather you wrote five essays in five hours than one perfect essay. Because the thing is, yes, perfectionism is our idea that we want everything to be perfect and we want to be the best, and we want we hold ourselves to extremely high standards because we want, you know, we're in that top five-10%, and we want to stay there. But the thing is, with that perfectionism, yes, it's us wanting to be the best, but that behind that, under the surface, perfectionism is more about our fear of making mistakes, it's about our fear of failing, it's about our fear of disappointing others, about letting me as your teacher down. If you hand in a bad essay, you're like, oh god, I'm letting Cheryl down, I'm disappointing her, um, she's gonna think badly of me, she's gonna think I'm a bad person. It's that fear of not being good enough, that other people will not think that you're good enough, that you will have that feeling of I'm not good enough, I should be better. This is kind of what's bubbling under the surface of perfectionism. But the thing is, in order to progress and order in order to get better at anything, we must take action, we must make mistakes and we must learn from them. We need mistakes to improve and to learn. And if we're waiting for everything to be perfect, then we're wasting time and learning opportunities where we could be improving. So, in that example with the essay that took five hours to write, it took five hours to write to try and make it perfect, and maybe it is perfect, unlikely. Nobody's perfect. It's it's impossible to be perfect. We're human, okay? Even AI, Chat GPT is not perfect, okay? We make mistakes, but imagine spending five hours doing that piece of writing, um, and then sending it for feedback after you've been procrastinating all week and wasting time kind of feeling guilty and bad about the writing. Um, you send it in and you get feedback, and it's not going to be perfect feedback, is it? And then you have to check you have to go back and improve on that and change it. But each time you're doing that, it's taking you five hours to do that. So to write five essays and get feedback, it's taking you 25 hours of time. Whereas the person who took the allotted time, the 45 minutes, an hour, even an hour and a half to do the piece of writing, they got it done first thing on a Monday because they weren't procrastinating about it. They got it done. Yes, they checked it, but they handed it in, expecting there to be mistakes, because from those mistakes they can quickly get feedback and learn how to fix those. So they can write another essay, improving on that thing, get feedback on their mistakes and fix it, improve again and improve again. And in the space of time it took person one to write one essay, person two has written five and gotten feedback and improved every single time, and is in a much better position and is seeing that progress and that growth. Okay, progress procrastination keeps us stuck where we are. Mistakes are essential. Okay, I this is one of the most important things that you can take away in learning a language is that you have to make mistakes. You will make mistakes, and mistakes are great because that's what pushes us forward, that's what helps us to learn and improve. If you're always in the fear of making mistakes or failing, then you're always going to stay in your safe, happy place with your language, or you're not even going to attempt the thing because we're scared of failing. We're scared of that what if, that what if I fail. But if you do that, you will you've already failed because you will never win, you will never improve. It's impossible to improve without making mistakes. So this is the mindset that I want you to go into. This is the above-average mindset that we need to be in that one percent or that two percent, okay? Progress comes from taking action, getting feedback, and improving. Okay, perfectionism is not gonna get us anywhere. If you're scared of going to a speaking class because you're worried about not being good enough, you're worried about making mistakes, you're worried about what I think about you. Please, please, please do that mindset shift now, okay? Show up, make the mistakes, push yourself to try new things, get feedback on that, and then you come back and improve the next day. It's a little bit better, and the next day it's a little bit better. And day after day you're going to see that improvement much better than someone who, before they're going to join a speaking session, thinks they must learn all the vocabulary on that topic, or practice everything and be perfect at it first before we go to the speaking sessions. Okay, that is not going to help you improve. Turning up, trying something, make mistake, fail, get feedback, improve. This is the key to that top one or two percent. And what I found is, and this is what popped up um a few times over the the past couple of weeks in in classes, that um I had some students who were doing uh reading tests, they were practicing the reading exam, and they were doing task after task after task. They're like Cheryl, I'm not improving, I'm not getting better, uh I'm I'm frustrated and I'm annoyed, what's going on? But the thing was that they were skipping that analysis stage of them of their um of their tasks. They were skipping the most, most important part, which is we've made a mistake, okay. Let's think about how we can get feedback on that mistake so that we can fix it for the next task we do. If you do 10 tasks in a row, let's say we do 10 reading part fives, one after the other after the other after the other, and then at the end you check them all and see your mistakes. You're probably going to have about the same scores for all of them because we haven't got that feedback in the middle before we progress. Okay, so like the person doing five pieces of writing. We don't want to do five without getting that feedback in the middle in order to improve. So same with any task. Do a task, analyze it, understand why you made those mistakes, fix those mistakes before you do another task. Analyze it, fix mistakes before you do another task. Before anything, okay? Um if you get them all wrong, that doesn't mean that you're not good enough. That doesn't mean that you're disappointing others, it doesn't mean that you're a failure and that you're never going to improve. All it shows you is the things that you need to work on. It gives you the data or the data, potato potato, it gives you the data that you can use to move forward and improve. Imagine a child who was learning to walk, they were taking their first steps for the first time, and they fell down. Imagine if the mum then was like, Oh, I give up, they are a failure, they're not good enough, they're disappointing me, they should have got that perfect the first time. You would be like, Cheryl, that's crazy, it's ridiculous. And it's but it's the same thing here, okay? You're trying something for the first time, you need to get feedback, you need to practice it and fix those mistakes before trying again. Okay, so that is my motivational pet talk for this week. If you want to get up to that one or two percent, get comfortable making mistakes. Let's get rid of that perfectionism. Action is going to beat perfectionism in our progress every single time. So, whatever you have been avoiding this week, this is your sign, this is your your chance, your opportunity to fix that, to take action, get it done. Do it now. Turn off this podcast, take action on that thing that you have been avoiding. I guarantee you it's gonna get you there faster. That's it from me. Uh, if you found this useful, let me know. If you want to chat about this more, let me know. Uh let me know in the comments. I'd love to keep keep this conversation going because I think it's a really, really powerful lesson. And uh guys, we'll see you next Monday.