Practice English Speaking&Listening with: True Courage

- Here's what I believe the meaning of true courage is.

Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook, from DoingEnglish.com.

People often speak about wanting to be

a confident speaker of english.

Somebody who projects confidence when they speak.

Someone who appears to be highly proficient in english.

Charismatic when they speak english

may be a better way to put it.

What does that mean, exactly?

Does it mean being perfect in english?

Does it mean never making a mistake

with your words or your grammar

or having perfect pronunciation,

an accent that is identical to that of a native speaker?

No, I don't believe it is.

And, in fact, if you are that person, fantastic.

You have made it.

And, indeed, that is the kind of person

that I help people to become, in a sense.

But I don't believe there's anything particularly

courageous about stepping out into the world

in that kind of state and using english.

In fact, I think if you have reached that level,

just getting out there is a given

and it's nothing special and it's nothing really to praise.

I believe that true courage, truly courageous people,

are those who are not there yet.

Their english is not perfect.

Their english still needs work.

Yet, they are still willing to step up

and do stuff in english.

I believe the most important thing,

the most essential element of being high level,

highly successful, highly proficient,

effective speaker of english as a second language

is the ability to do things in english.

And the willingness to do so

even if you're not yet perfect.

Even if you do still need to do some work to your english.

There is something far more confident,

something far more charismatic about people

who have the courage to do that.

Think about any film that you have seen

where you have the superhero, who at least on the surface,

in the beginning appears to be perfect

but then we see that they have some kind of

character flaw, some kind of weakness.

And it's not until that character overcomes their weakness,

faces it in the real world, faces their fears,

as it were, that we see them as a truly courageous,

truly charismatic, confident person.

So if you are still working on your english,

still trying to improve, know that is not a reason

not to get out there and do things in english.

Indeed, we get good at what we do.

And the more that you have the courage to step up

and do stuff in english right now,

the faster that improvement is going to be.

I, of course, can help you to get there faster.

By, metaphorically at least, taking you by the hand

and leading you down the right path.

And the place to start is DoingEnglish.com/FreeTraining

where you can watch my free training

which will teach you the five key changes

that you need to make to improve in english

as a high level english speaker.

This, then, is it for me, Julian Northbrook,

signing out from another video.

If you found this useful, give it a nice big thumbs up.

If you didn't, give it a thumbs up anyway.

I will see you, my friend, in the next video.

Thank you and bye bye.

(rock music)