The Ultimate Secret of Speaking (English) Well

Unlike all other articles on how to speak better English, this blog entry is brought to you my ultimate secret sauce on how to speak English better.

In fact, this article is not particular written for English as second language population. Especially if your first language is English, I guarantee that you could find values from this blog entry as much as ESLs.

Read on if you wonder how.

Over the past two years, I’ve been looking for the so-called secrete sauce to improve my speaking skills. As an East Asian, you know what I mean here.

Through countless trials and errors, I came to the final realization: the secret is really no secret. Interesting enough, the ultimate roadblock of speaking any language well is not any external factors such as unfamiliarity of pronunciations or difficult grammar. It is Yourself.

Speaking well comes down to our mindsets. If you always think a task is challenging, you would subconsciously limit your abilities performing well or moving forward.

Say if there is any secret behind a great speaker (in any language), confidence is what it is. The next is self-love.

We are bounded by limited minds. That’s why there are only a few of us became billionaires simply because most of us didn’t believe they could.

Our biggest challenge is the limited mind. That’s why we fail to get what we want. In order to excel in life, we need to unleash our minds first.

And that’s how confidence, the “secret sauce” comes to play.

When you are confident, you believe that you can succeed anything your heart desire (including speaking well). To begin with, you need to imagine the success as if you’ve already done it. Being confident is not the same as being arrogant: it’s to have faith in one’s own abilities.

Mind is powerful. When talking to those who speak well, dress in suits or higher up, we tend to cringe as if we can barely speak around them. Why? Because our minds give up the confidence by believing they are superiors. If you view others as equal despite of whom you talk with, you will perform much better than you think.

Think about the following scenarios:

• Did you cringe in front of an attractive woman so you stumble over words?

• Did you stare down on the floor when forgetting the lines during a presentation?

• Did your heart pump fast during a job interview?

• Did you think your accent (if you are an ESL) feels heavier and have harder time structuring your thoughts when speaking to a natively born person?

If your answers contain yes, it means that you don’t trust yourself enough to overcome any challenges that come along. It means that you don’t love yourself well enough.

Self-love is a concept that is well known but difficult to implement. Self-love is to embrace the imperfections of us regardless what others think. We are the products from the nature, so we are all perfectly imperfect. There is no reason to not love yourself.

Confidence and self-love are closed related. When you are lack of self-love, you lose confidence within and start to cringe in front of others.

Let me run you through another set of questions to test you on self-love:

• Do you think you don’t look good enough?

• Do you criticize yourself harshly using negative words (if used upon others, you would be institutionalized)

• When you make a mistake, do you blame yourself for it?

If you had yes in the answers, you should work on loving yourself more. Believing that you are perfect the way you are can boost your confident level, which helps you to speak better, either in private conversation or a presentation at a public event.

Confidence is contingence. When you appear to be confidence, it can be projected to others around you. When you are confident about yourself, your brain gets energized, sentences flows, volume improves, and your eye contacts absorb attentions. As a result, others enjoy talking to you more. Your confidence also makes you well respected by others as a result.

Some ESLs wonder: what do I do for practice besides being confident and loving myself? All you need is to spend 5- 10 minutes reading article aloud everyday, and an extra 5- 10 minutes practicing words that you found difficult to pronounce.

Before I close, I will reveal another trick that works for me. It is listening. If you are ESLs, pay attention to how natively born people link words together to make sentences flow: the rhythm of the language. In addition, learn the expressions that local people use instead of creating your own: copy and paste.

When you listen differently, you will find you speak much better.

In the past, I spent 1-1.5 hours practicing my speaking every single day. 2 months ago, I realized it’s unnecessary. Practice on your own can only take you that far.

The keys (secret sauce) really boiled down to self-confidence and self-love. Once you have these two, the rest will come with time.