Be Nicer to Yourself

Last Saturday, I went to a community gardening’s open house, hosted by a member of toastmasters (an organization where people practice communication and public speaking skills). Towards the end of the meeting, someone approached me and greeted me warmly and loudly: “hey Helen, how have you been?”

I turned around and completely recognized this friendly greeter. Her name is Nandini, a distinguished toastmaster (or DTM, referring to toastmasters who’ve completed all level of toastmasters challenges: bronze, silver, and gold). We chatted for a while, and the conversation stirred into English practice. I called it a hot topic, as it’s been one of my priorities since April 2015.

I asked Nandini: “Every morning, I have to warm up my English speaking voice (10-minute reading aloud) before I can talk fluently. If I skip the practice, I tend to sound muffle. However, I do know some ESLs (people those English as their second language) can speak well without warming up. This got me thinking: I should skip the warm-up too. I tried it out for a week and I absolutely hated it. Especially, I noticed my pronunciation clarity dropped quite a bit. Obviously, warm up is necessary for me. I end up wondering what’s wrong with myself.”

After hearing my thought, here is what Nandini said: “You just need to be nicer to yourself. There is nothing wrong with you at all. We are all wired differently so what works for others might not work for you. I’m part of the choir of my church. I need to review some graphs before the team started singing. Looking at graphs is the warm-up for me, like the one you do. To other people, what I do doesn’t make sense and perhaps wired to them, but it works for me all the time. So don’t feel bad for having to do something others might not understand. As long as it works for you, that’s completely fine.”

This made me think of a toastmaster friend, Ebad Naqvi. He had to go through lots of practice before finally speaking like a natively born Canadian. That probably took quite numbers of years before he let go of his daily warm-up. Necessity of warm-up is also dependent on at what age one started speaking English, as well as his or her language of origin. In general, English speaking is much easier for those who started before age 10 or those whose first language origin is solar Eclipse (or Sun. See full list: http://www.mreclipse.com/Special/SElanguage.html). In other words, if you are either or both, you don’t necessarily need any warm up as a practice to keep up with your speaking.

Starting age and language origin are part of what Nadini said about ‘individuality’. Since we are all differently wired, we just need to find what works for us, which might not be understandable to others at all.

You are not ascetic, wired, or a different breed. You just doing what works for you, and that’s all. Please be nicer to yourself.