Happy New Year everyone!
I hope you all had a great 2013 and I wish you all tremendous success in 2014 – in all areas of your life!
As you know, New Year’s Day is often a time for reflection and planning ahead. This is a time when we look back at the last 12 months and consider what we have accomplished, what we have completed, what went well and what didn’t. It is also a time to think about the future.
What will the next 12 months bring?
What do you want to experience this year?
What do you want to achieve?
What do you want to do?
I hope that one of your goals this year is to improve your English.
Learning a language is a life-long process, so whether you are a true beginner, an intermediate or even an advanced English learner, there is always room for growth and improvement.
So, in the spirit of helping you create a program that will ensure great success this year (and always), I want to share with you a term that I learned about from Anthony Robbins, an internationally renowned speaker, author and personal development coach.
The term is CANI and it stands for Constant and Never-Ending Improvement.
This is how I want you to think about approaching your English language learning this year.
What can you do in order to achieve constant and never-ending improvement in English?
I suggest you write down what that would look like for you. You know where you are, and you likely have an idea about where you would like to be in the future.
How do you get there?
Sometimes we focus on goals.
Here are some examples of common English-related goals:
- Be able to understand 80% of a movie in English.
- Pass the TOEFL or IELTS test, achieving the scores necessary to get into a university in the US.
- Be able to understand simple dialogues between two native English speakers.
- Be able to communicate with my mother-in-law about day-to-day topics while visiting her in the US.
- Be able to make a presentation to my colleagues in English, with confidence and ease.
- Create a new website for my business, in English, in order to expand my market.
- Read one book per month, in English, with complete understanding.
- Speak clearly and correctly in my work situation.
- Improve my English so that I can get a job at the local call center.
- Be able to write emails to colleagues, in English, using correct grammar and colloquial expressions
How are you going to achieve these goals?
This morning, I read an article by Phil Grossman, in which he recommended focusing on your systems, rather than your goals. Your goal tells you where you want to be, what the result will be, but your systems are what will actually help you get there.
Your systems will put you on the path to progress, which eventually leads to success.
This year, I suggest you concentrate on your system for learning English, and not just on your goals.
What will you do every day?
What you do every day is what will help you achieve your goals. This is what will help you be successful in 2014.
Your system might include the following:
- Listening to the same podcast each day for three days in a row.
- Listening to my new Success with Stories, Volume 1 Lessons (which will soon be released) each day for one hour.
- Watching an English movie once or more per week.
- Reading one news article or blog post per day.
- Reading 10 pages per day of a book written in English.
- Writing 500 words in English each day.
- Listening to 30 minutes of the news in English, each day.
- Learning one new song per week, in English.
- Speaking with someone for one hour per week, in English.
Whatever you are doing, whether it is listening, reading, speaking or writing, do it over and over again – make it a part of your system.
Commitment to your system will lead to mastery!
I wish you great success in 2014!
~Lisa
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.” ~ Jim Rohn