How using your character strengths can improve your English

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi and welcome to The 3 English Experts. I'm Birgit. I'm Dave. And I'm Rebecca. And welcome to this episode. 3 English Experts is your English podcast to help you speak better English and create a positive and happy mindset for your English learning journey. Hi everyone. Welcome back. Today's episode, we are going back to a mindset topic. As you probably know now, if you've been listening to us for a while, I'm really interested in the connection between mindset and language learning. I really believe languages are not just academic, they are emotional. And so this connection between your motivation, your mindset and your success is really important. You also might remember, I am currently studying positive psychology to become a positive psychology practitioner, a PPP for short. And just a reminder, I am heading now into my final project where I need volunteers. I need some people to join a test kind of course, let's say, which will be focusing on mindset and language learning. So if you're interested, it is completely free. I am not allowed to charge money. So if you would like to be a member of this course to join in, it's going to be online. So basically, it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you've got an internet connection, you can join. Drop me a message at rebecca.deakin at web.de, or you can contact us here at 3englishexperts.com. And that would be nice to have some nice people joining my course. So today's topic is character strengths. And if you know something about coaching or something about psychology, you might have heard about strength-based approach, the strength-based approach coaching, for example. So we're going to talk about what does that mean? What is it? And how can we potentially utilize this approach for our language learning? First of all, I'm here, of course, as always with Birgit and Dave. So I'm going to ask them, first of all, when you say the word strength, character strength, what pops into your mind? What does it even mean? What is a character strength? Any thoughts? Well, something you're good at or that comes easily to you. Something you feel good about. Absolutely. This is one of the perfect definitions there, Birgit. Thank you. Well done, Birgit. Well done, really. She's understood the assignment. Spontaneously. She's on the ball. Yeah, something that feels natural, that you're good at. And it feels good. And you don't have to really work on it or focus on it. It's just something that comes naturally to you. And of course, this is different for everybody. Everyone has different strengths. And generally, there are studies that show when we utilize our strengths, when we're using them, we feel good. It gives us a feel good factor. So it gives us a positive feeling when you're using your strengths. If you think about normally in life, we're always focused on what am I not good at? What do I need to fix? Oh, I'm not good at speaking in public or I'm really not good at learning languages or I need to work on, we're always focused on what we need to work on. We don't always talk enough about what are we good at? What are we actually good at? And how can that help us in life? How can we utilize that? Ask people in an interview question styles, what are your top three strengths? They all cringe. They all go, oh, I don't want to talk about my strengths. I don't know. People are uncomfortable with it. Would you agree, Dave? People are uncomfortable talking about strengths? I would say so. And particularly culturally, from a British perspective, certainly that we often downplay even our strengths, more humble in that respect. So definitely with the Brits, concerning the Brits, I think the Americans tend to be that little bit more forward in promoting themselves generally. But of course, this is a generalization, absolutely. But I think there are still the cultural differences there, but it is more of a generalization. I think a lot of people I meet, obviously, who don't feel that language comes naturally or English language comes naturally, I hear, oh, I must, I should, I need. It's like pushing. We tend to push ourselves a lot. I think this is what we learn here in Germany in our upbringing, education, at least. I feel that way. Of course, I was pushing myself a lot for a long time. So yes, it's not the first thing you say, OK, oh, I'm very good at. Here I am. That's not what we do. No, there might be people, but not in general. I would say generally they're quite humble or they've been educated to be like that. I'm not sure. Yeah. They do not blow their own trumpet, as people would say. They will not say what they're good at. OK, in positive psychology, these characteristics, strengths, let's say, were categorized by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, who are big names in positive psychology. And they really wrote this massive book, actually, and defined what they all mean and what are the benefits of this. There are also negative sides. You can, for example, overplay your strengths. Kindness is actually one of my top strengths. And sometimes I'm too nice and then I get taken advantage of. So it can have a negative effect if you overplay your strengths. But in general, they can bring a lot of benefits. So they were defined and they cataloged them and made sort of 24 strengths, for example, things like creativity or courage or kindness. And there is a survey you can do online. We've mentioned it before, but we'll put the link in the show notes where you can do a survey. It's completely free. Millions of people have done this survey. It's very popular. And you get a free report. Birgit mentioned she got hers in German, so you can do it in different languages, as far as I know. And it will tell you what your top strengths are in this nice kind of report. And it's completely free. I'm going to try and guess, so Birgit and Dave have done the report, so I'm going to try and guess. Yeah, I've done it too. I've done it a few times. It's nice to guess, actually, when you know someone quite well. What do you think their strengths are for nice activity? I'm going to go with Dave first. I'm not sure, but I think... Is your top strength humour? Oh, actually, no, can I tell which number it is? Yeah, yeah. It's the third one. Oh, wow. Top three. Top three. Well done. Yeah, very good. Very good. So what's your top strength then? What came out top? Kindness. Oh, wow. Yes. Very good. Nice one. Okay. And number two? Love. Love? Is your wife listening? Is your wife listening? Welcome to the ladies' club. Here we go. Here we go. And he's funny. What more do you want? Absolutely. Did you show her the results? No. I've sent her a copy of the PDF. Yes, I have. But I don't know if she's read it yet. Okay. Wonderful. Fantastic. I would say also, actually, Rebecca, for people listening and want to do it, try doing it in English because it's wonderful also for your English. There's all kinds of good vocabulary in there to help you learn English. And I would highly recommend to do it in English just for that alone. It's a great survey to do for that. Yeah. Yeah. And if there's any sort of people who work in training or HR people, it's a great vocabulary collection of how to describe people. That's quite nice. Yeah. Okay. All right. So Birgit. Let me guess, Dave. Do you have any ideas? What do you think? I've got a couple of ideas for Birgit. For number one. I'm tricky. I'm tricky. Complex. Complex. Yes. I guess that actually all three of us are pretty similar, actually. If I'm looking at yours, Rebecca, as well as Birgit, I would say as I had the kindness, love and humour, I would imagine you guys have pretty much the same, but I could be wrong. My top one is humour, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. My second one is kindness. And my third one is the love of learning actually was number three. Love of learning. Okay. Love's in there. Yeah. I don't fit in here. I'm sorry. Oh, no. Humour is number 10 only. Kindness, number six. Number six. Okay. I'm going to guess for Birgit. Just guess. When I was reading these and I was thinking, oh, that's Birgit. I had zest as number one. What's that? Zest. Zest. So what does that mean? Yeah. Enthusiasm. Excitement. Vitality. Energy. Life is an adventure. Feeling alive. Is that your number one? It's not my number one. No. Okay. My other one. You don't have to be sorry. My other one was creativity. Creativity. No. Also not. Shall I tell you? Yes. Yes. You're now really. I'm really curious now. Judgment. Oh. Judgment. And then second. Honesty. I'm a really honest. Honest. Okay. Very high. And persistence. Oh, persistence. Yeah. Perseverance. Okay. So judgment is you're a critical thinker. You're very analytical. Right. Definitely. Definitely does fit with your grammar side of you. You're very. I'm sorry. Really rules and all that is important somehow. Honesty. I knew honesty ranks really high on my scale. Which is authenticity as well. Being honest. You know who you are and what you think. And persistence. Oh yeah. That can be also very negative sometimes for people. I wouldn't let go. Why is that negative? On the other side, it means you are hardworking, you overcome obstacles, you finish what you start. Actually, persistence. It's very important. Yeah. Birgit tells me one day, I'm going to write a book. Two months later. I've written my book. Wow. Okay. She's written the book. I'm writing another book. Okay. Not too long later. I'm nearly finished. Wow. Okay. Yes. Persistence fits, doesn't it? No. Don't apologize. But I'm not. My kindness only comes number six. Love, seven. Humor, ten. So all these important social skills. They're all important in a different way. It was also divided into strong, medium or middle and weaker one, wasn't it, Rebecca? Exactly. Yeah. They go down the list. You're 24 is the sort of weaker strength. Let's say. Yeah. Okay. So what does all this have to do with language learning? This is the next question. Already back in the 70s, psychologists were studying how do people learn a second language and they looked into what they called successful language learners and tried to study what was it that made these people successful. And of course, some of it was the processes they were using or the strategies or the methodology they were using, but some of it was also they looked at people's character and personality. So they realized that actually they had a slightly different strength skill set, let's say, than the less successful learners. So looking at your list, Dave, Birgit, what would you say? And you're both language learners and you work with language learners. What kind of strengths do you think are helpful in a language learning environment? Birgit, do you want to kick off? Yeah, definitely. I know it's curiosity. You need to be open, curious, persistent. I think that's also important somehow. Curiosity. We heard that also from Ellen when we talked to her in our episode. Love to learn. Love to learn. I think if I see that, I love to learn, yeah. Absolutely. And on the list was perseverance, came up very high. This willingness to keep going. We've talked about this so often. You have to keep going. You have to see the long journey, the big picture. Curiosity. Self-relicate regulation was one as well, I think, with the sort of discipline, maybe. Absolutely. Curiosity is a huge one, actually, for language learning. I think we've all had learners where you have the learners who sit and wait to be fed the language, let's say, like soup. And there's others who just ask questions and they want to know why is it like this? And they have all these questions. And it's a different type of learning experience. Birgit, would you agree with that? I always have these questions. Yeah. And I know that from myself. If you have questions and you want to know, that's a driving force, isn't it? If you haven't got that, I don't know. Difficult. So my question would be, if these characteristics don't come up as top strength in your personality, what does that mean for your language learning? Are you not able then or what does positive psychology have? Yeah. We're coming to that in a moment. OK. Coming to that in a moment. Another question. Yes. She's asking questions. I'm a trained journalist. I'm not bad at what I learn. That was a good choice. Yeah. We're going to talk about that, how you can potentially build that. Yeah. So we've had curiosity, perseverance, a love of learning. Anything else you can think of? What about social intelligence? I'm not sure whether that's... Social intelligence, understanding people, how to communicate languages, communication. So definitely. Another big one that came up too that I think are quite interesting. Courage. Yeah. To be brave, to be courageous, because it does take courage to walk up to someone in a foreign environment or stand up in a room or even sit in front of your co-workers and speak in another language. That takes courage. I always feel sad when I hear people trying to speak another language and people make fun. And I think, how courageous is that? To sit there and despite everything, to stand and make mistakes and or have a different accent or it's extremely courageous, I think. So courage, being brave, you have to be brave. One of the reasons why some people speak better when they've had alcohol, because they get this what they call Dutch courage and they lose these inhibitions. I'm not promoting you have to get drunk to speak a language, but it's an explanation of this courage, being courageous. Hope was another one. You have to be hopeful. If everything's doom and gloom and oh, I'm never going to, I'm never going to get better, then you will give up. So being hopeful. Yeah, that's actually number four on my list. But courage is very down, not so high. Yeah. Interesting, isn't it? That surprises me. Yeah. I think I make up with all my other characteristics, maybe because of my curiosity, my hope. Social intelligence is high. But I know that speaking in front of a large crowd or a group, that doesn't come naturally to me. So maybe that's, I'm just finding out why I always feel like, oh, it doesn't feel good. Maybe my courage is not that big. Yeah. Maybe. Although you take risks. I would say, Birgit, you're someone who takes risks, you know, you're not afraid to try different things. Interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Maybe I can find in the book more about this topic issue. Yeah. Obviously, the test is not perfect. It doesn't mean it's absolutely, completely 100 percent accurate. It's more like a guideline. So we had perseverance, courage, hope, curiosity. Very important. Any other thoughts, Dave, on what makes good language learners? Looking at the list, I thought the other one that you could also, or two maybe even, is firstly, creativity, being creative in your learning process. Maybe often trying to find imaginative or creative ways to learn or to try to remember words sometimes by putting pictures or something connecting a mental picture to a word to help you to remember it. So there's that one. And maybe also for forgiveness, that's not necessarily for other people in this case, but for yourself, that you don't say, oh, connected to hope, there will be a future. You will get better if you continue to learn and try. If you don't improve in a shorter period of time, then forgive yourself. Don't worry about it. Don't beat yourself up about it. But just keep going. The perseverance, which you also said is very important, that it will come, but you just have to be nice and gentle with yourself. And if you make mistakes, that's what you're there for, to make mistakes to get better once you're corrected. So I think those two are also probably very important for language learners. I love that. Yeah. Forgiveness, forgiving yourself and not, like you say, beating yourself up. Love that. OK. Yeah. The question is, what do we do with all this information? So we've got this information. And of course, you start thinking because Big is already analyzing herself with this report. Don't look at me. The key here is whether it's either utilizing your strengths or trying to build some of the others a little bit higher. So first of all, utilizing. So let's say one of your top strengths is creativity. How do I use that in language learning? Yeah. Find creative outlets, find creative ways to learn. So there were studies where they got groups to journal, for example, do journaling, creative writing in the target language, writing poetry in the target language or reading literature. If that's your thing, find some really good literature in the target language or art. Go to a museum and do a tour. They do tours here in Frankfurt, the Stiedel, they do them in English. Art after work. Brilliant. I've done that with a few groups. You would love that, Birgit. Yeah. Birgit the art girl. So things like that. I think of, try to align. Is this kind of alignment of your strengths with your target and your target is to improve your English? So let's align that with my strengths. If you're not an analytical person, it doesn't make sense to analyze the grammar too much because that's just not going to fit with your mindset. For example, what else was I going to say? Curiosity. That's one of my, also quite high up on my strengths. Combine it with something like food. Another one of my strengths, food, eating. Oh goodness. I can relate to that. You can relate to that. We can all relate to that. We all love our food. But I love watching, for example, in Spanish, I watch this woman, this chef, Loli Dominguez, and she cooks traditional Spanish food. She's proper old school. I love her. She's brilliant. And sometimes if I want to improve my Spanish, I just spend 10 minutes watching a YouTube video of how to make proper tortilla and just listening to her and I enjoy it. I'm curious because I want to know, how do I do this? At the same time, I'm building my language skills. Go to a restaurant, try different foods, look at the vocabulary, look at the sort of, get into the culture of somewhere, I think. Japanese. My Japanese came from a curiosity about Japan and the culture and the language. It wasn't just a random idea, it was curiosity. So you can build like that. And building certain strengths so big, you said you feel you're not courageous or courage was a little bit further down. Little challenges, trying new things that make you a little bit uncomfortable, is small steps outside your comfort zone. So take a risk, a little risk, doesn't have to be a big thing. So in a language context, it could be, I'm going to speak in the next meeting and I'm going to prepare my phrase and I'm going to use this nice vocabulary that I've learned, but I'm going to say something, even if it's only for 20 seconds. I'm going to sit with one of my English speaking colleagues and have lunch with them and force myself to just chat for half an hour. It's this kind of pushing yourself. And the more you do this, you will get this, you will get this success feeling, which motivates you to keep going. But ultimately just focusing on your top ones is probably the most successful strategy is utilizing what you're good at and aligning that with your language learning journey. Humor, for example, I did something called positive psychology intervention, PPI, where for six weeks I decided what I wanted to improve. I wanted to improve my positive emotions about Spanish because I had a lot of negative emotions about my Spanish due to a professor back at university who always made me feel negative and not very nice, not very good about my Spanish. I've always carried these kind of negative emotions. So I did a positive intervention. So I decided to try and build positive emotions by utilizing my strengths, which is humor, top strength humor. So I spent six weeks watching Spanish comedy and singing Spanish songs because I love singing and that is something that really makes me happy. So this was my sort of zest combined with comedy. I watched like my favorite comedies like Friends or I don't know, Seinfeld and all this kind of stuff in Spanish and it was actually quite good, pushed me because I was having fun and I already knew the stories because I'd seen them before, but it built my positive emotion connection to Spanish. It sounds a bit bizarre, I know, but it was quite good. The singing didn't work so well because I got, I think I got COVID in the middle and then I couldn't sing. I lost my voice. So the singing was a bit of a disaster, but I did listen to some nice Spanish music. Yeah, so you can do these kind of interventions and that is something I'm hoping to work with people on in the workshop is trying to build a personalized intervention in a way for our participants. We're having this workshop in September and Mindset is going to be part of that. So yeah, tailoring a kind of personalized intervention to what are your issues with English language learning and how can you promote that? Don't worry, I'm not going to make you sing for six weeks. In Spanish, on top of that. They're all very personal. There's nothing. That's just me. So you don't have to. I think that makes perfect sense what you say, because as you said, I also believe it's a feeling that goes into the language because in the end, when we want to communicate in a different language, we always need to have a connection to what we want to say, how we want to say that or personality we bring across into the group. And you have to feel good about that. That's really important. And worry a lot less about making mistakes. I think that's very good here. And that's shifting focus, isn't it? Because a lot of people have this focus because maybe a teacher said something not very nice and you always repeat, as you said before, I'm not good at, I need to, I must and get rid of that. And shifting... Negativity. Yeah. Yeah. Just going back to Dave and your kindness. For example, you're learning your Spanish, utilize your kindness would be perhaps ask chat GPT. I've done this before and say kindness is my top character strength. Can you give me some phrases in Spanish that are polite and kind that I could use in everyday life and learn, learn complete set phrases over interactions for wherever you're in a restaurant, you're in the supermarket, whatever you're doing. That kind of emphasize your strength, which is your kindness, because that's probably what you do in your own language. You speak in a way that is kind and respectful. And so by doing that might be a way to utilize that into your Spanish. Absolutely. Yeah. Kindness. I volunteer at an old people's home in Germany. Kindness is one of my strengths. And I use my German all the time there because they, they think I'm insane. Always like, why are you here? We need to mention that. We want to have one episode where Rebecca tells us about my golden girls. We had a French day and I spent the afternoon speaking German in a fake French accent as an English girl. And I had to confuse people completely. Yeah. And you learn these phrases when they're upset or they're sad or they're confused. You learn how to express, make them feel better and how to try and comfort people in German, which is something, again, I'm utilizing one of my strengths, but while using one of my languages, which is good. And you get into this, what people call flow. Have you heard of flow, guys? Oh, definitely. Yeah. So what's flow, Birgit? When you don't have to think about what you want to say next. I think that's what people want to do. Get into the flow. Words are just coming. Like you have a lot of words available and then you can just choose, they're there. That's what happens when you immerse into a language or spend time in the country. Yeah. And flow can be anything. It can be language, it can be art, it can be playing music, it can be just working on something that you're good at. And this is the point is this getting into a state of flow of where you're not worried about mistakes. You're just in the zone, let's say. And often people are in flow when they're utilizing their strengths. That's when you feel flow because it just comes naturally. Yeah. OK. Thank you. Just one question. Is this fairly new approach, positive psychology, language learning, or has it been around for a long time? I don't know when these people you mentioned were. Yeah. Positive psychology is the newer wave of psychology generally. With language learning and positive psychology, it's still all quite new. When I've been doing my research, there are a lot of papers, but it's still being investigated. So it's quite interesting. There's a lot going on and I think there's a lot of potential to build on what's already been done. But yeah, psychology of linguistics has been around for a long time since 60s and 70s, at least just looking into the connection between how people communicate, how people learn and the psychology of that, this sort of positive psychology, positive education. It's all connected to positive education, actually, which is something that Martin Seligman and positive psychology, they really kicked off this positive education. What can they did a lot in schools, how to show kids actually about their character strengths, how to help kids highlight and see rather than looking at what are you bad at, let's look at what you're good at and let's see how we can utilize that in every subject, whether it's maths or sports or whatever it is, and not always saying, you're not good at this and you're not good at that. We all know that we all went through the school system. Hopefully it is a bit of a movement and it's going to change things, but I'm hoping that I'm going to add my little part to language learning with positive education. Absolutely. Yeah. So if you want to join a course, guys, anyone listening out there, drop me a message, go to my website or go to the podcast website and let me know and maybe you can join my experiment. Great stuff. The Golden Nugget. So Rebecca was talking all about strengths and one of them was creativity and using creativity to help you learn your language. And she mentioned things like journaling or reading or things like this. So that links in with our special part of the episode where we give you a little Golden Nugget. Today it's Morning Brew. You've probably never heard of it. And if you have, well done, great thing. It's a newsletter coming out of America called Morning Brew, just Google Morning Brew. Brew is B-R-E-W coming from having the brew in the morning, a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. Because of course in America it comes out around their morning time and over here in Europe it's in lunchtime. And it's full of news items, also current affairs generally, and also specifically in the areas of business, finance, also technology, all these kinds of areas. What I love about them is the articles are very short, very well written, lots of useful vocabulary, interesting vocabulary. And I love to use them in my actual sessions with my students. I often use them to take out new vocabulary to talk about the topics because, of course, it's very up to date. So I really recommend getting this. It's totally for free to sign up. You get it totally for free and you get it in your inbox around lunchtime every day. So that's the golden nugget for this week. Morning Brew, highly recommendable newsletter. And especially if you're into reading new things, learning new things and also, of course, recapping on the news of the day or the news of the times, that's a really good place to go. So next time we're going to have a special episode. This is we're going to talk to Jeff O'Day from Japan, originally from Australia, but he works in Japan with Japanese professionals. And that's a very interesting conversation. We're having a nice interview guest, fantastic input. I'm really thrilled about having that out and online soon. Yes, I can highly recommend listening to that next episode and hopefully you will be joining us. So talk to you then. Thanks for listening today and bye for now. So are you ready to upgrade your English? Do you still feel?