From Self-Doubt to Self-Confidence: Transforming Negative Thoughts To Conquer the CELPIP

Have you ever found yourself suddenly tuning into the thoughts that you have rolling around in your mind and realizing, wow, that's pretty negative or self defeating, or simply not what you want to be thinking about yourself? This happens to me where I'll catch myself.

My thoughts being super negative or just dwelling on a worry or something that didn't go well, instead of being kind or helpful, those thoughts tend to drag me down or make me feel down about myself or my situation. It's kind of shocking when you tune into one of those negative trains of thought, isn't it? At least I find it to be.

Like I said a moment ago, it's like suddenly realizing, man, I really don't like what I'm thinking about myself here. Hit the brakes, change the channel. Sometimes it's easy to change the thoughts that we have going on in our mind.

I can just push them aside and replace them with something else, or simply try to focus on what it is that I'm trying to focus on. But other times, times when maybe there's a lot of pressure or stress, those negative thoughts can put up quite a fight.

I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about.

If you've tried, for example, multiple times to pass the CELPIP exam, but each time you don't get the score you need, that right there, my friend, is a great place for those negative trains of thought to run recklessly through you, causing all kinds of nasty things inside of you if you hop on and allow those negative thoughts to take you along with them. I failed again. Boy, I suck at this. I might as well give up.

Coming here to Canada, leaving home as difficult it was back there has been the worst thing I've ever done. What a mistake. I'm never gonna get this. I'm a mess. I might as well give up and go home.

Anyway, one of the most important things that we can be doing as we enter this brand new year is making sure our mindset is not pulling us down or holding us back. And I'm talking to myself here.

Just as I am sharing this with you, I also need to make sure that my mindset is positive and not dwelling on the negative.

In today's episode, we're going to take a look at why your mindset, especially a negative one, can be one of the top reasons you didn't get the SELP of score were looking for and what you can do about it. And if you haven't taken the test yet, this idea will still be helpful for you. Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast.

This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam.

I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you, who are working towards becoming fluent in English so we can learn from their experiences together. Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson and I've been an English teacher for over 17 years and I'm a certified CELPIP trainer.

I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. So maybe you're thinking I already got a low score on the celpip. What does a negative mindset have to do with that? Well, a lot.

Let's do a little test together. And don't worry, you don't need to study for this one. You're already an expert on this topic. Are you ready?

If you've already gotten a lower CELPIP score than you wanted, what were the first few things you thought about yourself as you looked at your test results? If a negative mindset is something that you were struggling with, you likely thought something like, ah, I'm so stupid. I'll never get this.

I suck at English and I'll never learn. Coming to Canada or wanting to go to Canada was such a dumb idea. What was I thinking?

Or maybe you have something different but equally as nasty rolling around English your mind. The horrible thing about negative self talk or a negative mindset is that you actually start to believe the things you say about yourself.

And the scarier thing about thoughts is that if you entertain many of them long enough, if you keep them going in your mind long enough, you begin to live and act them out. You believe that they're true, so you start to act that way.

So if you know you're struggling with a negative mindset, here are some ideas that I know work and I know because I've used them myself. What to do about negative thoughts? Well, number one, don't ignore them. Talk about them instead.

Find someone you trust and let them know how you're feeling.

For me, that is my wife, very often I will Tell her when I am feeling down, when I am feeling discouraged, when I have those negative thoughts that keep coming, pestering me and bothering me, I will tell her, well, let me rephrase that. She'll probably notice and say, hey, what's wrong? And that is my perfect opportunity to open up and share what's going on.

So if you didn't get the Celpip score that you were hoping for, you of course are going to feel very disappointed and frustrated. A recent interview I had with someone who had taken the SELPIP exam but didn't get the score that they wanted.

Well, she confessed to feeling heartbroken over it, that she had worked so hard and yet didn't get the score she was hoping for. You know, you've likely worked very hard to prepare for the exam.

And if you are one of the ones who work so hard only to have a lower than what you wanted result, it's like all of a sudden all of your hard work that all of your months of practicing and trying, it's like it just doesn't matter. Well, my friend, if that's you, don't let those negative thoughts get stuck inside your mind. Talk about them with someone. Air it out.

Open the doors to your thoughts with someone who you trust and let them know what's happening.

Chances are they're going to be able to hear you and encourage you and help you to realize that all those thoughts that you're thinking simply aren't true. Natural? Yes. Normal. Yes. Normal to feel down. Normal to feel frustrated.

But if you share what's going on inside of your thoughts with someone that knows you and loves you and cares about you, I bet you they're going to do their very best to encourage you and help you to keep going. So make sure that you talk about all the things that you're thinking about after a negative result on the test. Don't keep it to yourself.

Number two, write your negative thoughts about yourself down. Write it in a notebook. I once heard a teacher say you have to get them your negative thoughts out in order to work them out.

And by oat I mean writing them down. I mean talking about them with someone that you love and trust. Get them out so that you can work them out.

Keeping them in gives them the opportunity to grow and fester and become loud and become overbearing and taking over you. But when you talk about them, you are the one taking control over those thoughts and you are the one who is getting help to deal with them.

And you are the one who's going to get maybe a different perspective on what those thoughts are trying to tell you. Because sometimes, I mean, almost all the time, they're telling you lies about you. And oftentimes we'll believe them. At least I do.

I believe those negative thoughts.

And sometimes I need somebody who's not inside my head, who's not inside me, my body, who didn't experience the frustration that I did or the sense of failure that I am feeling. I need them to give me perspective and to help me to remember that all these negative thoughts aren't always true.

You know, the things that they're saying to me aren't always true. So putting your thoughts down on paper, getting back to that topic, will help you to pull them out of your mind.

Like I was saying before, as long as they're living in your mind, they have room to grow. They have room to get bigger and uglier and nastier and more like a bully.

But when you pull them out of your mind and put them on paper, they become easier to deal with. I do this all the time. When I'm worried about something, I'll write it down. It helps me to process it.

It helps me to pray about it, because that's something that I do when I'm worried. I'll pray about it. And sometimes pulling those, those thoughts out of my mind and putting it on paper helps to reduce the size of them.

Like when I see them in print, it often times will feel like, oh, it's not as bad as I thought.

Or sometimes a solution comes as I am writing, or like I said before, when I share those things, those negative thoughts with someone else, that someone else is usually able to help me to look at what I'm thinking a little bit differently with a better perspective. So this works. Write down those negative thoughts.

It's not going to instantly solve them, but it will help you to begin doing the very next thing that I'm going to talk about, and that is look carefully. Are your thoughts telling you the truth? Are your thoughts telling you the truth?

You know, it's totally okay to feel disappointed with your lower than what you wanted results on the celpip, for example. That just means that you're a normal human being.

But if that disappointment is moving into, like this generalized I am a disappointment or I am a failure, then those thoughts are no longer telling you the truth. Zig Ziglar is quoted as saying, and I quote, remember that failure is an event, not a person. End quote. This point is so important.

You are not a failure. You might have Failed. Or you might not have achieved the result that you wanted. But that doesn't mean that you are.

It doesn't mean that you are a failure. It's just a moment. It's an event that happened. You are not a disappointment, and you are not a failure.

And you might feel like both of these adjectives, disappointment and a failure, because you didn't get the score that you needed, but they really are not who you are. And maybe, just maybe, learning English is not something that comes easy for you. We all have unique skills and talents.

Maybe language learning is not one of your, and I quote here. This comes easy to me. Things that's also normal. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't learn English. That's not what I'm trying to say here.

But everyone, including you, including me, has things that come easier for them, that come easier for us than for others. For me, one of those things is writing.

Ever since I was little, like when I was in grade five, I remember I loved writing stories, and I still do today. I love writing. I can sit down and have a complex story going with very little effort.

When I was in my late teens, I had a good friend who was a numbers guy. He was actually getting ready to study to be an engineer.

One day we were playing cards together and just happened to be talking about writing and storytelling. And he told me how much he admired writers, that he never was able to do stuff like that. His favorite thing was solving complex math problems.

It made him feel more alive inside when he got to sit down with a pencil and paper and try to work out a complex number problem. To me, that was mind blowing. As someone who hates math, I couldn't imagine someone actually loving it in the same way I loved writing.

But you know what? Those amazing people exist. And I'm certain that I'm not one of them. And I bet you know people like that.

Or maybe you are a person like that who just loves numbers or who loves writing or who loves art or singing or music, or there's so many different things that can come naturally to us that are natural strengths in us, that are not for someone else. And what I'm getting at with this is this. Maybe learning English is just not your thing. Your thing maybe is something else.

And whatever that something else is, it comes way easier for you than trying to develop your language skills. And you know what? That's totally normal for me.

In order to make it through some parts of my math career at school, I needed to take lessons from a tutor. Thanks to Those lessons I was able to make it through, I learned with the help of a great teacher.

Math still is not my strong or happy subject, but I know that if I need to, I can learn. The same is true for you.

If English just isn't your thing, like you've been struggling at this for years, it's not because you're stupid, slow, or unable to learn English ever. It just means you might need some extra help. Finally, challenge and replace those negative thoughts.

Now that you've gotten your negative thoughts down on paper, and I really encourage you to try doing that, by the way, write those negative thoughts out in your journal or in a diary and you'll be surprised at what you learn about yourself, what you see yourself thinking about yourself. It can be pretty shocking and eye opening.

The stuff that we allow to roll through our minds that we would never say to someone out loud, or hopefully we would never say to someone out loud, but we so often will say them to ourselves.

So once you get your negative thoughts down on paper, and now that you can see that very likely those thoughts are not true or kind, you can begin challenging them and replacing them. That's right. Challenge and replace those negative thoughts with positive, truthful and kind words about yourself.

Now, this is not some weird woo woo think positive idea. At least I'm not meaning it to be. But there's a powerful truth that's important to embrace here.

Just because you think a thought doesn't mean it's true or that it cannot be questioned or changed. I think so often we allow thoughts in our head and we don't question them, we think, well, of course they're true. That's why I'm thinking it.

Or you just don't even think to challenge those thoughts sometimes, right? I know that's true about me. So remember, just because you think a thought, it doesn't mean it's true or that it cannot be questioned or changed.

So for example, every time your negative thought about your English abilities comes crashing through your mind like, I don't know, like a giant elephant on skates, take control over it by saying stop. You might even need to say this out loud to yourself.

If those thoughts are loud ones and seem to march around in your thoughts like they own the place, I do this sometimes I will actually say stop out loud. If I notice that there's like this train of thought that I don't want to have rolling around in my head, I will tell it to stop.

You can even try imagining yourself holding up a big red stop sign in front of that negative thought train and then imagine that train coming to a complete stop in front of you. Then replace it. Try saying something true about yourself, like, I'm not stupid. If that's what that train of thought is trying to tell you.

I'm really great at X, Y or Z and you fill in that X, Y or Z with things that you are great at. You can say, english just doesn't come easy for me, but I can and will learn. I will be patient with myself and try again. Those things are true.

Maybe it doesn't come easy for you, but you can learn. You can be patient with yourself and you can try again. Just like I did with my math.

Math does not come easy for me even to this day, but I can learn if I get the right teacher.

If I set Like I was thinking about that time when I sat with that tutorial for months and she was helping me to work through a few certain math skills and I was in the end able to learn them. I think I was learning how to do long division. I just couldn't figure out why I had to carry numbers when I was dividing.

That part was just not working for me. And I remember sitting with her every Saturday in the afternoons working on math problems until I was able to get it. So I was able to learn.

You are also able to learn. So don't let yourself believe that you'll never get this because it's not true. You can do this and you can be patient with yourself and try again.

And you need to repeat this.

This whole exercise of hauling out that big imaginary stop sign and telling that negative thought train to stop and then replacing those thoughts with true and kind words. You might need to repeat that many times to kick that loud, annoying elephant on skates out of your mind.

So that's what I want to leave you with today. If you're struggling with a negative mindset, remember these points. Number one Just because you're thinking something, it doesn't mean it's true.

Question it. Challenge it. Negative thoughts or a negative mindset should be challenged.

And to challenge and change a negative mindset, Talk about what you're thinking with someone you trust. Write down those negative thoughts.

Remember, getting them on paper will help you to begin to work them out and tell those negative thoughts to stop and then begin replacing them with true things about you. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.

I sure hope that it was helpful for you, that it made sense and that it was encouraging for you and that it gives you the tools that you need to step positively and confidently into this brand new year. Please come back next Tuesday for the next episode and thank you again for listening.

You know, sometimes you might not have someone around you that you feel comfortable talking to about your struggles with the Celpip or with your English in general. And if that's you, you can talk with me.

I'm opening up a few free mindset or Celpip strategy calls for people in my podcast audience and that is you, my friend. If you've listened up to this point and you are still tracking with me, this invitation is for you.

If you would like some help with your mindset around getting ready for the celpip or if you just like to talk about your preparation strategy like am I really doing the right thing to get ready? Then I want to invite you to join me for a free 30 minute call.

We'll focus on you and your prep strategies or on your mindset, on working through maybe that exam that you didn't get the right marks for and you're just struggling, you're feeling discouraged, you're feeling maybe heartbroken over all the hard work that you put in and you just seem to get the results that you need. That can be so discouraging. And if you need help to get your mindset back on track again, take advantage of this.

This opening, this opportunity is for you. Sometimes having someone to talk to is all we need to take advantage of this free 30 minute call. And yes, it's totally free, no strings attached.

Just go to celpipsuccess.com call that's celpipsuccess.com call I'm going to put a link to this in my show notes.

You can put in the time that works for you and we'll get on a call together and we'll see if we can get you moving in the right direction this year. Sound good? All right, once again, that's celpipsuccess.com call.