Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. This is the podcast from Motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam.

I also love the 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. I've been an English teacher for over six years and I now work to help students prepare for the kelp exam. Through online classes.

This past week, since Wednesday or so, I've been away at a retreat or like a work trip for my work. Imagine that. A work trip for my work. Oh, dear. Yeah, I'm actually, I'm still here.

I am podcasting to you today from the room where I've been staying at since Wednesday.

And yesterday, a group of us went for a hike because the place where we're staying, it's in the middle of this beautiful valley surrounded by mountains. And there's woods everywhere with so many really amazing trails for you to walk on.

And so, like I said yesterday, a group of us got together after one of our work sessions, and we decided to stretch our legs, breathe some fresh air and we went for a hike. We walked for about an hour through amazing woods with tall, massive trees and beautiful ferns and just lots of nature everywhere.

It was quiet. That was another thing that I notice aside from us talking. It was a really quiet walk. There were birds singing in the trees and the occasional squirrel would go running across our path. It was just a wonderful time of walking together. And I've shared a couple of pictures with you on my blog.

But as I was walking, I was thinking about what I was thinking and how I was thinking. Stay with me now. This is going to be meaningful to you in just a minute.

I was pondering that day how everything that I did from start to finish, from having breakfast with my team to sitting through our classes, because we were watching some pretty intense training videos and then working together as in groups about what we had just seen. Everything was all in English from start to finish. Even our walk, our walk to stretch your legs and get some exercise. Everything that we were doing was in English.

And as I was walking along on that trail, I noticed that even what I was thinking about was also in English, as I saw this one tree. And this was the tree that kind of made me think about, you know, this might be something interesting to talk about with you today.

It was such an interesting tree. It it part of it had fallen across the path where we were. And it looked like it was quite dead. It didn't look like it was alive at all. It was bent and parts of it, the base of it was kind of broken and shattered, you know. But right in the middle of that tree in our path, the part that was crossing right in front of our path, it wasn't on the ground. It was probably about half of my height.

So about three, three or four, three feet to eight feet tall. It was about three feet off of the ground. And in the middle of it, there was this other tree or I don't know if it was a part of the same tree, but such a tree was growing straight up in the middle of this tree that had fallen.

And what is even more unusual about this tree and I've got a picture of it for you on the blog so that you can see what I'm talking about, because I'm probably not doing a great job describing it. But this tree didn't have roots going straight down into the ground from where it was growing. You know, that's where you would expect roots to be.

But no, this tree that's growing up from a fallen tree, that tree had roots. That was a part of the fallen tree. That's the only way I could explain it. The roots had continued down through the tree that had fallen. Or maybe this tree, this new tree that was growing up as it can is a continuation of the same fallen tree. I don't know. It was just such an unusual thing. It took me by surprise and I was just standing there thinking about it.

And as I was thinking about it, I just realized I'm thinking in English about this tree. My thoughts were in English, and that's the first thing I want to offer you. Or the first question I have for you today. What language do you normally think in?

Have you ever thought about that? I bet you haven't. Most of us don't think about that. I know I don't normally think about what language I'm thinking in until yesterday when I stopped and I was just kind of listening to myself, listening to the thoughts going on in my mind, because my second language is Spanish. So if I wanted to, I could be thinking in Spanish.

But on that day, because everything that I had been doing before was in English, I was thinking in English. And in fact that's like the default for me. That's my default language. It's it's English because that's my first language. But have you ever stopped to think about what language you think and try it?

Maybe even hit pause and just think to yourself, What language do I normally think here? Maybe it's your first language. Probably it is. If that is you, you might be facing this problem that I'm going to be talking about in this podcast, probably you are thinking in your first language.

So back to the story. Everything that I had done that day was in English from the classes that we were taking together with our team to our lunch breaks, when we would sit together for lunch or for supper to the games that we would play later on in the evening. And even that walk that we went on, everything from one activity to the other just flowed in English.

And maybe you're thinking to yourself, Well, yeah, because everybody in that environment were English speakers haha. That's where you're wrong, my friend.

My team has a wonderful mix of people from various places in the world, most of them, most of the ones who are not from here, Canada are from the Philippines, so their first language is not English and they've had to learn English and many of them speak multiple languages. We were talking languages, many of them speak multiple languages. We were talking about it yesterday.

Some grew up in Japan, so their first language is Japanese. one of my other co-workers is from Hong Kong. And I've got another friend who who is Chinese. So there's so many different languages going on and you can hear accents when they're talking.

They don't speak perfect English when they speak. And by perfect, I don't think that I speak perfect English. And if you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll know that I'm telling you the truth. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that many of these people have had to learn the art or learn the discipline of connecting their world to English, connecting their life to English, because each one of them and there's probably about six or eight of the our team that is meeting together, I think we are about 17 people.

I would say six or seven of us are from other countries and their first language is not English, but all of them were flowing in that English wave or in that English in the English that was going on around us yesterday. They didn't like remove themselves from conversations.

They didn't hide in their rooms. They didn't only use English when when we were in class together. And then once they stepped out of the class, they switched over to to their first languages. They didn't do that. They remained in contact with the English around them.

They continued using it from one activity to the other.

That is something that I see as being the biggest or one of the top problems or mistakes that English learners make. They do something that I call compartmentalize, compartmentalize means that you separate or you isolate one thing from another.

That's the dictionary definition of it: isolating or separating one thing from another.

My friends who are not from from Canada, who are not born here, who their first language is not English, they were not isolating themselves from using English. They were not reserving one little space for English and all the rest of the spaces in their life for their first language. You know what I'm trying to say?

Like they very easily could have said to themselves, "Well, I'm going to use English only in the classroom setting of our day," because our work trip is all about learning together. We're taking a course together. Related to our work and my foreigner friends, my friends and my team members who are not from Canada. They could have said that. "All right, while I'm in the class setting, I'll do I'll use English. I'll think in English, I'll take notes in English, I'll talk in English, I'll interact and talk with my fellow team members in English. But as soon as I step out of that classroom, I'm going back to my first language and I will stay there for the rest of the day."

They didn't do that. They're not compartmentalizing the way they use English. And it's really this is a really big challenge. I've said before, I've got friends who do this all the time. They've lived here in Canada for decades, for a really long time, and they still haven't become fluent in English because they've done that compartmentalizing part.

They've they've walled off a part of their life that they do in English and the rest, they use their first language. So what I was thinking about as I was on that hike was, What am I thinking? In what language am I thinking in?

I'm thinking in English. That's a great place to start. And I want to offer you, first of all, a way for you to figure out if you are compartmentalizing and this is what you can do to find out. Just ask yourself this question: When and where do I use English each day? When and where do I use English each day? If you answer, I only use English when I have to, or I only use English when I'm in English class or I don't use English at all, I stick in my first language. Then my friend, you are compartmentalizing. You're isolating the way you use English from the rest of your life.

That is a huge problem. What you want to be doing is what my friends here on this, on my work team, what they do, you want to have English flowing in and out of your life all day long from the things that you listen to, the people that you talk to, the things that you think about, the things that you've read all of those every day, things that you and I do, you have the choice of bringing English into it, especially if you're living in Canada or an English speaking country.

You have many, many more opportunities to make English a part of your life because it's all around you all the time. You don't have to go very far to be engaging with English if you're not living in an English speaking country yet, you can still do this.

But it's a bit of a challenge. It will take some creativity on your part to think about ways that you can make English a part of your life, But you still can do it. So like I said before, ask yourself that question when and where do I use English each day? And if you've realized that, yeah, I'm compartmentalizing, I'm I'm not using English as much as I can and should be. Here's one practical step that you can do today that will help.

And it has to do with the language that you're thinking. So your challenge today is to take out your cell phone and open up the little timer section or the timer app that you have. I think probably most cell phones have a timer app. And what I want you to try to do is to set up an alarm for yourself every hour so that it repeats on an hourly basis. And every time that alarm goes off, make yourself or give yourself a challenge to only think in English for the next five or 10 minutes.

Make that your purposeful goal that every time that alarm goes off, that's a trigger for you to sit to, to stop thinking in your first language and instead do everything that you're doing right now. Maybe you're working at your desk.

Maybe you're, I don't know, making dinner, maybe you're driving, maybe maybe you're out for a walk. But instead of thinking your regular everyday thoughts in your first language for the next five or 10 minutes, challenge yourself to only think in English. And as you do this, as you get good at it, like as it becomes more and more easier for you to think in English for five or 10 minutes, start gradually increasing the time.

So on the hour when that when your alarm goes off, instead of thinking for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, increase it to 10 minutes or 15 minutes and so on, as you get good at it, start increasing the amount of time you are practicing to think only in English.

And if you make a mistake, like if you're, you know, halfway through it, if your goal is to think in English for 10 minutes and you know, is 5 minutes into it or 2 minutes into it or one minute into it, that oops, my thoughts of switched over to my first language. Because they will. They will because that's your comfort zone, right? That's where you feel most at ease and where you're used, what you're used to doing.

If you notice that happening, that's okay. Just gently bring yourself back to the challenge of thinking in English. Maybe you could say something like, Maybe you can think to yourself something like, "Oops, no, I don't want to be thinking in my first language instead, I want to be thinking in English." And then start noticing the things around you.

Start thinking about those things around you. But in English, practice doing this? This is one practical way that you can begin bringing English into your life and have it flow with you during the day. And your objective is to gradually be increasing that time little by little as you go through this activity.