This is what failure sounds like with your English skills

Hello there. My name is Aaron, and I would like to welcome you to the Celpip Success Podcast.

Today I'm going to be sharing a little note that I created as I was preparing to go in and get my physiotherapy session last week. I was thinking a lot about the feeling of failure, the feeling of not being able to achieve the results that you are wanting to achieve.

That sometimes what I have been wanting to achieve and just how easily we fall. And I'm talking to myself here, too.

How easily we fall into feeling like we suck, that we're a failure, that we're never going to make the progress that we're working so hard to attain.

And if you are sitting in the middle of feeling like you're a failure, like you're never going to maybe learn English, or maybe you're coming off the end of studying and working hard to.

Try to take the CELPIP exam, and.

You take it for like the fifth.

Or sixth time, and once again, you didn't get the score that you were hoping for.

And right now you're just sitting in a big puddle of feeling like a failure.

And if that's you today, I want.

This episode to be just for you. I want you to imagine that we're sitting down over coffee and we're talking. And I hope. I hope that this podcast encourages you.

I hope that it gives you a different way to think about what has happened and that you are definitely not a failure.

Do you want to know what failure sounds like when it comes to learning English and improving your English skills and getting better at the CELPIP exam? Do you want to know what it sounds like when you fail? I'll. I'll let you hear it right now. Are you ready? This is what it sounds like. Did you hear it?

I'll play it again. It's like this. So if.

If you're leaning into your listening device or if you're, like, cranking up your audio because you're trying to hear what that sound was, I'll give you a bit of a spoiler. There's actually nothing there.

And that, my friend, is what failing sounds like when you are trying to get better with your English skills or to improve your skills for this help it. It's not when you make a mistake. Failure is not when you screw up.

Failure is not when you forget the vocabulary words that you need desperately, when you're trying to express yourself with or in front of others. Failure is not when you get tongue tied and you totally forget every English word.

That you thought you knew when you're in the middle of a conversation, that, my friend, is also not failure. Failure is also not getting the score that you're desperately working hard to get on the celpip, but you don't get it. That is also not failure.

Failure is nothing when you stop, when you stop having conversations because the last time you had one you totally screwed up, or you forgot the English that you thought you had known, or you made an embarrassing grammar mistake, or on the celpip, you failed it again. Well, not failed it, but you didn't get the score you were hoping for for the like sixth or seventh time in a row.

Failure in those cases is just stopping saying to yourself, that's it, I've had it. I'm not going to do this anymore. I can't do this. I suck at this.

There's just no point in me continuing to throw money at this and throw time and effort. I'm just never ever going to get better at it. And because of that attitude, because of that mindset, which is totally, totally understandable.

And my friend, when I'm saying all this, I want you to know that I have been there. I have the t shirt.

I have definitely had moments where the pain of making those mistakes, of not achieving what I had been working for with my own like Spanish skills.

And in my case when that pain was loud enough and strong enough in my head, I've had those times where I just pull back, retreat, closed my mouth and just didn't want to engage and try again just because that last failure. But I keep saying failure, but it's not a failure.

That last mistake, that last not coming out the way I wanted it to be, that last exam that didn't score the way I wanted it to score because of that situation, I. I just unplug. And I don't want to try again to try to keep myself from having that happen again.

And in the case of the self of exam, it's just happened so many times that I just don't want to do it again. Mentally, emotionally. I just don't feel like I have it in me anymore. And maybe I'm just never going to get this.

And my friend, failure is not those things. Failure is when you stop. Failure is when you let silence be the way you are in the world, in English and with relation to the self of exam.

That's when that fail happens. And even if you are, I wanted to say this as well.

Even if you are in that moment where you're just wanting to Stop and not use English anymore because it just keeps not working the way you want it to.

Or you just want to pull away from your self of exam and studying because you can't seem to get that score that you're looking for no matter how hard you try. If you are in that moment right now, I want to speak directly to you and say, don't believe your thoughts. Don't believe what you're telling yourself.

Very likely. And that is that you suck, that you're a failure, that this is the worst decision that you've ever made.

Why have you even come here to Canada to try all this? This is just too much work and it's too painful and I just, I just want to go home. This is just not working out for me. So frustrated.

I want to say, first of all, hang in there. Don't listen to those thoughts. You are not a failure. This moment is not defining who you are. This moment is not defining who you are.

You're not a failure. You did maybe make a mistake, you did maybe not get that score that you were looking for. But that does not define who you are.

And I want to encourage you with that today. I've had someone, many people in my life speak to me in this way when I've been going through hard, hard situations. Like when we were in Mexico.

I'm thinking in one case in particular, there's the. We. We ran our own English training and teaching company in Mexico City.

If you've listened to this podcast maybe for a while, maybe you've heard me talk about it.

But my wife and I ran this company and we were in business for over a decade and we worked with corporate clients and we had several clients that stuck with us for those 10 years. They were our primary clients. And we had dozens and dozens of people that we were working with inside of those companies.

But there was one year when a recession hit really bad. It was hard and like in a space of a month, we lost half of our clients. And these were people that we have been working with for a really long time.

And that hurt. That losing of so much business, like in a span of like in such a short span, was like somebody punching me in the stomach.

And what's worse is that in that next month, because of the pressure of the economy and all the things that were going on in the country at the time, we lost pretty much all the other clients that we had. I think we were left with maybe one or two small, little tiny accounts. Our main business just tanked. It went down the tubes. And I felt like.

Like such a failure. I felt like I was totally broken. Like there was nothing left that I could do right.

It just seemed like everything that I tried to do just didn't turn out. And a friend of mine said those words to me. He said, aaron, you are not a failure. This event that you are experiencing does not define who you are.

It's just something that you're experiencing right now. It's like a frame in the. In a movie. You know, the. The frame on a piece of film that's just a square. And that square on the film, it's still moving.

And that's going to. It's going to switch scenes once this scene is over. And maybe this scene is a painful one. Maybe this scene has a lot of heartbreak in it.

Maybe this scene is a difficult space for you and your family, but it's not going to stay where it is. It's going to keep moving, and your job is to stick with it and keep pushing through. But you are not. You are not a failure.

And that's what I want to encourage you with today, my friend.

If you are having a hard time, if you just got the results back from your selfless exam and it wasn't what you were hoping for and striving for, you are not a failure. You are not a failure. Don't give up. Keep trying to.