Small Habits to learn English

At Impact we keep on working relentlessly on how to make it easier for you to learn English. We believe that everything can be done better. So, we don’t always follow the conventional rules of training just for the sake of it. We want to learn English effectively, easily and quickly. 

Learning English is not like taking 5 to 10 hours classes in a week and you are done with it. It’s about using the language in your day to day communication. Only then the classes will help you to reach your goals.

Imagine if you could use English in at least 80 percent of your communication. How difficult would it be for you to improve your English then? Easier said than done! Yes, it will be very easy and very quickly you will be able to improve. But how to do it? Here comes the part of creating Habits around using English.

So, the first step is to understand that you should not try to start using English for 80 percent of your communication right away. Because your brain is used to some other language for basic communication and this change is going to be too much for your brain - it will stop you from achieving your goal.

Your brain will start working against you. You will feel boredom or you will start thinking about some other more entertaining things to do… etc. So, we need to go slow. We are going to make very tiny changes gradually to build up to 80 percent over a period of a few months.

Understanding how habits work

Trigger - Action - Reward

Trigger: There should be something that triggers your action. The best thing to do here is to find a habit that you already practice and make it your trigger for the new habit that you are trying to create.

Action: Action here means that you practice your new habit.

Reward: The best and easiest thing to do is celebrate. Make yourself feel happy.

If you follow this Trigger - Action - Reward sequence you will notice that creating new habits become so easy.

What are the habits that I can create to learn or improve my English?

That entirely depends on who you are. Every person has a different lifestyle and different training requirements. So, you have to work that out yourself. No one else can do it better for you. As a mentor my job is to train you to do it yourself.

Let me give you some examples so that you understand this better. For example for someone a great habit to develop could be

listening to English songs everyday or reading a book in English everyday

So, what do we do - how do we put the Trigger - Action - Reward sequence in action?

Let’s say that everyday you wake up at 6:00 AM - Let’s say that you drink a glass of water right after you wake up and you stretch yourself for a minute. Now, these are two good habits that you already have. So, how about you make stretching your trigger. Right after you wake up you have a glass of water - stretch yourself - play an English song and try to sing along. It could be an inspirational song that inspires you for the day ahead or a soothing song that calms you down or a loud song that wakes you up and fills you up with energy or any other song that you like. Once you are done with that then how about celebrating, how about a little dance for a few seconds that will make your body and mind feel good.

So, in this case the sequence goes like this:

Trigger - Stretching

Action - Listening to the song, singing along if that’s your goal.

Reward - Happiness released in your brain and body by doing a little dance also the sense of accomplishment

So, let’s say that you have a habit of smoking, its a bad habit and you should quit but I am using this just as an example:

Trigger - Smoking

Action - Making a sentence with the word of the day for improving your vocabulary.

Reward - Punching your fist in the air with excitement and saying out “I am awesome”

I hope that you get the idea. You can follow this process and start developing some habits that will make you use English more and more everyday.

You know the best things about habits is that once you create them, it takes no effort to follow them they become automatic.