311. English, Energy, and Long Workdays: Little Snippets #21

One of my lovely clients has to go to a lot of events where she speaks in English all day, which on the one hand, of course, is excellent practice.

And even though she's like, "Oh, I don't wanna go," and I'm like, "This is fantastic." So she, she does really enjoy them, but she finds them very, very tiring.

You may have had this experience too.

Let's imagine you travel out to the event, really early start.

Let's say you're going to a conference in Budapest, in Hungary.

You start the day with a breakfast.

You're with people, then coffee, then chatting, then workshops and speeches and lunches and dinners.

And she's like, "You know, I start off really great, and then little by little, I just become more and more tired.

And then by the end of the day, I'm essentially delirious, and I have no idea really what words in English are coming out of my mouth, and all I wanna do is just speak Spanish, right? I just wanna chill and chill out." So the first thing, I think the key message I wanna get across here is this is absolutely normal, and it is not a reflection on your inability to communicate in English.

It's just like if you're playing a video game and you've got all those energy bars when you start, and then as you go along, they get depleted or, you know, someone in the video game will kill you or something like that, and they'll take your energy points.

Your brain is working hard when you're in your second or third, fourth, fifth language, whatever English is to you, especially when you are making conversation where you have to be very focused and pay a lot of attention.

When you're listening to a speech that you're really interested in and you're really trying to be engaged with, that can be really, really tiring as well.

I always think it's a little bit like when you have your laptop.

I used to have a really old laptop, and whenever it would start working really hard, it would have that fan where it was like zzz.

It was kind of working really hard, and it's getting...

You know, you touch the laptop, and it's like really, really hot, and you have to just stop using it for a while.

You won't be able to speak English perfectly all day.

There'll be ups and downs.

There'll-- At the beginning of the day, you're gonna feel more fresh.

At the end of the day, you're gonna feel exhausted.

You know, an athlete who runs the hundred meters can't sprint at that pace for four hundred meters, for example.

Some things you could do, I think, which are practical things that you could take away, aside from the fact that this is a normal human experience.

But of course, any rest that you can get before those big events, if you can get it, right, is great.

Taking some time out during the day just to give your brain a bit of a break, that can also be good if you ever have time.

Sometimes it's really difficult at these events to get away, right? But if you can, you know, mid-afternoon or whenever, it can be nice just to have a bit of downtime, we call that, where you're not actually speaking and just give yourself a little bit of time to, to relax.