Leveling-Up Your English Proficiency

In previous entries, we have discussed the reasons why you should continue to improve your proficiency. You probably know from personal experience why you should: maybe you want to be taken more seriously at work, maybe you want to improve your grades, or maybe you want to be able to lead your team more efficiently. There are many different reasons why you should and, in some cases, why you might even need to.  But here's the thing and I'm sure you'll agree: learning a language can be both exhausting and repetitive which can eventually lead to you losing interest in it. A few summers ago, I tried to teach myself French. At first it was exciting. I was also reading French literature and the idea of potentially being able to understand the parts in French without having to consult the endnotes kept me motivated. However, after a few months of very little progress, I decided to take an indefinite break from learning French. And you want to know why? Because I ha...

Well, I am unsure as to how to begin this. To start, I would say that I am writing from a very interesting place. Lately, I have been going through some things that have impacted my ability to do all of the things that I wanted to do, like going to school and thinking about my career. So, I thought that I would turn my turbulent experiences into a lesson for thinking about your journey into gaining proficiency.  To start, I would have to go into a little bit of detail into what I have been going through lately. To be very frank, I do not know how to explain things, so I am going to take the direct approach and try to be as honest as possible. I was hospitalized for a mental breakdown recently because I tried to take on too much for this term. I was under the delusion that I could handle more than I actually could. Trying to multitask is never a good idea because what can happen is that we can try to do too much at once and this can have potentially negative consequences. ...

English is a complex language. There are many different parts of it you must learn to attain mastery of the language. While each part is important and necessary to becoming a fluent speaker/writer of English, there are certain parts that are more crucial than others. For example, I would say that knowing that the noun typically comes before the verb in a sentence is more important than knowing that a colon is used when the second part of the sentence is more important than the first part and a semi-colon is used when both parts are equally important. This is why it is important to prioritize which areas of English you need to work on.  You may remember that when setting goals you should be as explicit as possible. If you need a refresher on that post you can read it here . Once you have clearly defined your goal and broken it down into smaller parts, you should figure out which parts are the most important. In other words, which parts need to be complet...

Ever since my traveler's blog to India, these posts are seemingly becoming more and more metacognitive (that is, I am getting as much out of writing them as I hope you are getting by reading them). This week I want to discuss something that you have probably experienced before. This thing is perhaps one of the most difficult decisions you will have to make because there really is no way to know for sure if you should do it or not. What am I talking about?  The urge to quit.  Earlier today I was reading a blog post about when to know it's time to quit. As you probably remember from last week's post, I've been going through a lot of personal stuff, most of which has been strenuous and tiring. Well, I'm not going to lie, staying on track has been difficult; not only with school and work but with this as well. Earlier today I found myself wondering if maybe it was time to call it quits for this blog. Yes, honestly, I was considering if it was time...

Sometimes in life we are forced to face a major challenge or issue. Sometimes these issues can be so challenging that all we want to do is hit the pause button on everything else and focus on whatever the issue is. This might seem like the right thing to do initially but it will likely have a negative impact on whatever progress you've made so far in other areas of life. This week I was confronted with such a challenge. I don't feel comfortable getting into details, but this particular issue has taken much of my focus and even required me to leave work early on Wednesday (something I would never do under normal circumstances). I admit that the latter half of the week was extremely tiring, and at times, it felt nearly impossible to stay on course with my goals. Even as I write this, the issue still exists, but I can't let it hold me back from doing what I need to do like writing this weekly blog post. While this post does not necessarily have to do with improving y...

As I'm sure you've seen by now, we have officially launched our website. While we will continue to add new features and tools to it over the next several months, we felt it was important to publish something with the basic information about our brand. So what am I getting at?  The site was actually finished an entire week before it was published, and I'm glad that we took the extra time to look over and revise it. Here's why: Unbeknownst to me was the fact that a website's interface on the computer typically needs to be slightly altered for the mobile interface. While I was looking over the site myself, I had several close friends and relatives take a look at it and give me feedback. The only concern most people had was they said that in the services section on the homepage it was hard to read the text because the picture was behind it. Now, I knew that wasn't the case on the computer, so initially I was a bit confused by what they meant. Then I realized...