A few days ago I read this in a forum:
A girl had moved to the US to be with her boyfriend whom she met online, and they’d lived there happily for 2 years. Everything seemed great. Until her boyfriend left her. Just broke up with her without warning.
Now this girl is living alone in a small apartment in the US. She doesn’t want to go back to her home country and admit to her friends and family that things didn’t work out. But she also doesn’t know what else to do, either.
She relied on her boyfriend for everything. She didn’t bother to improve her English enough to get a job, didn’t go out and make friends.
Her boyfriend was literally her entire world.
“I am not able to understand what is happening. Everything is just falling apart.”
That’s what she wrote.
Thing is, this kind of thing is really common. We get comfortable with our current situation and think it’ll last forever. So we don’t prepare for the future or the eventuality that things will change (as they inevitably do).
I’ll be perfectly honest: I did the same thing once upon a time.
I went more than a year living in Japan without learning a single word. It was just too easy to live in an English bubble and rely on Mrs. Northbrook for everything else. If it hadn’t have been for my father in law making it a condition to marry his daughter, then a year after that ending up working in a school that had requested a fluent Japanese speaker (an administrative fuck up somewhere along the line) I’m not sure I’d have found the motivation, either.
But you know what?
I’m glad all that happened. Even though it was a nightmare at the time.
Mastering Japanese not only opened doors, but it totally transformed me as a person.
I went from shy to confident.
Not knowing what I wanted to do to becoming obsessed with linguistics, teaching English and starting a company.
Maybe you’ll experience the same change?
Maybe.
But maybe not.
Change doesn’t have to be as dramatic as mine for it to be positive, after all.
Watch the full video here:
On to business:
Head over to https://www.doingenglish.com/freetraining and check out the Free Training.
Best,
Julian Northbrook