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Filed UnderFixing Mistakes

What pilots can teach you about fixing your mistakes in English

June 9, 2023 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

Here’s a random Airline fact for you:

The number of plane crashes are constantly going down. Compare 41 crashes in 1972 with just 3 in 2015. Bearing in mind that around 100,000 flights go out every day now (far more than 46 years ago). That’s a tiny number.

Why are they going down?

Because every accident is closely studied, learned from and trained for.

The industry learns from its mistakes.

More:

Pilots don’t just train for these “mistakes” once and then never go back to them.

They train, re-train, then train again.

The parallels to speaking English should be obvious. Making mistakes is an essential part of the process, and if you’re holding back because you’re too afraid of looking stupid… you need to fix that.

But you do also need to actively learn from the mistakes you make (otherwise you’ll keep making them, and you risk creating habits that are difficult – though not impossible – to change later).

There are several exercises you can use to do this.

My favourite is something called “Retrodictive Learning”, and I teach it in detail in week 6 of MEFA.

If you’re interested in joining the course, the first step is to get on my Daily Email list and study the free Rocket Launch Method training.

Here’s the link:

https∶//www.doingenglish.com/freetraining

Have a great day!

Julian

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