It was the summer of 1998. I was 12 years old at the time and a frequent visitor to the local public swimming pool. Our family was doing well that year so each of my siblings and I had a Summer pass. Wow, a Summer pass! I felt on top of the world. I went to the pool religiously every day, right when they opened. I remember many of the teenage boys and men there had chiseled abs and washboard stomachs. I was just starting to like girls at the time and it seemed like all the boys with the muscular physiques were getting more attention from the ladies than I was. As soon as I realized this, that was the beginning of my quest to get ripped.

I started lifting some free weights that my dad had lying around the garage. That helped a little, but I was still self-conscious of my stomach. Keep in mind I wasn’t overweight. I was a lean kid. I wanted a chiseled stomach though, so every day at the pool I would constantly flex my stomach. When I flexed, it looked like I had more definition than I actually did, but who could tell right? So I flexed constantly. I flexed when I walked, I flexed in the pool, I flexed when I was laying down. I started doing it so much, I even flexed when my shirt was on. It just became a habit.

What I didn’t realize at the time was all this flexing had led to greater definition. Now even when I didn’t flex, you could see an outline of my abs. This may not seem like much, but for me it this was exciting.

As my obsessive flexing continued, more and more of the six pack under all those layers of skin started to come through.

I’m not suggesting you go around flexing your stomach all day long, but just think about all the time you’re not doing anything where you could take advantage of this:
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Your non-stop talking makes you seem like a jerk. I’ve never met you before, so if you are perfect at listening in a conversation, I apologize. That message wasn’t intended for you. But a lot of people do have a problem with listening. They fill conversations with the sound of their voice. I know, because I’m one of them. The listening habit has been something I’ve been trying to build with myself. There are plenty of selfish (and non-selfish) reasons why becoming a better listener is useful. I’m sure you don’t want to miss out, just because neither of us run out of things to say.

Some Selfish Reasons to Listen More

It’s easy to think of the selfless reasons to listen. People want you to listen to them. By listening, you can help someone with a problem, or help them come up with new ideas. But listening also has selfish benefits that make it worth the investment.

The biggest selfish benefit is that you learn more with your mouth closed. You’ll learn more about other people, and often, about yourself, if you stop talking. Those ideas are useful if you want to improve yourself. Going without feedback is improving in a vacuum, it’s almost impossible to do.

Listening also helps you think. When you’re truly listening, not just waiting for your turn to speak, you can chew over your ideas more. You can mull on points of the conversation longer. In the end, you’ll appear a lot wiser if you explain a fully-digested point of view, than if you just blurt out the first response that comes to mind.
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Have you ever heard of visualization? Of course you have. Everybody’s heard of visualization and everybody partakes in it whether they realize it or not. How it works though is an altogether different matter. I want to take a closer look today at the mechanics of why visualizing works without necessarily delving into concepts and theories that cannot be proven.

The brain has great difficulty in distinguishing between what’s true and what’s imagined. There is an oft-cited example of an experiment conducted by Australian Psychologist, Alan Richardson. He took some basketball players and split them into 3 equal groups. One group was told to practice their free throw technique twenty minutes per day. The next group was told to spend twenty minutes per day visualizing, but not attempting free throws, and the final group wasn’t allowed to either practice or visualize. At the end of the test period the group that had done nothing remained as they were, but both the other groups showed similar degrees of improvement. The people who only visualized playing basketball were able to perform almost as well as the ones who had actually practiced.

“How can that be so?”

Firstly, the people practicing would miss some shots. Each time they missed they had in effect, practiced how to miss. The people that were visualizing would be hitting every basket so they were building up the feelings and memory of how to be successful.
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There are over 6,000 languages in the world. Some are more important than others, not better or more advanced, just more important. Why? Because they are spoken by more people, in more countries. That does not mean that Finnish is not important to the Finns, and Maori is not important to the Maoris. It is just that these languages are not so important to the rest of us.

On the other hand, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over one billion people. Chinese origin words account for 60% of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese vocabulary. Knowing Chinese will help you learn these languages too. It helped me. Chinese culture has influenced the world for thousands of years with its art, philosophy, technology, food, medicine and performing arts. Today China’s economy is booming. Chinese seems well worth learning.

Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese are essentially dialects of the same language. If you learn one, you can learn the others. I did. If you learn Spanish, you open the door to the culture, music, history and possible business dealings with 800 million people in 60 countries, including the US and Canada.
If you get ambitious you could try Russian, as I have been doing for the last two years. Once you have Russian you can probably communicate with other Slav speakers.

But hold it here! Before getting carried away, let’s look at the present situation of language teaching. According to one Canadian survey, after 12 years of daily French classes, only one high school graduate out of 147 (0.68%) achieved “intermediate” proficiency. Another survey of immigrants learning English in the US showed that “classroom instructional hours” had little impact on progress.

If we cannot teach our own official languages in North America, what hope is there for other languages like Chinese or Spanish, let alone Russian, Arabic or Hindi?

As a speaker of 10 languages I know the benefits of speaking more than one language. We simply have to change the way we go about teaching languages. To start with we need to dispel seven common misconceptions about language learning.
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