Welcome to the Effortless English podcast. Today's topic is identity.

This topic came from a blog post actually, inspired by a blog post by Steve Kaufman on

Steve Kaufman's linguist blog, where he talked about some research by Stephen Kin, Dr Stephen Crashin,

and the interaction between identity and language learning.

It's quite interesting.

And that's the kind of starting point for our podcast today.

So I encourage you, go to Steve's blog, the linguist blog, I think, and you know check out the

original posting okay today's post identity

identity is a powerful thing what we believe about ourselves and how we define ourselves will determine our speed of progress,

our enjoyment of a language, and our ultimate success or failure with a language. A negative identity can destroy our motivation

and thus our ability to learn a language quickly and easily. A positive identity

can do exactly the opposite. It can be rocket fuel for our language

acquisition engine. Tony Robbins, an inspirational speaker, talks a lot about the power of identity and a CD of his called

Lessons in Mastery he makes the following point. See to get to where we want to be

we got to take on a new level of thinking.

We got to know that what we've done up in tonight has been great.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's fantastic.

But to get to the next level, we've got to look at life in a new way and one of those new looks is we've got to perceive ourselves in a new way and one of those new looks is we got to perceive ourselves

in a different way. Not just our capability, but who we are right now, not someday, today.

That shift begins the minute you begin to consciously define yourself

instead of letting the environment do it for you.

Because think about it, how do most of us define ourselves?

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