Have you ever found yourself feeling completely and totally stuck with your English classes or CELPIP Prep? Like you've spent weeks, months and years + way too much money, but you're still not seeing the results you need?

What should you do?

Changing strategies seems like the easy answer, but as you'll see in today's episode: sometimes those 'obvious changes' are not as easy to make as we think. We'll explore why, and what you can do about it!

Why Listen to This Episode?

-If you're feeling stuck with your English or your CELPIP prep, then you absolutely need to hear this episode. We're talking about the Importance of Getting Unstuck

-I share about Recognizing When Your Current Approach Isn't Working

Story 1: My Failed Book Reading Endevour

- Struggling with a Book

- The Dilemma of Continuing vs. Quitting

- The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Reading

Story 2: The Chiropractor that Helped Me Walk - but Couldn't Take The Pain Away.

- Dealing with a Back Problem

- Loyalty to the Chiropractor

- The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Healthcare

Story 3: What happened when we tried to sell our home in Mexico

- Selling an Apartment in Mexico

- Balancing Friendship and Business

- The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Real Estate

The Sunk Cost Fallacy Explained

- What Is the Sunk Cost Fallacy?

- How It Applies to Language Learning and Exam Preparation

You Might Need to Make A Difficult Decision

- The Importance of Recognizing When to Cut Losses

- Don't Get Trapped in the Sunk Cost Fallacy

- Embracing Change for Progress and Improved Results

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Introduction

Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam. I also loved the feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you who are working towards becoming fluent in English so we can learn from their experiences together.

Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson and I've been an English teacher for over six years, and I now work to help students prepare for this up exam through online classes.

Why You Should Listen

Why should you listen to today's episode? Well, for starters, we've all had times when we've gotten stuck. And when it comes to trying to learn English or improve your CELPIP score, that feeling of stuck can be devastating and expensive. If what you've been doing to improve your English or to prepare for the CELPIP exam doesn't seem to be working for you, you've got a vital decision to make and it can turn out to be trickier to make than you might think. This episode will help you get unstuck and get moving again with your English.

Three Stories of Being Stuck

To begin, I want to share with you three stories of being stuck that have happened to me, and each story goes from a lower level of difficulty to a much, much higher one.

The first story happened to me just, well, just this month. Do you remember a couple of episodes ago I was talking about two books that I had started reading for fun? The first book I read quickly, I finished it quickly. I enjoyed every minute of it. There wasn't a moment where I wasn't having a good time. There wasn't a moment where the author lost me. There wasn't a moment where I felt bored. I had a great time reading that book, and I was so excited about it that I quickly went for another book, another fiction book to enjoy. And I was talking about this book well, a couple of episodes ago.

The beginning was really good. I was into the story. There were one or two pages at the beginning where I kind of got lost. But I very quickly found my way back into what was going on in the story, and I was intrigued. I was interested to find out what was going to happen, but something strange started to happen as I got deeper and deeper into the story. There were moments where I completely felt lost. I would have to stop, go back a couple of pages, sometimes a whole chapter just to try to find my way in the story again, but just felt like I was losing the author. I was losing where he was trying to take me. And each time I was getting lost, it was harder and harder for me to find my way back in. I didn't know what to do. I didn't like the idea of not finishing the book. I was already halfway into it, a little bit more than halfway. I had spent easily a week or two reading, but now it just wasn't working for me. Should I stop reading or should I press on and keep going even though I was already starting to lose interest?

So that was the first story, a very simple level of difficulty in the end. This week, actually, I made the final choice to just give up on the book. I decided, You know what? This is not worth my time. No matter how hard I've tried this. This book just has not been doing it for me. Not like the other one. So I closed the book, pulled out my bookmark, and decided to take the books back to the library.

Story number two is called The Chiropractor. About three or four years ago now, My back went crazy. Yeah, it was about three years ago. Just. Just as the pandemic was getting started. My back blew up. It went nuts. It got to the point where I couldn't get out of bed. I missed work for over two months because my back was so sore. In order for me to start moving again, I had to go and see a chiropractor.

And I immediately just enjoyed working with this guy. He was one of the most friendliest people that I've ever met. He was personable, you know what I mean? It was somebody who you instantly felt at home with. He was easy to talk to. He always was asking me about my day and how things were going for me, how my back was. And he took the time to really listen. I felt so comfortable with him and I began working with him and I noticed at the beginning change. I was able to walk again. Thanks to him, I was able to get up out of my bed again. Thanks to him, I was even able to get back to work again, thanks to him. And he supported me with notes and with detailed reports to give in to my human resource people at the place where I work so that they could help me in my journey towards recovery. He bent over backwards, literally, to try to help me get back into working shape again.

But you know what? Even though I had this great relationship with my chiropractor, the pain in my back didn't seem to be getting better. It would feel good after each treatment for a couple of days, but then the pain would come back. I would find myself kind of feeling like this is where I was at the beginning, even though, you know, it didn't put me on my bed for two months.

Again, that pain just seemed to keep coming back and keep coming back and keep coming back. And so I spent a better part of a year and a half working with this chiropractor. Even though I wasn't getting the results, I was hoping for a year and a half. And I think a large part of that time that I had spent with him, it was because I liked him so much and it was expensive. I mean, my insurance through my workplace only covered a certain part of what I was paying. The rest was coming out of my pocket.

And I think that that might have been part of the reason why I didn't change One, I liked the guy and two, I had already invested so much into it. I thought, well, maybe if I just keep going, things will get better.

But you know what? It didn't. It didn't work out. And after a lot of encouragement from my wife, my dear patient wife, I finally made the decision to let them go. And I'm going to talk about that in a little while. So, yeah, story number two was a higher difficulty level than the book example that I gave at the beginning.

And it was more difficult to deal with because of the amount of money I had already invested in it. It was more difficult to deal with because of the relationship that I had developed with the chiropractor and the fact that he had actually helped me. At the very beginning of our relationship. He was the one that got me walking again and back to work again. So I kind of felt a strong sense of loyalty with him. But thanks to the encouragement of my wife, I was able to make an important change, which I'm going to be talking about in a little while.

Story number three is that a way higher difficulty level? This happened to our family while we were still living in Mexico. When it was time for us to move, we needed to put our apartment in Mexico City up for sale. And if any of you listening, if you've ever gone through that process of trying to sell a home or an apartment or a car, you know that it's not a small task selling something as big and important as the place where you've been living for, you know, ten years is, well, it's huge. You're basically uprooting your entire life and getting ready to move it somewhere else. And all of your all of the years of investing money in the mortgage and in that property are all on the line. So it's a big deal.

And it was a hard process, not so much the choice of putting it up for sale. It was choosing who to work with. Our first realtor actually turned out to be a friend of ours. They were just getting started in their business and they offered to help us so our home and because they were our friends, we decided, well, yeah, sure, we'll gladly list with you.

I bet you'd already know where this story is going to go, don't you? Yeah. Our. Our friends, though, they tried their best. They just weren't doing a good job and our time was working against us. We didn't have a lot of time to just sit and wait and wait and wait. We needed to sell and sell quickly. So we we were faced with the choice of firing our friends. And that was hard. That was a hard choice to make because of all the time and investment that we had with them as our friends. I mean, we had built up a relationship with them over many months and years of just getting to know each other and being friends with each other. And the thought of pulling out, of working with them was, well, it was a painful and uncomfortable one for us. And we dragged our feet a little bit. We resisted making the change a little bit because of that sense of loyalty and love that built up relationship that we had with them.

But eventually, you know, that our deadline was getting closer and closer. We needed to we needed to sell, we had to sell. It wasn't an option. So we ended up changing to another company.

And that company had amazing marketing. They presented themselves as like a speedy sales company, an aggressive sales company that would go after, you know, prospects like night and day. Like their marketing was spot on for what we were being faced with. We felt like if we started working with them, it would just be a matter of days, maybe a couple of weeks at the most before our home sold. So we immediately signed a contract with them. Once we got out of the deal that we had with our friend. But you know what? Even though they had this amazing marketing and it look like they were going to do a superb job in selling our home, nothing happened. We didn't get a single offer, even though they were trying to show our place frequently. Not one came in. It wasn't working. So we had to pull the plug on them and try to look for another realtor to work with.

And this one we found a more well-established, well-known company in Mexico. Actually, they're all over the world. I won't mention their name, but you probably have seen them in action before and we made the choice to work with them, even though they were a little bit more expensive. But we figured, they have all the experience. They'll probably be able to help us. We hope they'll be able to help us. And you know what? Within a month of us working with them, our house sold. It was incredibly fast, way faster than all the other ones.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Now, here's the tricky part from each of these stories, and it might just be the tricky that you are facing as well. In the case of the book, the first story I told you about, I'd already read a little a little ways past the halfway point in the book, though I kind of lost interest in it about ten chapters. Before that, I felt like I had invested so much time into it already that maybe I should just keep going. Even though I wasn't enjoying the book anymore, I kept thinking to myself I should just keep going. I should finish this book. I shouldn't be a quitter. With the chiropractor, I'd already spent a year plus working with him. I might as well keep going. Besides, he's a nice guy. And remember, he helped me get on my feet again at the very beginning. Maybe if I keep going, we'll eventually find the solution that actually fixes me. And with the house, the one that we were trying so hard to sell, man, it's a pain in the butt to change realtors. It's like you're starting a relationship all over again from scratch. It's not easy. So the price of changing feels too expensive. So maybe you're wondering to yourself, Okay, what does all of that mean for me? I'm working on my English skills or I'm working to get ready for the CELPIP exam.

Well, you can easily find yourself trapped in an English or CELPIP prep class that maybe worked at the beginning, but now seems to have completely lost you. But you don't allow yourself to think of quitting because you've already been with them for months and have already invested so much money and time. It would be a waste to change now.

Or maybe the methods of your teacher just aren't working for you. But you have a great relationship with them. You really like them. You like working with them. You like them as a person. And all that investment of relationship building will be for nothing. If you bail out and try somewhere else and you have that question inside, what if you don't like the next teacher? What if the classes you've been taking just didn't help you get the results you needed? Do you keep going because you've already been working with them?

The point is this: You have options and you need to tell yourself that working on your English or preparing for the CELPIP exam is an important endeavor that can affect your life for years. If you find yourself in a situation that isn't working for you anymore, then don't fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. Cut your losses and move on. Cutting your losses is the opposite to getting stuck in the sunken cost fallacy. Cutting your losses means you realize, Yeah, you've lost money. Yes, you lost time. Or the results that you've been hoping for. Your current strategy just isn't working. But you won't continue to allow that to happen because you're going to change your approach. You're cutting or stopping your losses. Maybe it's time for you to do that. And if that's you. I know how hard it can be to make that final decision to change direction and go with a new strategy.

Progress and higher self scores might be waiting for you on the other end of your decision.