It has recently occurred to me that the decision to improve your English language skills is like deciding to lose the extra kilograms you have unknowingly gained over the last couple of months.

With English, it works in the following way. One day you find yourself in a situation where you realise your English is not good enough to successfully take part in a business meeting held in English, make an international phone call or find some information on the Internet, etc. You identify the problem: “My English is poor, so I need to take a course or individual lessons”. Some people stop here and do nothing but identify their weaknesses. Others move one step further; they quickly search for some course and…put it on hold or “postpone” taking up lessons for the time when they are “not so busy.” but days and weeks pass by and they never seem to find the time. A few months or years later they are exactly in the same position or (if they don’t practise on a daily basis) their English gets even worse than it was before.

Losing weight looks very similar. One day you decide to put on a suit you have not been wearing for a few months. To your horror, it seems to have shrunk by at least one size while hanging in the wardrobe!  So, you try another garment and ….. it’s also far too small. You must confront the inconvenient and painful truth: “I have put on weight.” So you decide to make the effort to shed the extra pounds. Some people only go as far as browsing the Internet for the nearest fitness club or a miracle diet and then they give up. Others proceed further to the stage of buying a membership in a sports centre or downloading some information about weight loss methods (including surgery) and here their enthusiasm cools down. They are “too busy” to find time to go to the gym this week or next week. Likewise, starting a diet is postponed day after day and then unnoticeably months pass by without any action whatsoever.

Only a very few people have enough perseverance and a will power to move instantly from identifying a problem (poor English/extra kilograms) to take up an immediate action (starting to learn English or going to a gym and eating less).

So, the one-million-dollar questions are:

• Do you think there is some area for improvement in your life?
• In which group of people are you? A procrastinators or people who act promptly?
• Have you noticed some things in yourself that you are not happy with?
• Will you be waiting to fix them till you are not so busy (it means when you retire) or ……. you will start putting your “repair plan” in life today?

  I hope the above text may act as a spur to do something that you have been putting off for later.