Okay, I passed the first interview. They want a second interview.
What do I do now? How do I prepare for the second interview?
And my answer was so simple.
Research, research. Research.
Learn everything possible about the company.
If you have an interview with a company, you want to learn everything possible.
You want to read everything possible about the company, watch videos, listen to audio, listen to
any interview, any information you can find about the company.
Now, very specifically, let's say if you have an interview with a specific company, great.
Then you have a clear objective of what video to go watch.
But if you don't have an interview, that's okay.
But you probably have a profession or an area.
Let's say, for example, you are a mechanical engineer.
if you want to work professionally as a mechanical engineer speaking in English or a different country.
Research. Research. Research.
Go online and find videos about mechanical engineering or about your company or about your area.
You need to find videos and really use them for maximum listening practice.
Task 1. Find a video to train your listening.
Let's continue with the example of a mechanical engineer.
Let's imagine for a moment you are a mechanical engineer.
You need to go online and find a video about mechanical engineering.
Step 1. Find something relevant for you.
It can be very simple, but we want to find something that's relevant for you, something connected to your area or your profession.
Step2. Find a short video
The second idea is we want to focus on small quantities of material first.
We don't want a video that is 30, 40, 50 minutes long.
Well, it what we want is a short video, one, two, 3 minutes.
Or if yes, it is a long video, we want to focus on 90 to 120 seconds of the video.
Why?
Why do this?
We need to focus on small quantities of materials, because when you are watching a complete movie or
watching a series on Netflix and you're listening and watching and listening and watching, but you
understand maybe 30, 40, 50%.
The objective is to look at small parts of the video, focus and repeat until you can completely understand
that small part.
From there, you start listening and start repeating the phrases where you watch the clip.
When I say a clip, I mean a video about your area can be a short video or it can be a long video where
you are focusing only on the small part.
Watch one time, check, see which parts you understand and don't understand, and then start to isolate
small parts of the video, isolate vocabulary phrases, and start to repeat and reformulate right where
you want to listen to the phrases. Listen to the words again and again.
This is a lot about I have a YouTube video all about this.
I put the link in in under.
Where is what?
Isolate, repeat, reformulate where we want to isolate, focus on small quantities of material, find phrases and vocabulary, repeat speaking alone ten times so one or two phrases every day and then reformulate.
If you can take the phrase and start to change the phrase and express and say something about yourself.
But I have a I have a video.
I'll put the link in the description, the full video about my method.
But the idea is to focus on 2 to 5% of the video.
This is a really common problem with listening practice, where people are listening to the radio,
listening to the news and they cannot understand.
And it's very quickly, but it's not very focused and it's not very organized.
You need to master and become an expert in small parts of the video.
Don't worry or stress.
If you cannot understand 100%, you want to learn some basic phrases, basic vocabulary, and train
your listening to the vocabulary of your area when you are watching the video.
Focus and identify useful or interesting phrases.
If you are watching an interview with someone from your area and you hear a phrase that is useful or
interesting, right?
This phrase repeat and reformulate.
This is how you start to train your listening, to prepare for the job interview and to train your listening
to work in the area or profession you want.
Or different country, right?
Maybe an English speaking country.
The next part is to identify times in your normal day or routine when you can train listening when doing
something else.
Task 2 : Identify times in your day / routine
when you can train your listening
When doing something else.
Now, this is really important when you find a video and you can try to download it, download it to
your phone, it's really important that you don't try to find time, don't make a promise, like, okay,
Saturday morning for 2 hours, I'm going to study.
What we want to do is take your listening training audio onto your phone and really integrate with your
life.
Do you exercise?
Do you walk, travel by car?
Do you take a bus to work?
Do you cook?
Do you clean your house?
Do you walk your dog?
Do you have pets?
All of these things exercise, travel, cooking, cleaning, all of these things we all have to do part
of our normal routine.
But I'm saying, do not change your routine.
Just integrate English in your headphones and your on your on your phone when you are already.
Doing the things you are already doing, exercising, travel to work or cleaning your house.
If you become a productivity master and you start to listen again and again when doing something else,
you will find quickly that you can do 30 to 1 hour of listening training every day.
And this will completely change your English.
Train in an organized, planned way.
Training your speaking and training your listening.
It's not just, Oh, I'll watch YouTube, watch some random video, or just listen to the news you need
to plan and be organized.
So now if we start to find one video, then we can start finding one, two, three, four videos.
You want to find four or five videos that you can download and you can transfer to your device and you
can train your listening, listening to this when you are doing something else.
For me, at the moment, when I'm cooking or cleaning, I am usually listening to a marketing podcast
that is good for me in my business, or I'm practicing listening in a different language.
I never try to find time.
I only integrate my language learning with my normal routine.
Never try to find time to train your listening. Integrate your training with your daily life.
A few months ago, a student from Russia, she told me that she completely changed her way of studying,
where she stopped reading so much and just doing, listening, training.
And I can see the difference in her English is incredible.
She has doubled her English in four months just because of listening training.
The next idea if you're going to be organized is prepare your device.
Now you can do your listening training on your phone, your laptop, your tablet, or an MP three player.
But be organized.
Transfer, download and transfer the files.
Create a playlist on your phone.
Make it easy.
Make it so that when you take your phone in 10 seconds, you're already doing your training.
Don't.
Don't depend on WiFi or internet. It's just a problem.
You want to download the files so that you don't have any problems.
A really excellent way is a program I like to use called Real Media Player.
It's completely free and it works in an excellent way to download videos from YouTube or from different
places.
Of course, this is exclusively for educational purposes.
I'm not saying to download to do anything illegal, just train your English okay by headphones.
If you don't already have them and have them with you constantly be ready to train your English at all
times.
You have your playlist and your videos on your device and be ready.
Because for me, what I always did, for example, if there was a long line in the supermarket, if
there was a delay or a problem, I just started training my listening.
One time I had a problem where I needed to wait one hour in the bank.
I was fine. I was just listening to French, listening to Game of Thrones, the series in French.
I didn't mind. I was happy.
Normally people go crazy like, what? One hour waiting?
I don't care. Training. If your friend is late. Training, training your English.
Are you waiting at the bank or the dentist or the airplane? The airport training?
Is the traffic really bad? Train your English.
Start to use your lost time. Be ready.
Always have your device and your headphones ready.
Repetition is the key to perfection.
Now, I like the image here of the knife, because if you have a knife and you want the knife to be
sharp when you are passing a stone to make it sharper, to make it cut better, you think about you
take the knife, you pass the stone.
One time, it's a little better.
Not not great, but a little better.
And this is about your listening.
And if you can repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and become an expert in small quantity of materials,
this is the key to success.
Repeat, repeat, and repeat again.
Train, train, train.
For example, I have some audio still on my phone from when I was learning Spanish and I know them perfectly.
I know them word by word perfectly.
This work is an investment.
So to have the discipline and the patience to repeat the same audios again and again, sometimes it
can feel a little hard, sometimes it can feel a little boring.
But this is a big investment for your future.
If you do this work now, if you start a listening routine and training or speaking alone in the future,
you will have super confidence with your English.
This is an investment that can be good for you the rest of your life, but you do need a little bit
of discipline and patience to repeat again and again and again.
For example, season two of Game of Thrones and French. I had it on on my phone.
I listened to season three, season two so many times, again and again and again until I know it really,
really well.
And I can remember some of the lines.
So I always like to compare with a dancer or a sport.
For example, if have a professional dancer or gymnast who has a performance in two weeks, maybe you
have a job interview in two weeks.
What are you going to do to prepare?
If we look at the dancer, we understand she will repeat again and again and again before the performance.
You are exactly the same. You must not wait to train your speaking or the pronunciation of a difficult word before the interview.
When you are already in the interview, it's too late.
You cannot become magically confident.
You must train and have discipline before the interview.