This week I had the opportunity to speak with two people who are getting ready for their CELPIP exam. And both of them were struggling with the same issue. Overthinking. When they had to brainstorm, both of them want to be able to produce a constant flow of great ideas to talk or write about in the 30 or so seconds the exam gives you to prep.

But instead, as they practiced, they said they end up staring at their blank paper the entire time, completely frozen, or they spend far too long, like hours to get something they liked down. Both of these reactions are common ones. But as I'm sure you know, It won't lead to success on the CELPIP exam. Today, let's talk about overthinking, how it's impacting your ability to brainstorm, and your results on the CELPIP exam.

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 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 love 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 16 years, and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. If this is your first time here, the first time that you've downloaded an episode of this podcast, I just want to say hello and welcome.

Please sit back and relax and enjoy today's episode. If you are a regular listener. You are more than welcome here too. I'm glad you keep coming back each and every week. It makes my day to see that you keep coming back again and again. So whether you're new or you're an old time listener, please feel welcome to join me today as we talk all about the challenge and the problem of overthinking when you're trying to brainstorm on the CELPIP exam.

So that's exactly what my two friends are struggling with these days. Overthinking when they're trying to come up with lots of ideas for the exam. John Acuff writes overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want. And then he goes on to say that it leads to a tsunami of stuckness.

I just love that. A tsunami of stuckness. Doesn't that describe what your brainstorming struggle feels like? An overwhelming wave. Of not getting anywhere. And as I mentioned in the intro, many CELPIP test takers struggle with overthinking during the brainstorming portion of the exam. So if that's you, if you find brainstorming to be a real, real challenge, they know that you're not alone.

Lots of test takers struggle with this and the results of not being able to come up with enough ideas for the CELPIP exam are. On one level, it's just the frustration. You feel super frustrated because you know, you need to, you know, you want to, but you just can't seem to bridge that gap between what you want and what you need.

And that just leads to you feeling frustrated. You feel like giving up. You feel like you're never going to make it on the exam and not coming up with enough ideas in the brainstorming section, aside from leading to frustration, can lead you to not being able to come up with enough things to say during the speaking section of the exam or enough things to write about in the writing section.

of the exam. And that in turn will lead you to lower scores on the CELPIP. So we can't have that happen, can we? We can't let brainstorming be the thing that holds us back. And definitely we can't let overthinking be that stumbling block, that roadblock that thing that keeps holding you back.

And some of you know, If you've been listening for a while, I've mentioned it off and on, but some of you know that I'm a writer, or at least I'm working at being one. I've been working on one book for the past eight years, and I know that that's a really long time to be working on a book. My main problem isn't that I don't know what to write about.

I have a firm idea in my mind of the things that I want to be writing as I write. My problem is that I've been struggling to have time. Maybe I should rephrase that. I've been struggling to make time to sit down and write. So my trouble isn't really that I, I can't find the right words to say. My trouble is finding and making the time for me to sit down and write.

But you know that, Over the years, over the, the many years that I've been writing, because it's not just in the last eight years that I've been writing this book, all of my life, since I was a little kid, I've loved writing. That's just one of my things. You know, some people love to paint, some people like to golf, some people like to, you know, go bowling or horseback riding.

My thing is writing, at least one of them. I love to write. And I've noticed something about writing. and coming up with ideas to write about over those years. Here it is.

The first one. Ideas rarely come to me to write before I actually start writing. That means I've often sat down to write with nothing in mind to get me started.

Literally nothing in mind. I'll sit down, blank paper, well I don't use paper, I type, a blank screen in front of me, no words on it, nothing in my mind. In order for me to get those words flowing, I have to start typing. And at first, it's often slow. At first, you know, to get the first word, the second word, the third word, a sentence out, sometimes it comes quickly.

But other times I really have to struggle for it. And it might lead to lots of backtracking or deleting or backspacing. You know, I say, I start a sentence and then realize, no, no, no, that's not what I wanted to say, or that sounded awkward, but at the beginning, sometimes it can be slow. It can be awkward.

It can be not like how exactly I wanted it to be. But in order for those words to start happening on the screen, I have to start typing. And that's the thing. Zero ideas flow unless I get started. The action of getting words out leads to more words behind those words, you know, getting them out there brings other ones along with them.

And it rarely works the other way around for me. Sometimes it does. Sometimes before I sit down, maybe in that hour before sitting down, maybe if I was up for a walk, I've had it happen where I will get an idea for a scene that I want to write. I'll get it in my mind like a movie. I'll watch it happening in my thoughts and I'll think, Oh, that would be the perfect thing to write about next.

And then I'll go and I'll start writing it, but that doesn't happen very often for me, most of the time. The ideas don't start to flow until I sit down and I start typing. And as I type, those ideas start to flow faster and faster. And there's been times where I've had to struggle to keep up with all the ideas flowing as I am writing.

And that's what you need to strive for. And I think one of the things that needs to happen if you struggle with brainstorming is centered around how you think about brainstorming to begin with. If your objective in brainstorming is to come up with the best words, Like, the best way for you to talk about whatever topic the CELPIP exam is throwing at you, either on the speaking section or the writing section, if you're sitting there trying to come up with the best things to say, and you don't write anything down until you think you have the best ideas, then you are going to struggle for a long time.

And brainstorming is never going to be the tool for you that it can be. So in order to start moving with this, in order to get your ideas flowing from your mind, out onto paper and out during the brainstorming section of the exam. You need to leave behind that mindset of trying to come up with the best ideas first.

Instead, your goal needs to be around sparks. Have you ever watched like a fire that's going really well sometimes gets doesn't get started with with a big fire. It gets started with something small, usually a match, you know, or sometimes sparks like where I live in British Columbia. Every summer now for the past, well, the time that I've been living here, at least I know it's probably been a lot longer than the, than that, but I've noticed over the years that we've been living here, which has been about eight years or so, our summers have been getting hotter and we've been having more and more intense fire seasons where, where the forests around us can easily catch on fire.

And often all it takes is a bunch of sparks. And then the fire gets going. It kind of sounds cliche. I know, but it's really quite true. All it takes to get a big forest fire burning is a small spark or a couple of them going at the same time. And. That's kind of what we need to be focusing on having happen in your brainstorming sessions.

You're not looking to start with a big bonfire, a big forest fire of ideas. I mean, we want that in the end when we're actually producing the work. Oops, I hit my lamp. We're not wanting, we can't expect ourselves to have that big raging fire of ideas. When we get started in the brainstorming section, what instead we need to start focusing on is generating little tiny sparks, because if you get enough of them, those are those, the sparks is what is going to lead to more and more ideas.

So instead of me talking on and on about fire and sparks, what does that exactly mean when it comes to brainstorming? Well, like I said before, stop waiting for the perfect words to come.

Just start writing. You'll know what the, you know what the topic is. You know what you need to be speaking about or writing about. The exam gives you that. At least it gives you something to get started with. But don't wait for the perfect idea to come to you. Just start putting down random things on your paper that is associated with that topic that the exam is offering you.

Just start writing. Don't wait for perfect. Just start putting out one idea after another idea. And as you practice doing this on a regular basis, you'll get good at just putting down one word. And then that one word on paper will lead to another word You put that down and another word will come and you're not aiming for.

Quality words. You're not aiming for quality, you know, the best quality idea that you can possibly come up with to express your thoughts in English. No. If you have that mindset, that's going to be like, that's what overthinking does to you. It keeps you frozen because you're trying to get the best thing at the very beginning.

It doesn't usually work that way. Instead, aim for sparks, aim for maybe not the best words, but aim for words to come. The more words that you start having come out will lead to better and better ideas. Because sometimes, sometimes you have to get rid of a few garbage ideas before you can get to some good ideas.

That's kind of the idea of sparks. Maybe the first one that comes out isn't going to be the thing that starts the fire. Maybe not even the second or the third word that you write down, but I've seen this happen time and time again in my own life. As I write, it sometimes takes me a few sentences before the juices start the flow, but before words begin to come out of me.

That seemed to fit or help me express what I'm trying to say. And I've seen this happen many times with my students who aren't writers who aren't, you know, dedicated to, to, to trying to bring words from their mind on paper to tell a story. Cause you might be thinking to yourself, well, that works for you because you've done that for so many years.

And yeah, that's right. I've done it for a long time. So it, It kind of works for me, but I've also seen this happen with my students that if they just start writing out simple ideas, not even writing out big ideas, one word, because that's what brainstorming is all about on the exam. You don't have time to write full ideas down, oftentimes just getting those words

coming out of them on paper leads to more words coming in later and they keep coming faster and those ideas begin to get better as they go along. That's what your goal should be with brainstorming. Not coming up with the best idea, but coming up with a series of small ideas that's, that, that lead to more.

Better and better ones that will lead you to being able to fill up that 60 second, uh, recording time if you're speaking or, you know, that, that long piece of writing that you have to come up with on the exam. Well, I guess it's not a long piece of writing. It's like a 200 word limit, uh, piece of writing, but if you don't have the ideas to work with.

Filling up that 200 words can be really hard. You, you might find it difficult to figure out what you want to say next. And the same thing is true in the speaking section. If you don't have a series of ideas to work with, it's going to be tough for you to fill up that time. Now, those 60 seconds or those 90 seconds can honestly feel like an eternity if you don't know what to say next.

Or if you say what you already came up with so quickly, And you don't have other things to go along with it. Like if, if you, if you quickly run through the limited ideas that you came up with on the spot, you know, , if you just try to improvise as you're, as you're speaking, you'll, you'll probably find yourself finishing before the time.

The objective is to fill up your time, both in the writing and in the speaking section of the exam. And, and to do so in a way that, that logically answers the question that you've been given. And sometimes the only way to have that happen for you is if you do a good job brainstorming at the very beginning.

So to sum up , if you struggle with overthinking. During the brainstorming section of the exam, what I want to invite you to do is to examine your mindset. Is your mindset. Something like I have to come up with the best words in order for me to begin brainstorming.

And if I don't have the best words, then I don't write anything. If that's you today, I just want to invite you to set aside that, that idea of trying to have it perfect and instead give yourself permission to write small ideas that might not work, but that will lead to other ideas. The more ideas you put down on your paper as you're brainstorming, the more of those words that you can get out there,

the easier it will be for you to come up with more ideas to work with, and with better ideas to speak about or to write about on the exam. But it begins with you just starting to write. Don't wait for perfection. Just start writing.

Well, that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. . And I will see you again next Tuesday. Have a great week.