How To Make Time For Your CELPIP Prep

Speaker A: 00:00:00

We all have the same 24 hours of time each day, don't we? But the way we choose to fill those hours is different for each and every person and so are the results we are getting.

If you're struggling with having enough time each day to practice for your CELPIP exam, then first of all know that you're not alone. It's such a common challenge for many test takers. It's common to struggle with something called competing priorities.

Meaning you have multiple things priorities in your life that are important to you and because they are important to you, you want to make them happen.

You likely have responsibilities with your work, your family, your spouse, your loved ones, your bills that you need to pay, immigration challenges like paperwork and applications, and on top of it all, preparing for this help of exam. All of those things are important, all of them are priorities, and all of them are competing for your time and attention.

So what can you do if you feel like your life is an unending tug of war between these priorities and somehow you always end up not doing what you know you need to be doing, like getting ready for the selfip. If that's your challenge, then you are in the right place, my friend.

I hope today's episode will help you figure out how to get moving in the right direction again. 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 to 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 17 years.

I'm a certified CELPIP trainer and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. And before I speak another word, I want to make sure you know something. I struggle with managing competing priorities too.

What I'm sharing here, I'm also trying to apply in my own life because I too have those moments where I get to the end of a week and realize, shoot, that thing I really wanted to have happen in my life is not happening, or it's progressing, but at a way slower pace than what I want it to. For me, one of those things is my writing. I've been working on the same book for well over 10 years now.

I've made a lot of progress with it, that's for sure, but it's still not finished yet, and the big reason is simply this. It's a competing priority in my life and I often place other priorities over it.

Even though I know I want to have a completed novel by the time I turn 50, which is now just months away, I know that that won't happen unless I pause or eliminate a few of the other priorities in my life, which is a very difficult choice to make. Here's the deal.

All of us have a multitude of things in our lives that matter to us, and I think all of us know that feeling of trying to juggle them all. As we go through each day and week, we deal with one issue or challenge only to be immediately presented with another one.

Our time always finds a way to get used up each day, doesn't it? If you've been a listener for a while, you'll know that I work with seniors.

One of the most surprising things they say on a regular basis is how amazed they are to realize that they are quite busy even though they're retired. They thought retirement would be an endless supply of nothingness where they just get to sit and relax. But no.

Many that I talk to say they are just as busy as they used to be, but just not busy from going to work. Each day. It's a different kind of busy.

John Maxwell, a well known business writer, once said that time is an equal opportunity employer, meaning we all get the same 24 hours as everyone else does. Nobody gets more than 24 hours and nobody gets less than 24 hour days.

It's what we choose to put into those 24 hours each day that determines a great deal of what happens in our lives.

Like I said in the intro, if you find yourself struggling to make time for what really matters to you, like getting ready for the CELPIP exam or practicing your English, then please know you're not alone. We all struggle with making sure we're doing the things that really matter most to us.

I hope that the following ideas will give you something to think about as you work through how you'll invest in the time you have each week. The first idea that I want to share with you. And again, hear me when I say this, I'm talking to me just as much as I'm sharing it with you.

Okay, the first thing is to take responsibility. We need to realize above all that you and I are the one who needs to make the things that are important in our lives happen.

Your CELPIP prep time is one of those things. Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, would you?

If you have been struggling with having time to prepare for your exam, it's time to realize that you are the only one who can make that time happen. It's not up to a teacher or your spouse or your children or your boss.

But boy, it sure is easy to give that responsibility or blame over to those people when we find ourselves at the end of another week without any celpip or English practice time in, isn't it? Oh, my boss is the worst. I've always got so much to do that I end up working late.

I work late and I don't end up with enough time or energy to think about getting ready for my exam. It's my boss's or my work's fault. Does that sound familiar? Or how about this one? My kids need me.

I work all day and when I get home I want to spend as much time with them as I can. I need to help them with homework, preparing their lunches, making sure they have baths and showers, and just spending time with them.

Does that sound familiar? Or maybe a version of it?

If that's how you find yourself spending your time these days, like saying I've had to spend all my time doing something which means that I don't have enough time to be doing my celpip prep, then ask yourself this. Who or what is running my priorities these days? Is it me or is it someone or something else? Again, don't get me wrong, family and work are important.

Those are also my priorities in my life, and I also often find myself trying to sort out how I invest my time effectively in each one. So where are you spending your time?

We need to realize that we are the ones choosing to spend the time we are spending in each of those spaces in our life. It's not always that they are sneaking in and pulling us away from what matters to us. Sometimes they can, and sometimes they do.

But more often than not, we can find ourselves struggling with our time when we invest more of it in one of those areas than we need to in that day. I remember reading Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when I was younger.

One of the lessons that impacted me the most from that book was his concept of four quadrants. Quadrant 1 urgent and important, quadrant 2 not urgent but important quadrant 3 urgent but not important and quadrant 4 not urgent and not important.

Now let's talk a little bit about what each of those things means. Quadrant 1 urgent and important if you're spending time here, you are meeting critical deadlines at work or in your personal life.

In other words, you're Putting out fires, dealing with emergencies, paying bills. They must get done. They have to be done. By spending all of your time here, though, you may eventually experience a breakdown or a burnout.

These tasks require immediate attention and you have to deal with them. But it's not wise to spend all of your time here Quadrant two, Not urgent but important is where you really need to be as much as you can.

It's where you're planning, learning, exercising, investing in your relationships, working towards important goals like, say, your CELPIP exam. This is where you need to aim to spend your time. It's leading you towards what matters most to you, while at the same time starving.

The items in Quadrant one those urgent but important items. Then comes Quadrant three, urgent but not important.

The Covey website calls this quadrant distractions like unimportant emails, phone calls, unimportant meetings at home. That might look like making sure that everything is absolutely spotless all the time.

It might look like dealing with emails or social media messages, alerts from others Purdue University and I'll link to this suggests that spending too much time in this quadrant will have you crossing off to do items that aren't really connected to what matters most in your life. So be careful. Items in this quadrant will pull you away and keep you away from what really matters to you.

And finally, Quadrant four, Not urgent and not important. The Franklin Covey website calls this quadrant a waste of time.

Here is where you'll find doom scrolling, binge watching Netflix, playing hours and hours of video games. You'll want to limit your time in this quadrant as much as you can.

The Purdue resource I'll be linking to calls this quadrant the space where you are giving up your responsibilities for what needs to be completed in your life. Living here is where you will find yourself, going weeks and months and years without seeing the change you want to see happen in your life.

But at the same time you can't figure out where your time goes each day. A powerful exercise for you to do and for me to do is to be thinking about where you're spending most of your time each day.

If you find that you're not having enough time for your CELPIP prep, it might very well be that you're showing up in the wrong quadrant. And if that's the case, what can you begin doing today to begin spending more time in the spaces that matter to you the most?

In other words, quadrant 2, the shift might mean that you need to say no to things, at least for a season. That shift might mean you leave that Netflix series for the weekend instead of every night.

That shift might mean giving yourself a time each night where you tell your spouse or kids that you need 30 minutes of quiet so that you can practice. That's how I get my podcast done each week.

My family gives me time each Saturday night to get this episode right, written, recorded and edited, but I had to set that time up with my wife and my family. Sure, sometimes that time gets bumped around, but it's usually there. They know it's what I need to do and they work with me to make it happen.

So here are some takeaways that I hope will help you today. Number one, remember, you're the one responsible for making your practice times happen.

It's not up to anyone else, so don't give up that responsibility. And number two, which quadrant of time are you living in the most?

If you find you never have time to do what matters most to you, you may need to make some changes in how you use your time. And you may need to work with the people in your life to make those shifts possible. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

I hope that you have found it helpful and encouraging as you work through your goals and your objectives of trying to get ready for the selfip exam. And I hope that you'll come back again next Tuesday for another episode. Have a fantastic week. Bye.