Learn English with Elliot Hulse and Stefan Molyneux

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, A.J. Hogue, where A.J. 's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills. Here's A.J.

with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly. Confidence. Power. Strength. That's what we're talking about today on the Effortless English Show.

Go to EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Confidence, power, strength. Where does it come from? How do we develop confidence? One of the special things about the effortless English system is that it teaches confidence, confident speaking, especially my Power English course, especially that one, is carefully designed to train you to speak fluently and confidently.

What is confidence? What is that? People say, I want to be more confident. What does it mean? Well, it's a feeling of strength, right? It means you do not feel weak.

You do not feel shy. You do not feel nervous. You do not feel afraid. It's the opposite of that. You feel strong. You feel sure about yourself. You're not nervous.

You're not worrying about mistakes. See, you can have great grammar. You can know a lot of vocabulary. You can even be fluent, but still not speak confidently.

Still feel nervous and shy every time you try to speak, uh, English, and it sounds terrible. It sounds terrible. It's bad communication. So Power English, my Power English course, teaches you vocabulary, sure, of course.

Teaches you to speak fluently. Trains you to develop instant understanding with your listening. But most importantly, Power English trains you to feel confident when you speak English, right? It's a feeling.

It's a feeling inside. That's what confidence is. Now, of course, the problem for most of us is that we don't know how to be confident. We want to feel confident.

Of course we do. But how do you do it if you don't feel it? Right? Because some people just seem to be born confident. It seems they're confident when they're little children and they grow up just being strong and confident all the time.

And if you ask them, how do you do it? They can't really teach you because they've always been confident. They don't really know. Now, luckily, I have not always been confident.

I was quite shy and geeky, nerdy, means kind of like smart, but not social, when I was young. And gradually, over many, many years, I became more and more confident. I became a more confident speaker in my own language, English. Just...

a more powerful public speaker, a confident public speaker, and just confident in most areas of my life. So I developed it, I trained it, and it took me a long time to figure out how to do it. But I put those lessons into the Power English course to train you so that as you learn to speak fluently, you also feel that strength and confidence every time you speak English.

That's what's so special about Power English. It trains you, lesson by lesson, to feel confident, to be confident every time you speak English. Now, this show is supported by that course and other courses, so I encourage you to join my Power English course at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

Today's show features an interview between two people Stefan Molyneux, who is a philosopher, he has his own podcast, his own YouTube channel, Stefan Molyneux, and it's called Free Domain Radio is the name of his show.

He's the host, and he's interviewing a guy named Elliot Hulse. Elliot Hulse. And Elliot Hulse is... has a big YouTube channel, which is called, let me look, Strength Camp.

Strength Camp. Because Elliot Hulse, he's a strength coach. That's why we're talking about confidence and strength today. Well, Elliot Hulse, he's a big, strong guy.

He's a very confident guy. If you watch some of his videos on YouTube, he's very, very confident. And he's also very strong, I mean physically strong. He's a power lifter, so he lifts big, big heavy weights.

He competes lifting heavy weights. And he also coaches people on YouTube, and he has a gym team. He's in Florida, I think. There's a gym in Florida where he trains other powerlifters.

So this guy, he's strong, strong, strong. He's physically strong, but he's also emotionally strong. He's a very strong, confident man. So he and Stefan Molyneux have a talk about strength and confidence and the body.

They talk about how important our body is, that strength and confidence, much of it, perhaps most of it, does not really come from our brain and thinking, but rather from our body. How we use our body affects our brain.

And see, this is so important in my Power English course. Much of the technique in Power English is is how I teach you to use your body as you learn. Some people think this is just for fun so you don't get bored.

No, no, no. It's much more powerful than that. It's so important. How you use your body. In fact, the first two lessons of Power English are about exactly that.

So we're going to listen to this quite interesting interview between Stefan Molyneux and Elliot Hulse, and they're talking about the body, how the body is part of the brain, and the brain is part of the body, that we, in our culture now, you know, we kind of separate them, and people are so focused on the brain and thinking, and they're really too focused on their brain and valuing their brain and not valuing their body enough, and that the body also has intelligence.

And they talk about how Our viscera, viscera means guts. It's the inside in your stomach area, like your intestines, viscera. Our guts have a kind of intelligence.

Our heart has a kind of intelligence. Let's listen to the first part of this. So we'll have Elliot Hulse and Stefan Molyneux. Get on, right? It's really exciting, and you're spot on.

We're changing people not just through ideas, but we're changing their bodies. I've been in therapy. I was in therapy for three years. I come and go. I work with various mentors.

One of the things that puts me in a unique position is my understanding. Understanding of exercise physiology and movement. And what's also incredible is that we can not only just change people's DNA by changing their thoughts, because obviously the physiology responds differently to the environment.

tend to believe that you live in a good world as opposed to a threatening world like you described. But we can also work at the physiological level by helping people breathe better, by reducing muscular tension in key areas of the body that affect the brain. So stretching, breathing, exercise modalities like yoga and intuitive stretching are really important in changing

what I believe to be the whole brain because our body is linked to the brain. There really is no delineation except for the stories that we've told ourselves about where our brain is. My brain extends way down into my body through the spinal cord and it wraps around my organs and viscera and muscles through various vortexes. And if I'm going to change my thinking,

I can't just do it in an abstract way with new stories, new images. I also need to stand differently. I need to breathe differently. I need to carry myself differently.

My body should begin to feel differently. Ah, great, great. That was Elliot Hulse. Sorry, there was a small pause there. So, some really cool ideas. Elliot Hulse is saying that

We have this idea that the brain and body are separate. But in fact, the brain is also in our body, right? We usually think, oh, our brain, our mind is inside our head only. But, you know, through our spine, the brain, the nerves go all the way down our back.

And then out of the spine, the nerves go all through our body. They wrap around our different organs, right? And so really, the brain is our whole body. It's in our whole body.

We have nerves all through our body. The brain and body are connected, and really they are one and the same thing. And he's saying that you can't only change by changing your ideas. Like if you want to make a change in your life, you want to be successful, you want to learn something new, really make a serious change.

It's not enough just to change your mental ideas in your head. You have to change your body at the same time. He says you have to change the way you stand, change the way you breathe, change the way you use your muscles.

He mentions, you know, using breathing techniques. He mentions yoga. Of course, he's a strength coach, so he lifts weights. He's very strong. He's got big muscles.

how you move your body, all of these things are part of making an important change. If you don't change the body also, then you usually don't change the emotions.

And if you don't change the emotions, usually you will not change your actions long term. This is a big, big, big mistake that people make is they focus too much on the brain and the ideas and, oh, I'm going to change my thinking. That's okay. That's part of it.

But you've got to change how you're using your body, too. That even includes things like nutrition, everything. This is another reason why I feel the schools are criminal, really. Criminal.

Because they... They are the worst about this idea that all our learning and all our brain is only inside our head and that our bodies are not important.

Now, I can remember when I was a kid that we at least got, I can't remember, I think it was about an hour, maybe 45 minutes, to play every day at school, like elementary school as a small kid.

It's called recess. So we would do our classes, you know, six hours a day, whatever, five, six hours a day. in the building, sitting on our butts, not moving, not taking care of our bodies, ignoring our bodies.

But at least we had a little break where we got to go out and run around and play. It was short, not enough, but now schools in America are cutting recess so that the kids are completely inside, not active, sitting on their butts the whole time with basically no physical movement, completely neglecting their bodies.

And the schools think, oh yeah, learning and change, it's just inside your brain, just ideas, but not true. And that's why the kids get so bored. That's why the kids are trained to be so passive and weak and distracted.

Because their bodies are being neglected. And it's not natural. And it's not natural at any age. It's not natural for adults either. The only problem is that most adults have been trained physically.

to do this for so many years that they're kind of used to it. So they accept it as normal, just sitting in an office all day long, not moving or sitting in a class, you know, for hours and hours and hours and not moving and not using their bodies and trying to solve problems only with the body.

Let's listen to another part of this. I think this is such an interesting conversation. And this next part, you'll hear Stefan Molyneux speak as well. Just find it here.

And it's about right there. Okay, so here we go. So they continue talking about the same subject that the body is part of the brain. The brain is part of the body.

And there's actually an intelligence inside our bodies that most people don't use, but we need to. So let's listen to what they have to say. And so I think that the body work is vastly – the value of body work is vastly underestimated. And people wait until it's broken and then try to fix it, which I think is a real mess.

Yeah, if you wait until your body is broke, I can guarantee you that in many ways your life is also broken because the vehicle through which you've been approaching it has been compromised. Okay, so they're saying that the value of body work, meaning –

Exercise, meaning nutrition, meaning even things like massage, just all the things you do to create a healthy, strong body. People don't value that enough. They're too focused on their brain and mind, and they don't value it. And they wait until their body starts to break and have health problems and all that.

And then they finally pay attention to the body. And then Elliot Hall says, you know, that's right. If you have a body that's broken, that has problems, then your life is broken. Your whole life is broken.

Let's continue. You're brain damaged if you're body damaged. Now, I know that's a big statement. You are brain damaged if you are body damaged. I think that's my favorite quote from this whole interview.

You are brain damaged if you are body damaged. How many of us think about that? If your body is unhealthy, it means your brain is also unhealthy. If your body is sick, your brain is also sick.

They're not separate. If your body has low energy, then you will also have low mental energy, lower mental energy. If your body is weak, you will probably be less confident.

Now the good news, of course, is that the opposite is also true. A strong, healthy, energized body usually produces a stronger, healthier, more energized brain, mind.

But really, if you don't have access to the intuition of your body, you've got to understand that your body does what it does without you having to think about it. Autonomic nervous system, they used to call it the vegetative nervous system when I read some of the old books. So he's saying you have to realize your body has an intelligence, which we call intuition.

Intuition, which is... how you just know things, but you don't know how, right? You just have a, we'll describe it as a gut feeling in English. I have a gut feeling that this is right.

I have a gut feeling I need to do this. I have a gut feeling that person is bad. Right. It's a kind of intuitive knowledge. It's a it's not from language.

It's not from our brains. It kind of comes from our body, our emotion and emotional intelligence, a body intelligence. And that's in many ways more intelligent than our language using brain. Let's keep going.

basically just does what it does without any effort on your part. There's a tremendous amount of intelligence that is available to us if we are... in touch with our bodies, you know, yoga and tai chi and qigong and exercises like that tend to give us access to the language of our heart, the language of our gut, so that it doesn't seem, you know, I tell a lot of people, I tell people often, you know, listen to your heart or trust your gut. Well, shit, if my stomach is sick from the food that I've eaten, I've got tension in my belly because I'm cutting off my sexuality from, you know, basically the tightness in your belly is sort of

Okay, so he's saying that we have to create health in our body for our intuition to be good so that we can have an understanding of, he says, the language of the heart, the language of the gut.

So he says, he gives advice to people sometimes, and he says, trust your gut, trust your heart. But he says, if your heart's not healthy, if your gut is unhealthy because you eat terrible food all the time and you're really overweight, then your intuition will also be bad.

Your intuitive intelligence will not be good. And even your brain intelligence will not be working correctly. So you'll make worse decisions. You'll be weaker emotionally.

All right, let's listen to a little more. I'm just going to forward it a little more again, and let's see what we've got. Then there's a fruit. You've got the root and the fruits.

What we tend to do is take the – is if we were a piece of fruit and we were to say, well, those roots, they just hang out in that dirty, nasty dirt down there.

I'm a piece of beautiful apple. I'm a beautiful apple, shiny. I'm when the birds built their nests. I'm not where the worms are. Right. Yeah, so that apple to say that sort of judge, place judgment on and separate himself consciously from the root system.

He doesn't exist. The fruit won't exist. It doesn't make any sense. We have to realize and appreciate and honor our root system. Well, and I've read some very convincing arguments for me, at least, Elliot, that –

You know, everyone talks about peak oil and so on. I think that the most scarce and necessary resource in the world is empathy. Because if you have empathy for other human beings, that doesn't always mean sympathy. It doesn't always mean that you agree, but you understand where other people are coming from.

Empathy and cruelty are opposites. You can't do the two together. And empathy, I believe, really comes from the body. the one thing we share with everyone else we may have different ideas different religions different cultures but you know as shylock said an emotion of venice if you prick us as the jews do we not bleed right the body we all have in common and we all go through the same experience of growth and puberty and maturity and eventual decay and death and

I believe that those who are not connected with the body have the greatest trouble with empathy. And so I think that teaching people to get into their bodies helps remind them, as you said, like we're all kind of the same, but not in our thoughts, but in our bodies. You know, I'm assuming you, like me, have approximately two nipples.

Okay. Very interesting. The first part of that, they were talking about roots and fruits, roots and fruits. So it's a metaphor, right? They're comparing...

body and mind, body and brain to roots and fruits. So he's saying, imagine there's a tree, right? And you have, let's say an apple tree. And you have an apple, a beautiful red apple.

And the apple can think. And the apple thinks, oh, I'm so great. I'm so wonderful. And I'm much better than the roots. The roots are nasty. The roots are down in the dirt below me.

And this is kind of how we think. We think, oh, the brain is so great, but oh, the body is dirty or smelly or difficult to deal with or whatever. But he's saying how ridiculous. Of course that's ridiculous.

Without the roots, the fruit cannot exist. The fruit comes from nature. the roots in the same way. Our brain comes from our body and really is, is the body just as the apple is the tree.

The root is the tree, right? It's all one whole. Then Stefan Molyneux, he changes the subject a little bit and he talks about empathy. And I think this is a really good point he makes because

Empathy is different than sympathy. So sympathy is something where you kind of feel similar to another person. But empathy is kind of like emotional understanding. Emotional understanding.

If you have empathy for other people, it means you care about them. You care about them and you can at least understand... Their feelings, their fears, what they want in life, that kind of thing.

And it's the opposite, he said, of cruelty, to be mean, nasty. You cannot be mean and nasty if you have empathy. If you feel empathy for other people, maybe you disagree with them. You completely disagree with another person.

But if you have empathy, then you don't hate them. You don't want to hurt them. You don't want them to suffer. You disagree, but you can also at least understand that they're human.

You have a connection, an emotional connection. And Stefan says he believes that empathy, that very important empathy that creates peace and understanding in our world, he believes that's a physical thing. He thinks that comes from the body, not from our brain.

Because he said, you know, our thoughts can be very different. We can have totally different beliefs, right? We can completely disagree and be completely opposite about some idea.

But like he's saying is that we all share similar bodies. Our physical experience is similar or the same, right? We all have a heart. We all have lungs.

Like he said, we're all born. We all go through adolescence. grow older and eventually die we all experience sickness and diseases at very different times uh we all have to eat you know all of these these basic physical things we share we share as human beings we even share most of these things with animals too

And so he's saying that is really the source of our empathy, where we can have that human connection, understanding, and care for other humans and not want to be cruel.

That it comes from the physical, the body. And he's saying the people who don't have empathy, who are cruel and mean, he thinks they're kind of disconnected from their body.

Interesting, interesting, interesting topics. I think this is super important, as I said in the beginning. Effortless English has always had a very strong physical, we can say physiology, physiological component part.

Because I recognized as I was creating Effortless English that... What these guys are saying is true. What Elliot Hulse and Stefan Mullin are saying, it's true. And it's also true in really in learning and in all kinds of learning.

We have to involve our bodies. We can't forget about our bodies. And that if we do involve our bodies, the more we involve our bodies, the better we learn, the more confident we become.

That's true for empathy. It's also true for English speaking. I mean, what makes a confident speaker? I could show you two videos. I could show you two videos.

Let's say we pick one person who's a very shy speaker. No confidence. And in the other video, I show you a super confident, powerful, strong speaker. Now, I could turn off the sound, no sound, silent, and then play both videos.

And you would know exactly which one was confident and which one was shy and nervous and not confident. Without sound, not even hearing them, you would know immediately, ah, that one's a great speaker, that one's confident, and that one's not.

And how would you know? Well, obviously you would just be looking at their body, how they use their body. That's where the confidence comes from. The strength, the confidence is physical.

So you've got to pay attention to this. It's so important. And it's important in all areas of life. I often try to just... make changes first with my body.

Like if I'm having a tough time in my life, uh, in some area in the past, I, you know, I would try to, Oh, do I, do I need to do differently? You know, try to learn different ideas first. But now usually my first step is just to try to figure out what am I doing physically? How can I change my body?

What am I doing with my body that is creating weakness or tiredness or Or a lack of confidence. And then I work on my body first. And then it becomes much easier to make that change to improve things.

You need to do this too. I encourage you to do this. All right. Why don't we take a look at Twitter really quick. See if we got anything interesting on Twitter.

Twitter questions. My Twitter. is AJ Hogue, my name. So it's twitter.com slash A-J-H-O-G-E. AJ Hogue on Twitter. That's where you can ask me questions or make a comment.

Just say hi. Let's go. Felicitas fan down in L.A. and her and her brother both She asks, do you have any good suggestions for making a resume and cover letter look good?

She's specifically asking about a college instructor job. But I'll just give you more general ideas. Okay, now first of all, I have a whole course about resumes, job interviews, cover letters, career. I made a course with my dad.

It's called Business English Conversations. businessenglishconversations.com. We have actually a whole unit about resumes and cover letters. I think we have one about resumes and one about cover letters.

So that's the best place to look, but I'll give you a very short answer now. When you make a resume, this is for any job. You need to focus on accomplishments.

Too many people focus on tasks. What they did. I did this. I filed reports. And I typed letters for my boss. That's a task. It's what you did. But it doesn't talk about an accomplishment.

It doesn't show any value. An accomplishment is something that you did... that had high value so an accomplishment would be i saved my company a thousand dollars by changing our billing system just as an example trying to think of something but basically you want to show that you know did you save money did you save time

Did you help people work together better? You know, what did you do that was valuable? Put that on your resume, your accomplishments. You know, did you lead a project or were you part of a project?

You don't have to be the leader. You're just part of a team. Were you part of a project that, you know, did something? Did you help create a product? Did you help?

do a marketing campaign that made money, whatever. But you got to show that you did things that were valuable, useful. She's asking about being an instructor. So what have you done that helps your students or your school?

So for example, when I had a resume, I don't have a resume anymore. I don't need one. But when I used to have a resume for teaching English, I put things on there like, you know, I...

increased my class size by 50%, or I don't remember, 80%. So in other words, my classes were very popular, and so people in my class, my students, started to tell their friends, and then they came to our school, registered at our school. It was a language school in San Francisco.

And just so they could join my class. So my class got bigger and bigger. Well, that's fantastic. What does that show? That shows... a potential employer that I helped my past school make more money.

They like that. Okay. Maybe you haven't done something like that, but you could, you know, maybe you developed, um, you know, a new course. I developed a new TOEFL course or whatever.

Right. But you got to show something valuable. If you're specifically a teacher, then show, uh, how you helped either your students or your employer, your school, or both.

All righty. So there you go. That's good advice for any, any, any, any resume or cover letter, not just teachers, but really in general. All right. So returning to our topic, a few last thoughts.

Confidence equals body. That's the big idea here. Confidence equals the body. Confidence is physical. That's why you can look at a video and you know if someone is confident or not.

You can look at a video and you can see, oh, they're shy or they're weak or not. You don't need sound. You don't need to hear them. I know this is a big problem for a lot of people, maybe for you.

this problem of confidence, this problem of weakness and shyness, of developing confidence. I encourage you to focus on your body. And when you get my Power English course, do what I say about using your body. Do all of those activities that I teach you in that course.

You know, some people, they get it and they think, oh, that's not important and they don't do it. But that is super important. It is one of the most important parts of the course. You have to use the course correctly to get it.

those great results that I promise, okay? You got to do everything I tell you, especially the physical parts of how I tell you to use your body as you use the lessons.

Okay, as I said before, go to EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Get my Power English course. See you next time. Bye for now. Thank you.