One of my favorite activities is the one minute challenge.
I love this activity because it's one minute so the simplest form of this can be done on your busiest
day.
The other reason that I love the one minute challenge is because it's a way to assess your progress
with this method of lifelong learning with no tests.
It's still important to understand if you're getting better or if you feel more confident with your
English.
And the third reason is the more intricate version of The One Minute challenge can also be used for
development and growth.
So I want to show you all of this.
The first thing you need is a timer.
So I literally went to Google typed in timer and here's the automatic one you can use a timer in your
phone or any of the other timers that pop up.
You click here.
One minute now you need a topic.
I recommend picking a topic that you're actually going to use common small talk topics are weather vacations
family.
If you're using English for work you can do something about business.
Maybe mergers or the meeting this Saturday whatever it is you need.
This is very flexible.
You click start.
For one minute you just talk.
You talk about that topic.
Now if it's a topic that you're very comfortable with you should have no problem just talking for a
minute about it.
For example if it's about the beach you could talk about how much you love being in the sun and how
you want to go to Miami soon because you heard they have great beaches.
And one time you went to Pensacola and it was pretty cool.
But you heard Miami is even better.
So you can see you can go anywhere with this.
It can be your personal experiences or the topic in general.
Now if you're doing the simplest version of this that's it.
You just do that.
And then the next time you do it again you're able to see how well you're doing if you're able to talk
the whole minute with no difficulties.
Great.
If you do have some trouble then you can think about why is it because you didn't have enough vocabulary.
Or is it because you had the words you just didn't know the sentence structure or you didn't feel good
talking about it.
Were you really tired or stressed.
Oh and then you can think Oh is my English worse when I'm stressed.
So you start making these connections that allow you to grow your confidence and address weaknesses.
Now let's say you want to take this to the next level.
You can record yourself for a minute and then listen to you to yourself and the recording and see OK
how is my pronunciation and my fluency Now let's go back to the PTF because then when you show you a
different way to do the one minute challenge.
So still using the timer you can use this for Idea generation.
So let's pull this one up we'll call here first.
So for example for the beach here we have the topic in the middle now related ideas that's mostly going
to be vocabulary that's directly related verbs nouns adjectives.
And the next drawing is for the higher level learning.
It's also the fact what you're really going to use in real life conversation.
No one's going to say do you like the beach and you're going to say yes I love the sand I wear sunscreen.
My goal is to help you push through that.
And I want you to prepare.
So here you can do memories for example your family vacation in Cancun that you would like to learn
how to surf.
Notice here I'm doing memories that I had things for the future.
I was shaken up.
You know don't the don't tie yourself to the immediate thing in your brain try to think outside the
box.
The more you do this the more comfortable you are with spontaneous conversation which will help you
feel more natural and feel more confident when you have these situations in real life.
Now the other forum that I have here for you this one is to identify what to study what to review.
So you set the timer for a minute the topic in this case was food.
So Mike I want to I want to see if I can talk about food.
I set the timer and then you come up with nouns verbs and adjectives.
So this is different than the first approach because it's more strategic.
At the end of the minute I notice oh ok my verbs and nouns are pretty decent.
But man I cannot think of any adjectives.
So now you know where to invest your time whether it's that day or another day.
What you do is you find resources to strengthen your food adjectives which is a way less overwhelming
than studying everything to do with food.
For example here we could go to the resources page that you have access to and I actually have an adjective
section in the first to our food.
So let's take a look at them.
This one I like because it's more for advanced maybe upper intermediate.
And I love that it has the words and examples.
So then you know oh OK lemons are tart.
This makes it easier for you to remember I don't want you to memorize the definition.
I would rather you make the connection with the examples.
Now this one.
The second link is different.
There are no examples.
It's just the words.
So this is good for more specific development.
And you can use this like OK crispy if you need to look it up that's fine and think oh I love crispy
fried chicken.
So notice I'm not repeating the definition.
I'm making a connection with my memory.
Now going back over here now that you've done that you've identified you've grown the different things
that you associate with the topic you've identified specifically where you need to strengthen your skills
then set the timer again.
And now talk so now that you've done those other steps you'll have more material fresh in your mind
to talk about.
So then you need to work on how do you use all of that information and get the sentences out.
It'll probably feel frustrating at first if you're not used to this and those 60 seconds in the minute
may feel like an eternity but as you get better it'll feel faster.
And that's the goal.
You want it to feel really effortless.
Now if you wanted to sit down and do this back to back you could set the time or do it verbally set
it again do this first form set the timer again do the next one take five minutes to review things that
you found online to address your weaknesses.
Set the timer again and do the verbal one.
So within 20 minutes your transformation is significant.
Even if you just did this the one minute that that being done consistently once a week once a day makes
a big difference if you need more drastic results you do this form where you do the different activities
back to back 20 minutes max and you come out of those 20 minutes really feeling good about a specific
topic.
OK so this is how you use the one minute challenge.
I hope you're as excited as I am because it's so tailored to you.
You don't talk about topics that don't matter to you.
You get to pick what ever is real and valuable for you and your life.
OK.
Go practice.