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For the past 20 years, / I've been helping / Malaysians / and other Southeast Asians / to speak / better English. // And through training / thousands of Southeast Asians, / I've discovered a very surprising truth. // I've discovered that / how well somebody communicates in English / actually has very little to do with their English level. // It has a lot to do / with their attitude / towards English. // There are people out there / who have a very, very low level of English, / and they can communicate very, very well. // One of them that I remember was a student, / a participant of mine / named Faizal. // He was a factory supervisor. // English level very, very low, / but this guy / could just sit and listen to anybody, / very calmly, / clearly, / and then he could respond, / absolutely / express his thoughts / beautifully, / at a very low level of English. // So, / today I want to share with you / what is / so different about people like Faizal. // How do they do it? // And second of all, / why is this so important not only to you, / but to your children, / to your community, / and to the future of Malaysia? // And third of all, / what's one thing you can do, starting today, / if you want to speak with that calm, / clear confidence / that people like Faizal has? // So, first of all, / what is / so different? // How do people like Faizal do it? // So, / to answer that question, / I'm going to take you back about 10 years, / okay? // So, / I was training staff at that time, / and my daughter, / at that time, / was taking piano lessons. // And I started to notice / two really strong similarities between / my daughter's attitude / or thinking towards playing the piano / and a lot of Malaysians' / thinking or attitude towards English. // Now, / first of all, / I should tell you / my daughter absolutely hated piano, / hated the lessons, / hated practicing. // This is my daughter practicing piano, / okay? // This is as good as it got. // This is the real thing. // And she dreaded going to piano lessons / because to my daughter, / going to piano lessons, / she was filled with this sort of dread. // Because it was all about / not screwing up, / right? // Because like a lot of piano students, / to both my daughter and her teacher, / her success in piano was measured by how few mistakes she made. // Now, at the same time, / I noticed that a lot of Malaysians went into English conversations with the same sort of / feeling of dread. // This sort of feeling that they were going to be judged by / how many mistakes they were going to make, / and whether or not they were going to screw up. // Now, / the second similarity that I noticed / was to do with self-image. // You see, my daughter, / she knew what good piano sounded like, / right? // Because we've all heard good piano. // And she knew what her level was, / and she knew how / long she'd have to play for / to play like that. // And a lot of Malaysians, / I noticed, / had this / idea of what good proper English is supposed to sound like, / and what their - / I see a lot of you nodding / - and what their English sounded like, / and how far they would have to go to get there. // And they also felt like they were - / like my daughter / - just bad, / bad piano player, / bad English speaker, / right? //