Good job, everyone! Thanks to @Rory Yuan, @Lee Tree, @Hina Hsia, @Lin Ma, @Grayson Guo, @Syed Shah, @公用 学员账号, @Ada Ada, and @Harper Harper for your questions and focused pronunciation practice. Just keep muscling through until speaking feels second nature. See you at the next session~

@Denise Zhang I wish you lots of happiness and success, just for your new year! How old are you, little pretty girl? Stevie Wonder Happy Birthday

Hi Fawaz Ali! Welcome to PIRF Standard and DDM Standard! I already gave you access to our AMA live classes on LME Skool community. Use our Skool calendar and JOIN IT! Calendar · Let's Master English . Don't miss Coach Shane's daily CHECK IN Let's Master English, you'll find it very useful. If you have any questions , just let us know— we’re here for you. Stay active in the community, study Coach Shane's lesson, join our LIVE hangouts/classes, and together... Let's Master English!

📖 Book Don't Sweat the Small Stuff … and It's All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson, PhD. Synopsis: Simple ways to keep little things from taking over your life. The book consists of 100 short articles -- we'll go through them week by week. This week’s # 28: Seek First to Understand Here's what you need to do: 1. Read it yourself, take time to reflect on it and make notes. 2. Join the live reading on Wednesday. We'll read and listen to the article together, line by line. 3. Share your thoughts. Keep your answer under 4 minutes. Be clear, and focus on expressing your ideas about the topic to practice real English speaking. No debates, just sharing thoughts. ***** This is adopted from one of Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Using this strategy is a shortcut to becoming a more content person (and you'll probably become more effective too). Essentially, "seek first to understand" implies that you become more interested in understanding others and less in having other people understand you. It means mastering the idea that if you want quality, fulfilling communication that is nourishing to you and others, understanding others must come first. When you understand where people are coming from, what they are trying to say, what's important to them, and so forth, being understood flows naturally; it falls into place with virtually no effort. When you reverse this process, however (which is what most of us do most of the time), you are putting the cart before the horse. When you try to be understood before you understand, the effort you exert will be felt by you and the person or people you are trying to reach. Communication will break down, and you may end up with a battle of two egos. I was working with a couple who had spent the first ten years of their marriage frustrated, arguing about their finances. He couldn't understand why she wanted to save every penny they earned, and she couldn't understand why he was a spendthrift. Any rationale on either position had been lost in their joint frustration. While many problems are more complex than this couple's, their solutions were relatively simple. Neither person felt understood. They needed to learn to stop interrupting each other and to listen carefully. Rather than defending their own positions, each needed to seek first to understand. This is precisely what I got them to do. He learned that she was saving to avoid her parents' financial disasters. Essentially, she was frightened of being broke. She learned that he felt embarrassed that he wasn't able to "take care of her" as well as his father did his mother. Essentially, he wanted her to be proud of him. As each learned to understand the other, their frustration with each other was replaced by compassion. Today, they have a nice balance between spending and saving.

I was joking with my friends a few days ago that I might become an erotic novelist. For now, though, I’m just tried making an outline. A pianist—while playing the piano, without touching himself—was able to reach a physical climax. In a distant country, there was a blind intelligence agent. She had the extraordinary ability to catch any sound from anywhere in the world while remaining at home. She worked under the dictator of that country. At that time, the dictator was preparing to fly to the remote region of the country where a woman he had once loved was living, hoping to be there at the moment of her death. Everyone around him opposed the trip. In that area, swarms of migratory flying butterflies had broken out. If an airplane was caught among them, their unusually highly flammable bodies created a serious risk of the aircraft crashing. Using her exceptional hearing, the blind agent was assigned to detect the faint rasping sounds made by the flying butterflies and protect the dictator. When the plane lifted the dictator into the sky, she began her mission, shifting the focus of her hearing across vast distances. At that moment, she accidentally caught the harmony of piano music and a man’s faint breathing. Struck by the shocking beauty of it, she forgot her mission and became completely absorbed. The airplane exploded in the middle of the butterflies’ dance. The moment the dictator’s vital signs ceased, a tiny implanted device emitted a subtle signal. At the air force base of the dictator’s country, exactly as designed, silo hatches opened silently and autonomously. Hundreds of nuclear warheads were released and scattered across the world.