Welcome to Mindful Monday, where we bridge the gap between Second Language Acquisition research and the practical realities of both your classroom and your business. Each week, Leo and I share research-backed insights to help you sharpen your classroom teaching while building the freedom to work on your own terms.
See our CPD Courses & Materials here.
In partnership with: E-Solutions for ELT
You tailor your teaching to your students.
Your tech should be tailored to you.
E-solutions by Renata Kucharska for ELT helps teachers build an online system that works for them by building practical websites, course platforms, landing pages and automations designed around the real needs of their ELT businesses.
Tech should make your business simpler, not more complicated.
It’s now August which means we’re getting our first run of “back to school” adverts here in Canada. As my younger self would say: it’s still summer! August is the summer month that seems to go the fastest though; hope you’re enjoying it where you are.
In this week’s Mindful Monday, you’ll see:
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I interviewed Leo for the first time on our podcast
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We want to hear from YOU about the podcast
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Summer Book Club
Hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
🎙️ I interviewed Leo on his new business
“That which seems like a false step is just the next step. What if it wasn’t the wrong step? What if it was simply necessary? The path is not something you already know. The path is something that starts to appear because you just keep walking.”
When we first spoke of interviewing each other for Teacher Talking Time, I wasn’t sure about it.
People already know us.
That’s not the aim of the show.
Would people want that?
It turns out, we had a lot to say and a lot to learn about each other. Our friendship spans more than a decade, but there is a lot we haven’t talked about or asked each other. As we conceptualized these interviews, there were only two rules:
Don’t reveal the questions beforehand. Only ask questions you don’t know the answer to.
Here is the first episode of this two-episode series where I interview Leo on his life, educational philosophy, and his new venture, TBL4T.
To answer the final question – would people want that? – this is your turn to let us know.
In this episode, we discuss:
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How growing up in Brazil’s necessity-driven, micro-entrepreneurial ecosystem forged a lifelong bias toward action.
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The psychological tension between a native, spontaneous Portuguese identity and a structured, academic English persona.
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Why traditional schooling fails experiential learners by presenting knowledge as a finished product to memorize rather than a tool to use.
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Sidestepping academic dogma to build a practical TBLT framework for real-world teachers facing rigid constraints.
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How validating an audience first prevents costly product mistakes.
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Using student feedback and “loop input” to evolve an 8-week pilot into a high-level, 10-to-14-week transformative program.
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Reframing client rejections, failed launches, and operational mistakes not as errors, but as mandatory steps on the entrepreneurial path.
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Why waiting to feel “ready” is an illusion, and why taking scary leaps is the only way to uncover what your market actually wants.
FOR MORE FROM LEO GOMEZ:
3. Learn YOUR English website (coming soon)
Where to listen:
We hope you like this series. Listen to the full episode on YouTube (above), Spotify, or any audio app.
🎙️ Would you leave our podcast a review?
We are rebuilding the Learn YOUR English website, and one of the things we’re most excited about is giving Teacher Talking Time a much bigger presence.
The podcast has grown into one of the most important parts of what we do. It has allowed us to speak with researchers, teachers, teacher educators, writers, entrepreneurs, and people who are shaping the future of language education.
Now we’d love to hear from YOU – the listeners.
Leo and I are compiling a list of testimonials for our Teacher Talking Time podcast to display on our website from listeners and friends of the show.
Would you consider contributing one?
If so, you can type it in the comments by clicking “leave a comment”:
We’ll be featuring some listener reflections on the new website.
Thank you for listening and being part of the Teacher Talking Time community.
📚 Summer Book Club
I don’t mean Wuthering Heights the movie, I mean the epic original work by Emily Brontë.
It seems to be a very divisive book: people either love it or hate it. I know lots of people for whom this is their favourite book. Conversely, my book club is reading this currently and let me tell you, the mood is not having it.
Me? I’m a bad book club member: I didn’t read it.
If you have, which side are you on?
As an aside, the real-life Brontë family story is very sad. All six siblings passing away around the age of 30. Such a talented family that experienced great tragedy.
That’s all for this edition. Talk in two weeks,
Leo and Andrew
*We’re on a bi-weekly newsletter schedule until September.
Want to grab a coffee and strategize the next step of your business?
If you enjoyed this, the best compliment we could receive would be if you shared it with one person or restacked it on Substack.
What we do at Learn YOUR English
1. Subscribe to our Teacher Talking Time podcast here
2. CPD courses for teachers here
3. Brand new website coming soon!