You’re likely reading this post because you want what every other couples therapist wants: to improve your work-life balance and your revenue.
Or, put another way…
Profit for your small therapy practice without adding more hours to your schedule.
We’re here to let you know that this is entirely possible!
As Certified Gottman Therapists, my husband Alapaki Yee and I (Sam Garanzini) co-founded the Gay Couples Institute. Ours is a thriving six-figure practice, delivering therapy to more than 200 gay couples per year across the US at about 10 direct-care sessions per week.
But it didn’t start out that way. We really had to wrap our minds around being business owners and what that meant regarding marketing our practice.
Alapaki Yee & Sam Garanzini
Knowing Where to Start: A Roadmap to Success
Most therapists have no idea how to start or what to do to maximize their return on investment when it comes to marketing. They just put up a generic profile on Psychology Today and hope for the best.
To achieve the goals you’ve set for your practice, you need the right marketing tools. That’s where we come in.
Our Advanced Couples Therapy Mastermind is the perfect place to learn about theory and ideas that will improve your practice. Most importantly, it will provide you with a concrete plan that you can implement to market your practice.
Here’s the plan you need…
Small Practice, Big Profit Method Roadmap
Using this process, you will know exactly what to do today, this weekend, and every weekend after that to develop your business.
4 Marketing Tips
Here are some tips we tell our students on how to effectively market your practice. They don’t even cover the tip of the iceberg of what we teach in our course, but these will help you get started in the right direction.
Tip #1. When naming your private therapy practice and website, focus on the outcome your clients are looking to achieve.
While a “rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” no one is going to know where to find you if you don’t use words that target your audience (Sorry, Shakespeare). In today’s marketplace, customers shop primarily online for products and services. This trend is even more pronounced thanks to the pandemic. You need to use words that will get your website a steady stream of visitors, which can then convert into calls.
We suggest you avoid basing your business and website name on:
Your first and last name (which I did initially at samgaranzini.com).
Your location (a mistake I also made with sfgaycouplescounseling.com).
Cliché therapy phrases
Instead, create your business and website name based on the language your potential clients use to speak about their challenges and frustrations. Research your target audience. Take a look at how they interact on social media. Listen to the way they phrase their goals on intake calls. By doing this, you can create a business name that will speak to them.
When these potential clients do their online searching, your practice will come up. If your content resonates with them, they can relate to you and feel secure in bringing their issues to you.
Let’s look at the website of one of our students as an example of this tip in action: Transfamily Alliance by Shawn Giammattei, Ph.D. With our help, Shawn refined his practice interests. He began to look deeper into families who want help with their teens while coming out as transgendered. Often during the coming out process, the parents are forgotten as the focus turns to the teenager’s needs. Shawn went on to serve more people using a membership site. We’re now helping him create online courses that attract more clients to the membership. Way to go, Shawn!
Tip #2. Even the simplest website can score you full-fee clients.
You’re going to love this tip. It’ll save you thousands of dollars on a multi-page website.
No client wants to be overwhelmed with a ton of information about you, your numerous publications, or high-resolution images of incredible horizons and landscapes. They want only to know that you understand their needs and that you are easy to contact.
That’s why the most important part of any therapist’s website fits on one page. And it works best if there’s a simple path that leads the visitor to schedule a consultation with you.
Tip #3 . Set yourself apart from the competition and brand your practice.
It’s easy to think that the market is saturated. Especially when you note that 99.9% of all Psychology Today profiles are virtually clones of one another.
What sets you apart?
First, know who you are. Do you have any passions that might overlap with your practice?
Next, know who your ideal client is.
Understand their pain points and the outcomes they want to realize. Then convey this understanding in all your marketing materials.
Tip #4. Download our handy (and free) “Ultimate Private Practice Builder Checklist” and email series at our Advanced Couples Therapy Mastermind program.
We’ve got a proven model and specific framework that can help you become an expert couples therapist and build up your small but profitable therapy practice.
If you’d like our help, we can show you how to reduce your direct care caseload down to 10 (or fewer) sessions per week, while keeping your income at a comfortable $150,000 (or more) per year.
Get access to the most important Gottman training tools.
Receive advanced training on affairs, addiction, meta-emotion mismatch, and much more in our video library.
Learn how to generate more revenue without adding more direct therapy hours to your week.
Learn how to raise rates without losing clients.
Final Thought
You deserve to have a life outside your practice. And you deserve to be paid well for the quality help you give your community. All you need to do is get yourself connected with those potential clients.
Feeling burnt out on dating and love? Wondering How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted? Dating is daunting. When you are ghosted, bread-crumbed, rejected or betrayed it can start to be almost impossible to believe in yourself.
You start to feel like something is wrong with you. You resent couples who seem to be happy. Or you think you are too old, too fat, too whatever to ever find love. That there is just no soulmate for you. I know. I have been there.
But the good news is that I have learned simple hacks to help me believe in myself. And you can too! You have all that you need to create the relationship – and life – of your dreams. And you are lovable and loved just as you are! The problem is the little voice inside your head won’t let you believe it… and so it keeps you stuck. Well, enough is enough! You’ll be amazed at what can happen in your life when you learn out to truly believe in yourself. Here are my top 7 strategies for how to believe in yourself when you feel deserted.
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Use Affirmations
Affirmations are most effective when they’re inspiring positive statements, for example, “In a surprisingly easy and effortless way I learn to love myself. I create soulmate love that is just right for me.” “I intuitively know how to handle my relationship so that it works out even better than expected.” or “Blessings are coming my way today.”
Repeat your favorite affirmation several times a day.
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Use sticky notes
Post a sticky note on your bathroom mirror that says, “I deserve a great day today starting now” or, “ Everyday in every way I am getting better and better.” Or, “I am lovable and loved just as I am. “ Since it will be the first thing you’ll see in the morning, it can set the tempo for a more positive day.
Consider putting some positive sticky notes up in other places, such as your refrigerator, by your computer, in your closet, and so on. This way, you’ll see positive, uplifting messages throughout your day!
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Write down your negative thoughts and feelings
Negative thoughts can undermine many otherwise good intentions and efforts in life.
Write down your negative thoughts and ask yourself, “is this a fact or a feeling?” If it’s a fact, it cannot be changed. If it is a feeling, remember that all feelings can be changed and do change.
Next, write down the opposite—or positive expression—of all the negative thoughts; for example, “I can’t do this” becomes “I can do this in a surprisingly easy and effortless way.”
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Develop an attitude of gratitude
Write down all of the things you’re grateful for right now.
Practice being grateful for even the smallest positives. Your skill at being grateful will improve over time. This is the bedrock of happiness!
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Think with a future perspective
Ask yourself “Will this breakup be important six months from now?”
Many of your concerns are mental clutter and won’t be on your mind at all!
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Call or text a friend
This helps to take your focus away from your own negative thoughts and feelings and instead puts the focus outside of yourself.
Just listening to a friend is great not only for them, but also for you.
It’s simple: helping others creates good feelings in us. It makes us feel more competent and lovable.
How to believe in yourself when you feel deserted: Surround yourself with positive people
Positive people tend to improve the moods of the people around them. If you spend time with happy people you’ll find that their moods and attitudes are infectious.
Speaking with a Love Mentor coach is a good example of this. It’s like having a Fairy Godmother and then some!
A Love Mentor will show you the simple tips and powerful techniques you can use to increase self-belief and add to your joy in life!
And as my gift to you, sign up for a free Love Mentor session especially designed to help you believe in yourself. It could change your life, starting today. Here’s what Marni emailed me right after her gift session: “THANK YOU for the mindshift for me! My ah-ha moment!!! I know that I deserve juicy lasting love and I feel confident in a whole new way.”
Your love affirmation for today: I acknowledge the gift that I am
Time is the raw material of our lives. How we choose to spend it, shapes our life accordingly. So having the motivation to spend it on achieving goals is crucial to creating a life we want.
What is Motivation?
The Oxford dictionary defines motivation as the desire or willingness to do something – our drive to take action.
Scientifically, motivation has its roots in the dopamine pathways of our brains. When we do something that feels good, that’s dopamine kicking in. Our actions are driven by the desire for that reward (the good feeling).
Author Steven Pressfield describes motivation more practically. He says we hit a point where the pain of not doing something becomes greater than the pain of doing it. He sees motivation as crossing the threshold where it’s easier to take action than it is to be idle. Like choosing to feel awkward while making sales calls over feeling disappointed about a diminishing bank account.
However you choose to think about it, we all want to harness motivation to achieve our goals.
How to Get Motivated
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says that most people misunderstand motivation. They think that motivation is what gets us to take action. In reality, motivation is often the result of action, not the cause of it. Once we start a task, it’s easier to continue making progress. Like Isaac Newton’s first law: objects in motion stay in motion.
This means most of the resistance when working on your goals comes right before we start. Since motivation naturally occurs after we start, we need to focus on making starting easier.
4 Ways to Make Starting Easier
1. Schedule it
One reason people can’t get started on things is that they haven’t planned when to do it.
When things aren’t scheduled it’s easier for them to fall by the wayside. You’ll end up hoping motivation falls in your lap or hoping that you’ll muster enough willpower to get it done.
An article in the Guardian said, “If you waste resources trying to decide when or where to work, you’ll impede your capacity to do the work.”
2. Measure something
It’s easy to feel uninspired when you don’t know if you’re making progress or what you’re even working towards. That’s why you need to make your success measurable in some way. Starting is easy when you know exactly how much closer your current actions will bring you to achieving your goal.
3. Extrinsic motivation
This type of motivation is from external factors. It can be either positive or negative. Positive motivation consists of incentives like money, prizes, and grades. Negative motivation consists of deterrents like being fired, having a fight, or being fined. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t work effectively long-term, but it can work well in the short term to get you started on something.
4. Make it public
Keep yourself accountable by telling friends and family your goals, or even sharing them on social media. This makes it easier to start something because you’re pressured to not let others down.
When we say we want to feel motivated to do something, we don’t want to be pushed or guilted into doing a task. We want to be so attracted and drawn to the idea that we can’t resist not taking action. That’s why it’s important to build a foundation that will set you up for consistency.
These are 5 techniques that will help you do just that:
1. Stay in your goldilocks zone
The goldilocks zone is when a task is the perfect level of difficulty—not too hard and not too easy. In this zone, we reach peak motivation and focus.
For example, let’s say you’re playing a serious tennis match against a 4-year-old. On this level of difficulty, you’ll quickly become bored and not want to play. Now let’s say you’re playing a serious tennis match against Serena Williams. On this level of difficulty, you’ll quickly become demotivated because the match is too challenging.
The Goldilocks zone is in the middle of that spectrum. You want to face someone with equal skill as you. That way you have a chance to win, but you have to focus and try for it. Adjusting your workload and goals over time to stay within your Goldilocks zone keeps you engaged and motivated long-term.
2. Pursue intrinsically motivated goals
Being intrinsically motivated to achieve a goal is when you want to achieve it for what it is. There are no external factors like a reward or the risk of being fired. The drive behind your actions is coming from within.
For most intrinsic goals we pursue them because they will enrich our lives or bring us closer to fulfillment. That makes these goals extremely sustainable long-term because they directly affect our quality of life and the things we care about.
3. Use “chunking”
Chunking is the technique of breaking down a goal into smaller short-term targets. By doing this you achieve multiple successes in your pursuit of the main goal. This triggers the brain’s reward system and drives you to keep going.
Traditionally, you may set a goal that you expect to achieve in one year. That’s a long time to commit without seeing any results along the way. By chunking your goals into monthly or quarterly targets, you get the consistent positive reinforcement you need to stay motivated long-term.
For example, instead of trying to lose 50 pounds in one year, try to lose 4 pounds every month for 12 months.
4. Be flexible
We’re all victims of circumstance. Things happen along our journey that we can either adjust to or quit because of. That’s why it’s important to have leeway and flexibility when you’re pursuing a goal. If you expect everything to go perfectly, the inevitable failure can make you disengaged and desireless. When you plan for things to go wrong, you make sure you can keep up for the long haul.
5. Pursue your goals in a sustainable fashion
Don’t lose hope when you’re not an overnight success. Overnight successes are the 1%—for the most part, they don’t exist. What we see as an “overnight success” is actually countless hours of work behind the scenes finally hitting a tipping point. Pursuing goals is a story of patience, persistence, and unseen effort.
Don’t compare yourself to others. Comparison is a recipe for a drop in self-confidence and satisfaction. It also cultivates a mindset where you think you haven’t done enough. As a result, you may raise your expectations and put more pressure on yourself.
This is pointless because things worth achieving take time. So we obviously won’t compare to the things around us when starting.
Mastering motivation is a superpower. With that ability at your fingertips, you can accomplish your goals and shape a life you want to live in.
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” Marcus Aurelius
“If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap. If you want happiness for a day — go fishing. If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.” Chinese Proverb
Saying no is often the easier way out.
When you say no you can safely stay within your comfort zone. You don’t have to fear failing or being rejected.
The scary unknown and sometimes difficult change can be avoided.
But if you say yes your life can expand and deepen. The yes allows you to open up your life to more happiness.
Today I would like to share 10 things that I have said yes to and that have helped me to become happier in my life.
Pick one of these that resonate the most with you and focus on making it a part of your life.
1. Being imperfect.
Trying to be perfect is setting the bar too high. It will be impossible to reach.
Perfectionism is mindset that eats at you and your happiness. Saying yes to being imperfect can turn that around.
How to do it:
Realize the costs of buying into myths of perfection.
By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection.
It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.
But in real life it clashes with reality and it can harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world.
I find it very helpful to remind myself of this simple fact.
Go for good enough.
Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else very slowly or never being finished.
So go for good enough instead.
Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.
2. Being you.
Not being able to be yourself, always trying to change for others or censoring yourself don’t feel good at all.
It makes life feel so small and limited.
So how can you be yourself? Your environment plays a huge part.
How to do it:
Supportive people.
Spend more time with the people who support your dreams, values and you. Or are at least neutral.
And spend less time with people who always criticize you or you simply aren’t a good fit for.
Supportive and life-expanding influences outside of your everyday life.
Change your environment not only close to you. Go further and spend more time with sources of information that supports your dreams and can give you information that expands and makes your life happier and more exciting.
Find support from people you have never met via books, movies, blogs, forums and music.
And spend less time with negative and limiting influences.
3. The things that make you come alive.
It is important to find some time and energy for the things that you feel makes you come alive.
How to do it:
Mix it up.
Try something new, even if it is just something small each week.
Eat the vegetarian dish at lunch if you always eat meat.
Listen to some music that isn’t your normal cup of tea.
Go out to a movie, café or pub with friends if you usually stay in at night. Or vice versa.
Create variation and expand your comfort zone regularly in small ways to live a happier life.
Reconnect with what you used to love if it has fallen by the wayside.
If you used to go fishing, paint or play the guitar and it really made you come alive then reconnect.
Use an hour for it this week and see if it still brings you joy and makes you come alive.
It can make it feel like there’s no point in trying because it won’t make a difference or you’ll just fail. It can create ceilings and walls made out of glass where there really are none.
When you’re in what seems like a negative situation then make something better out of it by asking yourself questions that promote optimism and helps you to find solutions.
Questions like:
What is one thing that is positive or good about this situation?
What is the opportunity within this situation?
Start your day off on the right foot.
As mentioned in tip #2, the influences in your life can make a huge difference.
So choose to spend your breakfast time with an optimistic influence like for example a book, a blog or your mom.
Or talk to someone early in the day that most often supports and cheers you up like a co-worker or a friend in school.
5. Turning negative self-talk around.
It is very important to keep your motivation and your self-esteem up to live a happier life.
Your inner critic may be one of biggest obstacles standing in your way of that.
It can tell you that you are stupid or lazy. That you will not succeed. That you are worse or uglier than someone else.
Being able to turn the inner critic around or to shut it up as soon as it pops up is a very helpful skill.
How to do it:
Say stop.
Simply create a stop word or stop-phrase that you say or shout in your mind whenever your critic pipes up with a distorted and self-esteem hurting thought.
Say: Stop!
Or: No, no, no, we are not going there again!
Explain to yourself what this will lead to over the next year or more.
As I mentioned in tip #1, reminding yourself of the cost of buying into myths of perfection is a powerful way to replace those thought habits.
This works very well for other self-esteem hurting thought patterns too.
Remind yourself of how the inner critic has shaped your life so far. And in your mind see the cost of letting it roam free for another year or five.
6. Saying no when you feel it is the right thing for you to do.
To have the time and energy to say yes to the most important things you have to say no to some things too.
How to do it:
What do I truly want to focus my time and energy on?
When you get an offer or an opportunity arises ask yourself this question.
When you look over your schedule ask yourself this question. Think about and look at what your top priorities are and what you deep want before you say anything.
Disarm and then state your need.
It becomes easier for people to accept your no if you disarm them first.
You could for example do that by honestly saying that you are flattered or that you appreciate the kind offer.
Then you, for instance, add that you do not have the time for accepting and doing what they want. Or say that you do not feel that this offer is a good fit for your life right now.
7. Forgiveness.
Not clinging to the past and to the hurt that is there but to let it go and look to the now and the future is an essential thing to find more happiness in your life.
Forgiving is not always easy and can take time but there are some things that can make it a little easier.
How to do it:
Remind yourself that you forgive for your own benefit.
As long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what he or she did over and over again.
The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too.
When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free from all of that agony too.
Make a habit of forgiving yourself.
Do not just forgive others but also yourself. By forgiving yourself – instead of resenting yourself for something you did a week or 10 years ago – you make the habit of forgiveness more and more of a natural part of you.
And so forgiving others becomes easier too.
8. Making someone else happy.
Making someone else happier has many benefits. The happiness spreads back to you as you see his or her face light up and as you know you did the right thing.
It spreads back to you as people have a strong tendency to want to give back when you have done something good for them.
And it spreads out into the world as that now happier person may spread his or her happiness to other people.
How to do it:
Help out practically.
Lend someone a hand when they are moving. Or give them a ride in your car. Or if they need information, try to find a solution by asking the people you know or via Google.
Just listen.
Sometime a friend or someone close to you may just want to vent or for someone to listen as he or she figures things out. It may not seem like much but it can be an immense help for someone who needs it.
So be there fully – don’t sit there thinking about something else – and listen.
9. Openness and growth.
Saying yes to being open to the good things in life and growing as a person plays a big role when it comes to happiness.
The other things in this article will help you with that. But here are two more tips that will make your journey a little easier and simpler.
How to do it:
Change one thing at a time.
Changing many things or your whole life at once sure sounds good. But willpower is something we often overestimate and everyday life tends to come in the way.
So to make sure you have a much better chance of changing a habit or area of your life change just one thing at a time.
Start small.
Just say no to one small thing you don’t want to do this week. Or forgive one person for one thing. Or help and make someone happy in some small way.
When things have been standing still for while or you hit a bump in the road then it’s easy to back down. To shrink. To give in or give up.
But a better way to say yes to happiness in those situations is to say yes to living your life fully.
How to do it:
Keep going.
When you fail or make a mistake don’t give up. Reconnect with optimism by using the questions further up in this article. Find inspiration from books and blogs and the people around you.
And don’t beat yourself up. Instead nudge yourself back on track again.
Remember, it’s not too late to change your life.
I didn’t really try to improve my life very much until I was 25. And many throughout the world and history have made positive changes far later in life than that.
So if you want to make a change then start today. Work with what you have where you are right now.
Start small and take the first step towards something new.
LITTLE ROCK — I’m the wrong person to debate the pros or cons of playing games in War Memorial Stadium. My roots are too deep with that stadium.
So don’t ask me to belittle the decision to break the 77-year-old streak of no games against other schools from Arkansas. I came away with pleasant memories from the 45-3 victory over Arkansas-Pine Bluff on Saturday.
There was an 80-yard punt return by Nathan Parodi that might be memorable. Along with KJ Jefferson’s four first-half touchdown passes were three total touchdowns by Treylon Burks (two receiving, one rushing) that might be all that I’ll recall longterm.
Yes, I’ll remember the battle of the bands at halftime, won by the UAPB’s Marching Musical Machine of the Mid-South if the cheers from the stands mean anything. And, I’ll probably recall that the coaches agreed at halftime — with the Hogs ahead 45-0 — to shorten the third and fourth quarters to 12 minutes. The game was shortened further by some clock errors.
There was a 12-second runoff after a change of possessions. And, the clock wasn’t fixed after an 80-yard interception return was overturned by video review. Yes, I remember stuff like that.
Outside of the smoothness Jefferson showed to beat all-out blitzes with lasers to Burks, there was hardly anything else that will supplant all of my favorite thoughts of War Memorial Stadium.
I could dissect some of the riveting fourth-down plays, but please excuse me as I return to the good old days of the grand old place on Markham Street.
For anyone who has been in the area, if you pull into the Wendy’s on Markham, you have been in my old yard. There was once a house on that lot and my family lived there until I was 2 years old. For the record, I’m 67.
A Christmas tree was planted in the front yard just weeks after Arkansas beat Ole Miss on the Powder River Play. My father always reminded me that I was in diapers when he dug the hole for the tree. It was a massive tree that covered the entire front yard when the lot was leveled to build the Wendy’s.
More than once, I’ve pulled up to the drive-thru window after a night game to order a Frosty for the return trip to Fayetteville with this message to the teenager at the window: “I used to live here.”
Two houses later, our family moved to 1821 Fair Park, and that’s generally the same road that winds past the Little Rock Zoo and turns into Van Buren Street, splitting what formerly was a golf course in front of War Memorial Stadium.
What I can tell you about the highlights of the house on Fair Park were walks to nearby Ray Winder Field in the summer for Arkansas Travelers baseball games. It wasn’t difficult to walk to the golf course or to football games. Heck, there were many walks home after football practice at Pulaski Heights Junior High.
After digesting all of that, understand that I like the occasional game at War Memorial Stadium. Never mind that it isn’t just old, but antiquated in many ways, too.
I do not care. It does my heart good to walk into that stadium, full or empty.
I wasn’t in the stadium in 1954 as an infant when it’s said that Arkansas football became a rage throughout the state with the 6-0 victory over Ole Miss. Buddy Bob Benson threw a halfback pass to Preston Carpenter for the lone points in that game.
Coach Bowden Wyatt called it the Powder River Play, named after a river in Wyoming. Wyatt once coached for the Wyoming Cowboys.
It was with great joy this summer that I drove my truck through Kaycee, Wyo., on a fishing trip to Casper. Yes, I drove over the Powder River, wide and dry with sand as fine as powder.
As a 35-year-old, I met Carpenter as he watched his son play football for Conway High. We discussed the Powder River Play at length standing on the sideline watching the Wampus Cats practice. His take, “No one has ever been more open than I was on a game’s deciding play.”
If pinned down to pen more WMS memories, many don’t have anything to do with an actual game.
My high school golf matches were often played at the golf course that featured three holes next to the parking lot on the southwest corner of the stadium. The 15th green was the highest point on that little island of golf holes separated from the rest of the course by Van Buren.
I admit that the high school players in my group (and probably other groups) in city tournaments had a tradition of dropping an old golf ball beside the green at No. 15 and firing a high iron shot over the stadium wall. It wasn’t a difficult carry. The only thing that could keep you from hitting a ball into the stadium was a light standard.
Workers at the stadium told me they found many golf balls inside the stadium through the years. So it wasn’t just my high school buddies who tested their skills.
As a teenager, there were always odd jobs at the stadium where you could pick up a few bucks. I always held jobs at Ray Winder Field, from stacking bats in the visitor’s dugout to retrieving foul balls off the roof to selling popcorn, there was money to be made.
But the best payout came when I helped ABC Sports for the Arkansas-Stanford football game in 1970. My job during the game was to help feed statistical information to the broadcast team; basically carry stat sheets up one flight of stairs in the press box.
But the real job came afterward when a young assistant producer handed me $300 for my pay to cover two days of work. That was odd. I thought I was done after one day.
Terry Jastrow, not much older than me, said I had to get 20 luxury cars parked outside the press box used by the ABC Sports crew that weekend back to the airport rental facility.
I didn’t dare tell Jastrow that I didn’t have a driver’s license. I had turned 16 but was still working on my learner’s permit, meaning an adult had to be in the car with me.
My mother was the only available adult driver on Sunday as we took those 20 cars back to the airport. After we took the first one back and grabbed a cab back to the stadium, she decided I was OK to drive solo and we took them back two at a time and enlisted an older brother to shuttle.
The broadcast team for the Arkansas-UAPB team sat just a few feet away from my seat in the press box, with a glass partition between us. I glanced over at the end of the game to make sure they didn’t need me to return rental cars.
Considering inflation, TV folks are probably paying four figures now.
Grammar. To many people, the word is almost synonymous with “boredom”. Does that make “grammar games” a contradiction? I’m going to say not, but more on that in a moment.
True, the average grammar book is more useful as a cure for insomnia than it is as a tool for language learning.
And in school, you probably spent more time buried in those books (and trying to stay awake) than you did actually using any of all that fancy grammar for its actual purpose: communication.
So, does grammar really matter?
Why Learn Grammar? Does It Really Matter in a Foreign Language?
My view is that speaking a language is much more important than good grammar, especially for beginners. That’s why I advocate Speaking from Day 1, even if you do sound like Tarzan.
Even so, it’s obviously important to learn good grammar — especially once you’ve reached the intermediate and advanced levels in a foreign language.
But getting all those conjugations and declensions into your head doesn’t have to be a yawn-inducing activity. Believe it or not, learning grammar can be fun! (No, really.)
When learning is fun, not only are we more likely to attempt it, but we’re more likely to remember what we’ve learned.
So how can we make grammar fun? The same way we make most things fun: we turn it into a game.
What Are Grammar Games?
Say you’re learning German, and you want to memorise the present tense conjugations of the verb sein (“to be”).
The most obvious approach is rote memorisation — just repeat ich bin, du bist, es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind to yourself over and over again until they’re burned permanently into your brain.
This is an approach that’s often taught in language classes. It can work, but it’s extremely time-consuming and boring. Especially when you have another 100 irregular verbs to learn in multiple tenses and moods.
A better, but still imperfect, approach is the classic learning method “look, cover, write, check”. Look at the correct verb forms, cover up the screen or piece and paper, and try to write down all the forms from memory. Then uncover the correct answers and see how well you did. Rinse, repeat.
In a way, you can think of this technique as a simple form of game: you play by writing down your target words (in this case, the different forms of sein), and you win if you can remember them all with no mistakes.
There’s a reason this “game” is taught in schools everywhere: it works. But it’s still rather boring. We can do better!
A “grammar game”, then, is essentially any technique for memorising or practising a particular aspect of grammar — be it verb conjugations, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation, or any other intimidating feature of your target language — that’s at least slightly more fun than rote memorisation or “look, cover, write, check”.
The category would include group games that you play in a classroom or with a language partner, grammar review games played online or on your phone, or even grammar practice games that you play in your head in spare moments.
In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of some easy grammar games that you can try.
Let’s get started… and don’t forget to have fun!
3 Grammar Games for Kids
When I worked as an English teacher, I always enjoyed getting the class involved in games. (As far as I could tell, the kids enjoyed it, too.) They were a fun way to keep everyone engaged while still learning something.
And just because children enjoy themdoesn’t mean that adults can’t also enjoy them.
Some of these games are more childish than others, but you could try adapting them for your own purposes, for example, to play with your language exchange partner or online language tutor.
1. Describing and Drawing a Person
Give everyone a piece of paper, and nominate one person to be the “describer”. It’s their job to think of someone they know, or a famous person, then to describe that person’s appearance. (Tip: it’s more interesting if they pick someone who’s in the room.)
At lower levels, this helps practice simple adjectival phrases like “he is tall” or “she has red hair”. However, the descriptions can get more advanced according to your ability.
For example, more advanced learners could describe what someone is wearing or what their personality and mannerisms are like.
As the nominee gives more detail, everyone draws on their piece of paper what they think the person being described looks like. When they’ve been given enough detail, they can try and guess who they’ve drawn. The describer then reveals who they were thinking of, and everyone can show their drawings to the rest of the class to see how well they did.
This last step often produces huge laughter, since most of the drawings will be hilarious caricatures of the real person.
2. Twenty Questions
Just in case you’ve never played this game before, it works as follows: you pick a celebrity or an object, and the other players have to figure out who or what you are.
To gain information, the other players ask you yes-or-no questions (usually a maximum of twenty, hence the name, but you can pick whatever arbitrary limit you like) to try and narrow down the possibilities: “Are you male? Are you American? Are you an actor? A singer?”, and so on.
A variant on this game was made famous by the film Inglourious Basterds where it’s played in a bar by Allied spies and an unwitting SS Officer (just watch the movie, it will make sense).
In this version, everyone writes a celebrity’s name on a piece of paper and passes it to the person on their left. This person then sticks the paper to their own forehead so that everyone, except them, can see what it says. Now instead of the group asking questions to figure out who you are, you ask questions to the group to figure out who you are.
Whichever version you play, it’s a good way to practice forming and answering questions. To expand the range of potential grammar practiced, you could permit questions that require a more in-depth answer than a simple “yes” or “no”.
You could also insist that the answer replies in full sentences each time – “Are you male?” “Yes, I’m male” – which also helps practice switching between different forms of the same verb.
3. Mister Wolf and Other Classic Children’s Games
Telling the time is something that varies slightly from language to language and always takes some getting used to.
For example, to a German “half four” (halb vier) means 3:30 (half before four) while to a British person it means 4:30 (half after four), and to an American, it makes no sense at all — two o’clock, maybe?
What’s the time, Mister Wolf? is a classic game for young children that exposes them to different ways of describing the time.
One player is “Mister (or Miss) Wolf”, and stands at one end of the playing area with his or her back to the other children, who stand in a line at the far end of the area. The other children walk forward while calling out “What’s the time, Mister Wolf?”. Mister Wolf then turns around and responds with a time (e.g. “it’s 4 o’clock!”).
This repeats, with Mister Wolf saying different times as the players get closer and closer, until on one round he replies to their question with “it’s dinnertime!” and chases the players back to where they started.
If Mister Wolf catches another player before they’ve reached the starting line, that player becomes Mister Wolf.
This is just one classic game that children love and that has the side effect of teaching them a bit of grammar.
There are plenty of other children’s games you can use in this way. “Simon Says”, for example, is full of imperatives, while “I Spy” teaches you spelling.
Who knows how many other games there are that could be adapted for your target language! Many games that children play also teach you something useful.
Now we’ve covered grammar games for kids, let’s take a look at some grammar games for adults.
3 Grammar Games For Adults
Some of the above games might be too childish for your liking, but grammar doesn’t have to become boring just because you’re an adult learner.
Here are some grammar games you could play as an adult:
1. Would You Rather?
This is a classic game that you’ve probably played before.
One person poses an interesting and/or ridiculous choice between two options — would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck? Then each person in the group gives their own answer and a brief explanation of why they made that choice.
As well as prompting some thoughtful (and bizarre) discussions, these types of questions are a good way to practice some less commonly-used verb forms like the conditional, and can be adapted to any language.
If you run out of interesting ‘would you rather’ questions to ask, you can visit either.io for an effectively infinite list of ideas.
2. Taboo
Taboo is a classic parlour game where you have to help your teammates correctly guess the word written on your card without saying the word itself or any of the other words on the card.
For example your word might be “car”, but you’re not allowed to say “car”, “vehicle”, “drive”, “transport”, “road”, or “travel”.
Taboo is a great way to build vocabulary, not least because it represents exactly what you should do when you need to say something in a foreign language but don’t know the word: stick within the target language and try to get your point across in other words, rather than immediately blurting it out in English and asking for a translation.
As well as vocabulary, Taboo will help your grammar. That’s because when the most obvious words aren’t available to you, the only alternative is often a winding, roundabout sentence with a complicated structure.
“It’s the big metal thing you sit in and press the pedals with your feet to go fast from one place to another.”
Look at all that grammar!
3. Role-Playing Grammar Games
At the end of the day, the point of learning all this grammar is to use it in real life.
So why not get straight to the point, and play some role-playing games with a language partner that simulate a real-world encounter you’re likely (or unlikely) to have?
Some common situations you might want to practice are: checking into a hotel, introducing yourself to new people, asking for directions, and ordering something over the telephone. You can surely think of many more examples based on your hobbies and interests and the daily experiences you’re likely to have.
Since our focus here is on grammar, some other role-playing ideas you could use are:
Fortune teller. One person is the fortune teller, and the other has come to get their fortune read. What does the fortune teller see in their crystal ball? How does the other person feel about it? This is a good way of practicing the future tense.
Alibi. The police suspect you of a crime, and they want to know if you have an alibi. Where were you on Friday night? Who were you with? What were you doing? The suspect won’t be able to talk their way out of this situation unless they’ve got a good grasp on the different types of past tense.
Late for work. One person is the boss, and the other is an employee who’s just shown up late. What’s their excuse? The boss should question the employee’s story, pick holes in it, and try to figure out if they’re lying. In the process, the boss practices asking different kinds of questions (why? how? when? who?), while the employee will practise answers and the past tense.
Whatever it is you want to practise, try and think of a “real” situation where it might get used, and see what role-playing ideas you can come up with.
Online Grammar Games
Go to Google or to the Android or Apple app stores, type in the name of your target language, and you’ll probably find a zillion free grammar games (and lots of paid ones, too).
For obvious reasons, each game tends to be focussed on just one specific language, and a detailed list of available games for every language are beyond the scope of this article, but two digital resources are worth mentioning:
Duolingo
Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning apps out there today, and at the time of writing it offers free courses in over 20 different languages. Fluent in 3 Months already has a detailed review of Duolingo.
As well as being a fun and easy way to practise a language and build your vocabulary, Duolingo gradually introduces you over time to new grammatical concepts and provides detailed explanations of how to use them.
Duolingo is no substitute for real face-to-face speaking practice, but it can make a nice supplement.
Anki
I’m a huge proponent of using spaced repetition systems — more commonly known as “flashcards” — to learn languages.
Anki lets you create totally customisable flashcards on whatever topic you like (not just languages!), and if you don’t feel like creating your own there’s an enormous directory of pre-made content on their website where you can download flashcards that other people have created.
The most basic way to use an SRS is to learn vocabulary; create flashcards with English words (or pictures) on one side and your target language’s translation of those words on the other side.
But did you know that flashcards are also a fantastic way to learn grammar? Here’s a grammar game you can use on Anki:
Say you want to learn the present-tense conjugations of the Spanish verb “hablar” (to speak). Rather than trying to kill yourself with boredom by repeating hablo, hablas, habla etc. ad nauseam, it’s much more interesting to come up with some sample sentences that demonstrate the different forms of the word (e.g. yo hablo español) and turn them into flashcards. On the “answer” side of the card, write the full sample sentence. On the “question” side, write something like _yo __ español – (“hablar”)_.
Now, when you review the card, your job is to figure out which form of “hablar” belongs in the blank space. Create a few sample sentences for each verb form (or whatever) that you want to learn, and you’ll find that this is a much more efficient and enjoyable way of getting grammar into your head than beating yourself over the head with a verb table.
Go Forth And Play!
This list is by no means exhaustive, but by now I hope I’ve given you an idea of what grammar games are, how you can use them, and why they’re helpful.
Whatever it is you want to practise, there are endless possibilities for how you can accelerate your learning by turning it into a game. Have fun!
Benny Lewis
Founder, Fluent in 3 Months
Fun-loving Irish guy, full-time globe trotter and international bestselling author. Benny believes the best approach to language learning is to speak from day one.
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