Self-reflection is scary, but necessary for growth. There's | Ozodbek Botiraliyev

Self-reflection is scary, but necessary for growth.

There's a question that's been consuming my mind for the past few days. After getting the C1 certificate in Arabic and upping my IELTS score to 8.5, I kind of totally lost my focus. Already in November, I will be applying for my Master's program abroad, and from there my life is going to change completely.

This also means I have very little time remaining here in Uzbekistan: around a year and a couple of months. Hence the question I've been asking myself repeatedly: WHAT NOW? Broadly speaking, three equally valid options popped up in my head.

Option A was to leave the world of social media altogether, including Telegram, and focus entirely on my studies. As someone who majors in Islamic Studies, there are literally hundreds of books I must study to get a good enough glimpse of my field. In fact, this is exactly why I've never worked full-time as an IELTS instructor (which I get a lot of criticism for from my colleagues).

Teaching IELTS has always been a side hustle for me: a means to stay afloat, so to speak. This is also why I didn't want people to associate my channel with IELTS, as I wrote HERE in December 2020. Contrary to what I wrote in this post, however, I did heavily shift the focus of my channel, posting more IELTS content than anything else.

The logic behind this shift is very simple: there's lots of demand for quality IELTS content, and demand breeds supply. I mean, last time I announced an Arabic online class, not even 5 students signed up, whereas my IELTS courses are always filled up to the maximum. Also, I'm personally not very impressed with the work that other IELTS channels are doing, which brings me to Option B: going all-in with IELTS.

Inspired by our last project "Free IELTS 911" (which by the way I couldn't properly manage at all, sorry for that), I nevertheless came to conclusion that with the right approach and commitment, our team can contribute a lot to the community of IELTS learners. Who knows, maybe we'll even launch another mega-project like it in the very near future.

Besides, I've been running a lot of online IELTS courses anyway. (Free plug: soon we'll announce an awesome Speaking course in collaboration with a band 8,5 instructor.) As the saying goes, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

My last option is to turn all my attention to teaching Arabic. It's true that we don't have as many students who to learn Arabic, but we also don't have as many teachers who are teaching this language. For a short while, I tried running a TikTok account, posting short Arabic videos daily. That was a very enriching experience for me personally, because I realized that good content requires a lot more than just knowledge of the language.

A good camera wouldn't hurt, for example. Also, it turns out, your content needs to be in Uzbek, because the stupid algorithm (to my understanding) will not automatically show your videos to an English speaking audience. Anyhow, I'm not going to restart my TikTok account any time soon, or at least not unless someone is willing to invest from $200 - 500 into this thing, in which case you know where to find me, don't you? For now, it seems I will keep teaching Arabic to small groups of people.

In any case, these are all my thoughts and reflections. It's been a while since I last shared a #longread post on my channel. If you made it this far, definitely let me know what you think in the comments section. Which one of these three options do you think I should take?

Thank you all for being here. Yours always,
@ozodbek_SK