Chris Morgan is our Presenting in English with Equal Impact course author. He’s an internationally recognised expert in language coaching for professionals who give presentations in English as their second language. He’s also passionate about showing data-backed reasons to build your confidence (and calm your nerves!).
Here, he shares some of his thoughts on xx.
It’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to perform in a second language and NOT feel judged. But where does most of that judgment come from?
In my experience, and the experiences of many professional English learners I’ve help over the years, it’s usually not from other people.
And I don’t think I’m alone in noticing we often judge ourselves more harshly than others would. We’re frequently biased, jump to conclusions quickly and don’t give forgive ourselves as much as we could. In other words we don’t always give our second language performances a fair trial.
We might not be able to stop this self-judgment completely. But when it does happen (and it will) we can at least make sure we look at the right evidence and hear the best defense.
If you’re reading this in English which is not a first language for you, I’m already convinced your English performances should be feel guilt-free. I’m also sure that MY certainty means nothing unless you can prove it to yourself.
So let’s do that by treating it like a trial by jury. Because in order to cement the positive, resilient beliefs that will carry you successfully through your next English performance, you need to convince yourself on a deep, emotional and lasting basis. You need to convince your own inner jury. Think of those beliefs as the part of you that’s always watching, listening and sitting in judgement.
In a real trial, a jury will hear a lot of things about a defendant that makes you question their character, their actions, what’s fact and what’s fiction.
In the case of language confidence, these things include the doubts and less-than-perfect memories from your past performances. Thoughts and memories from times when we were not at our best, weren’t prepared, or when we were simply victims of bad luck – but blamed ourselves anyway.
And as I’m sure you’ll agree, a few experiences like this can be harder to forget than the many successful moments are to remember.
They aren’t final proof of poor English, but they are good at clouding judgment and can lead to the wrong verdict about your English performances – if you let them.
A good prosecution lawyer (yes, you’ve got an ‘inner prosecutor’ too) will try. They’ll use every bad experience and every uncertain character trait to put doubt in the minds of that jury of yours.
Don’t let them.
Stay guilt-free by taking a little time to build yourself a rock-solid defense. Prepare to tell your inner jury a true story of how successful you are at communicating in English, in spite of your past experiences. How, with a small but growing range of language and vocabulary you can still get all your messages across. And how, with proof from the most up-to-date evidence available, it’s evident that the language you already know is far more effective than all the language you have yet to learn.
It’s a story that you might need to practice and then to tell yourself a few times before you reach a final not-guilty verdict, and that’s ok. When you accept your English is good enough to walk, judgment-free into the spotlight, a little reminder now and again can help you refine and grow into that new freedom too.
Don’t give up until you reach it though, your English has been judged enough.
If you’re a non-native speaker of English and you want to learn more about building confident presentation skills, Firehead has a course: Presenting in English with Equal Impact.
View all of our career courses on firehead-training.net
