Improve your English to make people feel something
Can you fully connect with other people in English as yourself?
When you spend your life learning a language, and perhaps the last place you actually invested in your English was at school, in a course, or through an app, it makes sense that the focus becomes grammar and vocabulary. And when I speak to people about their English, those are usually the two things they point out as their biggest frustrations.
But when I dig deeper, I often realise that there is a stronger frustration underneath. A deeper frustration, a more meaningful frustration that starts to show itself when people tell me about how they aren’t able to feel like they can truly connect with someone else as themselves in English.
I’ve noticed this a lot in my work.
When I start working with people, sure, it often starts with grammar and vocabulary because those are the things they believe are holding them back. And we do work on those things to boost their confidence a little bit, but not necessarily by adding more grammar and vocabulary. Very often, it’s actually about showing them how much they can already do with the English they already have.
Once they start to feel more confident with that, and that initial frustration becomes smaller, we can start focusing on something much more interesting: how they actually feel in the language.
Because once you start identifying how you actually feel in English, we start working on identity. And if you can begin to identify with English and actually connect a part of yourself to the language, that’s when great connection starts to happen.
That’s when you start trusting yourself enough to share what matters. That’s when you start revealing more of your true self to the world around you in English. You’re no longer only trying to produce correct language; you’re actually using English to connect as yourself.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
More and more, that’s what I see my mission as: getting my clients to that point where English isn’t only something they’ve learned, but something they can genuinely feel like themselves in.
