How to become more confident ...

... when you speak English

Hello!

In last week’s email, we talked about how you can sound more confident when speaking English even if you don’t feel confident.

But I’m sure you want to actually be more confident as well, right? That’s what we’re going to think about today.

Do you want to speak more English? Does your lack of confidence sometimes get in your way? Do you sometimes decide to stay quiet because you don’t want to make a mistake?

If that’s you, maybe today is the day you decide to do something about this!

But what? And how? The answer is that you simply have to start speaking! 

But I know it’s not really that simple and I know that the first step is often the hardest.

Sometimes we don’t feel ready. Sometimes we say that we’ll start later when we’ve had more time or done more preparation.

The problem is, if you wait until you feel ready, or if you wait until you have more confidence, you might never start!

I saw a Facebook comment recently which said something like, “I need to learn all the grammar and vocabulary first and then I’ll start speaking English. I’m not ready to speak yet.”

There have been many times in my life when I was nervous about starting something, for example, speaking Polish in Poland, posting on social media, learning to drive, starting a new job and many more.

Recently, I started posting regularly on LinkedIn. I’ve been posting on Facebook for a few years, but posting on LinkedIn feels like starting all over again! It’s a bit scary!

But I know the only way to get more confident and better at it is to do it! The hardest part was getting started. Now I have to keep doing it, even though I’m still not completely comfortable. It’s starting to get easier and I know I’ll get better with practice.

The same is true for speaking English. You have to feel the fear and speak anyway!

Don’t wait until you feel ready or until you’ve learnt more vocabulary or whatever.

Just start. And then keep going.

You won’t feel magically super confident overnight but the more you speak English, the easier it will become.

So you remember last week I told you I had something to share with you?

I’ve created a free email mini-course for professional women. If that’s you, I want to help you feel more confident about your English at work. The course is called “Your 5 Steps to Confident English Communication at Work”.

I know a lot of my readers are men but recently, I’ve been changing my focus more towards supporting working women. Most of my students are women and I understand the unique challenges they face in the workplace.

So if you’re a professional woman who uses English at work and you'd like to be able to communicate in English without fear or anxiety, you can sign up for my mini-course here:

Just so you know, if you sign up for my mini-course, you’ll also join my main newsletter list. At the moment, I’m sending the same email to my Substack people and my main newsletter list.

This is not a perfect situation and I might make the two emails different eventually. First I need to decide the best way to do this. Until then, you probably don’t want to get the same email twice a week.

If you’re getting the same email twice, all you need to do is unsubscribe from one of the lists. To do this, just click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of one email.

It’s a bit confusing, I know, and I’m sorry for the mess and the confusion. I know some of you have already moved from one list to another. Please be patient with me while I figure everything out!

See you next week!

Katie

PS If you’d like to help me grow on LinkedIn, I’d really appreciate your support! You can find my LinkedIn page here.