The Face of Confusion
By Richard Marshall
The Story We Tell Ourselves When Someone Doesn't Understand Us Is Almost Always Wrong
"Te cuento una cosa, soy profesor de inglés y en mi clase esta mañana has sido la protagonista."
"Let me tell you something, I'm an English teacher and in my class this morning, you were the protagonist."
That's what I said before giving her the full-on belt and braces story I'm about to tell you. But unlike this post, I told it to her in Spanish. My Spanish. My beautifully imperfect, shameless attempt at being understood in a language I've spent years not using. Too afraid of what people will think of me when I do.
And she stood there, listening to me, making eye contact (which wasn't at all like her, until this and my previous visit to my local pharmacy), dare I say even smiling, as I told her all about the eureka moment that she was fundamentally and accidentally responsible for.
Then when I'd finished talking she simply said:
"Bueno, pues si te ha servido, me alegro."
"Well, if it was useful to you, I'm pleased."
I love telling the Pharmacy Story because it illustrates perfectly what I mean when I say that lots more things are happening when we communicate over and above us and our abilities to speak and be understood.
Years of Avoiding the Pharmacy
I've been going to that pharmacy for about five years, and one of the members of staff is a little old lady, and every single time I walked in and she was behind the counter, I did a quick calculation: is it worth waiting for one of the others, can I plausibly pretend I need to browse the vitamins for another few minutes, is there any way at all I can avoid this interaction?
Because every time I spoke to her, she gave me the face.
Eyes half closed to a squint of "what the hell is this guy saying to me?", and I'd walk out having spoken to her and feel a deep sense of shame, the kind that makes you replay the whole conversation in your head and pick apart every word and wonder which one was the one that gave you away.
For as long as I can remember, my immediate response whenever I spoke Spanish and someone didn't appear to understand me was that I wasn't pronouncing things properly and that they hadn't caught a word I'd said. And so when I was met with the head tilt of misunderstanding, I immediately had this feeling inside that I'm no good at this language learning business. It affected my confidence. My self-belief would be on the floor as a result, and it would always remind me that I have such a long way to go.
I've recently come to understand that there's a difference between knowing that you have the technical skills to communicate and feeling confident enough to follow through with speaking imperfectly and owning it. Not hiding in the shadows of shame, not thinking everyone's looking at you thinking you're less than, or stupid, or unable to function. None of that is really happening. And if it is, there's nothing you can do about the thoughts and opinions of other people. All that's in your control is how you process the information that's in front of you.
It's Not Always About You
There are more variables involved in communication than just you and your ability to pronounce certain words or express yourself confidently in a language that isn't your own.
There might be noise in the room, which sounds so obvious it barely needs saying and yet is almost never the first thing we think of. You could be a native speaker and they still wouldn't have caught it.
There might be noise in their own head, which is honestly the one I find most comforting, because the world doesn't revolve around your communication moment as much as it feels that way when you're mid-sentence and terrified. Somebody might have had an argument with their partner that morning and they're thinking about that, they're thinking about what to get the kids for their birthday, they're thinking about their plans for the weekend, they could be en su mundo, miles away, completely elsewhere, and when they ask you to repeat yourself it has absolutely nothing to do with how you said it.
And if you're on a video call, the connection may have cut out right as you were saying that carefully constructed sentence, the screen may have frozen for a second, and you won't even have noticed on your side, and then you hear "sorry, could you repeat that?" and instead of thinking "technical problem" you think "I said it wrong, I always say it wrong, maybe I should just not speak in meetings."
And then there's the one that took me the longest to really understand: the human mind needs just a little bit of time to adjust to you. Not a long time. It could be a few words, a few sentences, even thirty seconds. But if you give them a chance, if you just carry on, part of the subconscious will be thinking: okay, okay, okay, this person's got this kind of accent, they pronounce things a certain way, oh okay, I've got this now, I'll follow them.
And the face of confusion, a lot of the time, isn't confusion at all. It's focus, it's recalibration, it's the face of someone tuning their ear to you, meeting you where you are. It just looks like confusion because we've decided, in advance, that that's what it means.
Just Keep Going
It's like when you pop into one of those tiny bars in the middle of nowhere, some tiny little village with a population of a hundred people, three dogs and a post box. The kind of place where the fish stop swimming when you walk into the only bar for miles around, every aging, sun-kissed face staring at you as though you've got two heads.
And that awkward silence is about to be filled by your best attempt at communicating in their language, except the problem is they're only used to their own accent with its unique pronunciation. So your best effort sounds, to them, like proficient Dothraki.
But you keep going. And somewhere around the third or fourth sentence, you notice some subtle changes to their faces. They're with you now, they've recalibrated, and the conversation you were terrified of is actually happening.
Five Words That Changed Everything
Anyway, back to the pharmacy. On the day in question, I was trying to get hold of some medication I couldn't find anywhere, which meant explaining my situation in rather overcomplicated British-induced Spanish (as in, far too many words than were required).
And for the first time in all the time I'd been going there, her face was one of total acceptance. She was nodding away, looking at me, smiling, helpful. And I just felt thrilled by it, honestly, like I'd crossed some kind of line, like my Spanish had finally arrived somewhere I never in a million years thought it'd get to.
It's like that feeling when you watch a film you first saw years ago in a language you barely spoke and couldn't follow, and then you watch it again now and everything lands, every word, every joke, and you think: right, okay, I've decoded all of this, it's mine now. That's what it felt like.
So when she brought the medication over and I was paying, I felt relaxed enough, open enough, to tell her what had just happened. I said, in Spanish, thanks for your willingness to understand my Spanish today, I know that normally when I speak to you you don't really understand me, but today you did, and I feel really happy about that, thank you for making an effort, I know it can't be easy to follow my pigeon Spanish.
And she said, and this was the moment that blew me away, she pointed at her hearing aid and said:
"Tengo un problema de oído." I have a hearing problem.
And I just thought: what? Really. That's amazing. Not amazing that she's hard of hearing, I'm not a sadist. Amazing that I'd just been told that my Spanish is way better than I thought it was.
All the times I'd tried to avoid her. The occasions I walked away from interacting with her feeling like I'd failed at something. All the embarrassment I felt on every walk home from what should have been a simple transaction in a local pharmacy.
And behind all of that spiralling self-doubt, the actual truth was: she just couldn't hear me.
And with those five beautiful words, "tengo un problema de oído", the pain I'd been carrying simply disappeared. Gone. In an instant.
I told the story to my class the very next morning. And as you already know from the opening of this piece, I went back to the pharmacy that afternoon and told it to her too. And her reaction? "Bueno, pues si te ha servido, me alegro." Which was perhaps the most perfectly understated response to someone else's existential crisis that I have ever heard in my life.
F.E.A.R: False Evidence Appearing Real
The word for what I'd been doing, the acronym actually, is FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real. We create a story in our mind that isn't actually true. The fact that this woman thought my Spanish wasn't good enough, the fact that she couldn't understand it, all of that was false, and in my mind I made it appear real.
We all have our pharmacy moments. When we're asked to repeat what we just said. When the squinting eyes staring back at us start to glaze over and all you can think is I'm so bad at this. It happens on video calls and in shops and in meetings, anywhere, and the default story is: I said that wrong, I freeze when speaking, my skills aren't getting any better.
And we're the ones in the driving seat, which is both the problem and the solution, because we're in charge of the story we tell ourselves. We can choose to shrivel and convince ourselves we're terrible at this, or we can choose any number of sensible and very realistic alternatives: that they didn't hear you, that they're tired and not concentrating, that they just need a few seconds to adjust to the rather cool and exotic way you speak.
Ten minutes before you walked into that meeting, someone in another room understood you perfectly. Your level hasn't changed since then. The room has changed. The variables have changed. But you are the same person who, ten minutes ago, was understood without a problem, and there is no reason, none, not a single one, why that should be different now.
The Benidorm Move
I want to say something practical here, because I've developed a small move that I use whenever I sense the face might be coming, and it goes something like this. I say, "perdona, te aviso que tengo un nivel de castellano del estilo de Benidorm," which means roughly "fair warning, my Spanish is approximately at Benidorm tourist level" (it isn't, but that's the joke), and it usually makes people laugh, and it does something very specific: it primes them, prepares their ear, does the recalibration work for them before the conversation has even started.
They're already on my side. "What do you mean, your Spanish is great," and we haven't even started yet.
I did it at the police station recently, actually. Needed to get some official paperwork done (I find bureaucracy genuinely difficult in any language, and Spanish bureaucracy is its own particular sport), walked up to the counter and said "tengo un nivel de castellano del estilo de Benidorm" and he laughed, because it's self-deprecating, I'm taking the piss out of British people in Benidorm, I'm taking the piss out of my own accent, and what it says is: listen, you know my level, it's alright, thanks for your patience, I know you need to give me a bit of extra attention. All of that in a five to seven second phrase, and the conversation was already different before it had properly begun.
I know what you're thinking, and you're right, what senior executive wants to open a video call with a Benidorm joke? None. So the words change depending on who you're talking to and where. But the spirit of the move doesn't change: confident, warm, self-aware, not apologetic. You're signalling that you know what you're doing before you need them to believe it. And that matters enormously when you're trying to speak English confidently in meetings, because the first few seconds set the tone for everything that follows.
And here's what it isn't, and this matters: it isn't the same as saying "my English isn't very good." Because "my English isn't very good" is self-diminishment, it's apologising for taking up space, it's asking permission to exist in the conversation, and it almost always makes things worse because the other person either has to argue with you (awkward) or agree with you (devastating).
What I'm actually saying underneath the Benidorm joke, what I'm really saying, is something much closer to: I'm doing my best in a language I wasn't born into, I've memorised thousands of words and I can put most of them in roughly the right order, I'm standing here doing it right now, and it's your job to be understanding and patient with me. Give me a few seconds to get my point across and you will be able to understand me, you just need a moment to get your head around how I speak. Which, by the time you've said all of that, you've already proved.
Change the Story
The confidence to take the space, to keep going when the face appears, to trust that they'll catch up if you give them a few seconds, that doesn't come from studying harder or perfecting your pronunciation. It comes from changing the story.
The pharmacy woman's face wasn't proof that my Spanish wasn't good enough. It was just her face. It was the face of a woman who, as it turned out, couldn't hear me. And I told that story to myself for five or six years, carried it into every interaction, let it shape how I moved around my own neighbourhood, who I spoke to, how much of myself I was willing to risk on a simple transaction in a local pharmacy.
If you're a professional who freezes when speaking English in meetings, who replays every conversation afterwards picking apart every word, who avoids situations where your English might be judged, the chances are you've been doing exactly the same thing. Building a story around a face. Carrying false evidence as though it were fact.
Keep going. Give it twenty seconds. Let them catch up.
And once you start choosing to see things differently, the story changes. And so do you.
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If this resonates, I've been exploring how language, mindset and identity shape the way we speak English on my podcast, From Lost to the River. You can listen at procoachenglish.com/podcast (by CLICKING HERE) and on all major streaming services as well as YouTube.
And to learn more about working together, you'll find everything HERE.
