Do You Even Know How Intelligent I Am in Spanish?
By Richard Marshall
There's a moment in Modern Family where Gloria, Sofia Vergara's character, gets so frustrated mid-conversation that she just stops, looks at the person she's talking to, and says: "Do you even know how intelligent I am in Spanish?"
I've never heard it described more precisely than that.
Because that's exactly what's happening when one of my clients goes quiet in a meeting, and it has nothing to do with their level or their vocabulary or the grammar they've spent years studying. It's something more specific than any of those things, which is the gap between who they are in Spanish and who they appear to be the moment English enters the room. The fully formed mind on one side, and a vocabulary that's far broader and more capable than they give themselves credit for on the other, and somewhere in the middle a senior professional with twenty years of experience going silent because they can't find the exact word fast enough, and the silence feels safer than the attempt.
The Man Who Was Focusing on the Wrong Thing
I had a guest on my podcast recently, an Italian polyglot, former IT manager turned language coach, someone who had built an entire career in English after moving to Ireland with enough of the language to get by and not much more. And he told me something that stopped me mid-conversation.
When he arrived, he said, he was surrounded by colleagues who weren't worrying about any of this. They were translating Italian word for word into English, making mistakes that were obvious to anyone listening, apparently not losing any sleep over it whatsoever. And he sat there quietly, focused on getting it right, waiting until he was ready, convinced that the people around him were doing it wrong.
A few years later, those same people were managing international teams, getting headhunted, walking into new companies and being hired without question, in English, with all their mistakes still very much intact. And he was still sitting there, still waiting, still focused on the mistakes.
He said, with the kind of clarity that only really arrives in retrospect: "I was focusing on the wrong thing."
The Habit That Becomes an Identity
I think about this a lot, because it goes to the heart of what I see every day with the people I work with.
The intelligence was always there, the knowledge was always there, the language to carry it built up over years of study and work and real-world exposure that most people dramatically underestimate when they're busy feeling bad about the bits they can't do yet. None of that was ever the problem. What gets in the way is the willingness to let it out before every last piece of it feels perfect, and for a lot of people that moment of perfect readiness never actually comes, because the bar keeps moving, and the silence becomes a habit, the habit becomes an identity, and eventually the identity becomes something like: I'm not good in English.
Which is not the same as: I'm not good.
But it starts to feel that way, and that's where the real damage happens.
What His Colleagues Understood That He Didn't
What his colleagues understood, without anyone having to explain it to them, was something that takes most high-achieving professionals years to internalise: that the people around them were listening for the message, and if the message was clear enough, if the intention behind it was obvious enough, a preposition in the wrong place went unnoticed, or unremembered, or quietly absorbed by someone who understood exactly what was meant without ever registering what was technically said. The communication happened, and in the end that was the only thing that was ever being measured.
The Invisible Pressure Nobody Names
When you're operating in a second language there's this invisible pressure to demonstrate, through the quality of your English, that you are a serious and capable person, that you've earned your seat, that the ideas you're carrying are worth hearing. And the cruelty of it (and I've felt this myself, in Spanish, for years) is that the very act of trying to prove all of that, the monitoring, the self-correction, the waiting until everything feels ready, is exactly what gets in the way of the message landing.
Your colleagues already know you're intelligent. You earned your place at that table long before this conversation started, and they're not waiting to be convinced of anything, they're waiting to understand what you think. So stop proving it and start saying it, because that's what confident communication in a second language actually looks like, and the language, it turns out, is only ever one piece of a much larger picture.
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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.
