Do You Apologise for Your English Before Anyone Has Even Noticed?

By Richard Marhall

The Small Habit Says More About Your Mindset Than Your Level

You've probably done it without thinking. You're in a meeting, or on a call, or writing an email, and before you've even finished the sentence you're already apologising for it.

"Sorry, my English isn't very good."

"Excuse me, I'm not sure if I'm saying this correctly."

"Sorry for my English."

And the thing that strikes me every time I hear it (and I hear it a lot, more than you might think, from people whose English is genuinely excellent) is that nobody else in the room noticed (or even thought that) anything was wrong. The apology arrives before the mistake, before the confusion, before any evidence at all that something needs excusing.

That's not a language problem. That's a mindset problem. And it goes back further than most people realise.

Where the Habit Comes From

Traditional English teaching, particularly in Spain and across much of Southern Europe, was built around correctness. You were taught not to make mistakes. Every error was marked, corrected, and recorded, and the cumulative message, delivered year after year, was that speaking English was something you did when you were sure, not something you did to swim in the pool of the language and connect with people. 

So your brain learned to focus on errors rather than communication. It learned to scan everything you were about to say for potential problems before you said it, and when it found one (or thought it found one, or worried it might find one if it looked hard enough), it sent out a small defensive signal in the form of an apology, just to manage everyone's expectations in advance.

Which is, when you think about it, an extraordinary amount of psychological work to do before you've said a single word.

What Fluency Actually Requires

Here's something I've noticed working with professionals over the years: the people who make the fastest progress are almost never the ones with the best grammar. They're the ones who gave themselves permission to speak imperfectly and kept going anyway.

Fluency doesn't come from mastering every structure before you open your mouth. Study has its place, but language settles into you through use, through communicating, repeatedly, in real situations, with real people.

Every client I've worked with (every professional, every executive) has told me they feel something before an important meeting in English. Nerves, doubt, that voice asking if they're good enough. Every single one. The difference isn't who feels it. It's who speaks anyway.

The goal was never correctness. It was always communication.

What the Apology Is Really Saying

When you apologise for your English before anyone has noticed a problem, you're not being polite. You're telling yourself, and everyone in the room, that you expect to fall short. You're framing everything you're about to say as inadequate before it's had a chance to land.

And that framing matters, because the person on the other side of the conversation takes their cue from you. If you signal that your English is a problem, they start listening for problems. If you speak with the confidence of someone who has something worth saying, they listen for that instead.

The apology isn't protecting you. It's getting in the way.

What to Do Instead

Stop apologising before anything has gone wrong.

Not because your English is perfect (it isn't, mine isn't either, nobody's is), but because the apology has never once made the communication better. It just makes you smaller before you've started.

• Speak. 
• Connect. 
• Get your point across. 

And if something genuinely doesn't land, you'll know, because the person in front of you will tell you, or look confused, or ask you to repeat it, and you can deal with it then, in the moment, the way every native speaker deals with every miscommunication they have, which is by trying again with different words.

Fluency begins when you stop apologising and start connecting. That's not a motivational line, it's just what the research and over a decade of working with professionals tells me is true.

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 you'd like to know more about working together, you'll find everything HERE.