It Depends Who's in the Room
By Richard Marshall
Whose Opinion Are You Listening To?
My nephew visited from England this weekend, and we spent two days doing the usual Madrid things, walking around, ordering food, chatting to shop staff, navigating the kind of city that doesn't particularly slow down for anyone regardless of how well you speak the language. At one point, he stopped and said, "Uncle Richard, your Spanish is incredible, how did you even learn all that?" which gave me a nice little dopamine boost, to be honest, because praise is praise and I'm not made of stone.
The reason I had to laugh, though, is that a couple of weeks ago a Spanish friend told me my Spanish was a four out of ten at best (which stung a little but I appreciated the honesty if nothing else). And so there I was in the space of two weeks having been told that language skills were both incredible and barely functional in the same language, which raises an interesting question: which one's true?
And the answer, as far as I can tell, is that both of them are true, and neither of them particularly matters, and the whole thing depends entirely on who's in the room and what they're measuring you against.
The Only Benchmark That Makes Sense
My nephew's comparing my Spanish to his zero, which is not a criticism of him at all, it's just the reality of the situation, because anyone watching someone with any degree of ability at anything from a starting point of nothing is going to be impressed, and the impressed response is genuine even if the calibration is completely off.
Meanwhile my Spanish friend is measuring me against native fluency.
So once you understand what each of them is actually measuring, you realise that the gushing praise and the four out of ten are both, in their own way, totally irrelevant, because neither of them are answering the question that actually matters, which is something more like:
Can I get what I need in this language? Can I order food, handle day to day conversations so I feel like myself when I interact with people, can I be funny, can I express an actual thought instead of just surviving the situation and retreating?
Mostly yes, some days better than others, which is true of everything worth doing.
And am I improving compared to where I was a few months ago, a year ago, five years ago, when I first arrived in Spain barely able to string a sentence together without the intense rage of impatient abuelas pulsating from the queue behind me? Absolutely, without question. Which is the only comparison that tells me anything useful about where I am.
So be careful whose opinion you listen to, and be careful whose advice you follow, because most of the time the person giving it is measuring you against a standard that has everything to do with their own frame of reference and very little to do with what you actually need.
The Same Thing Happens in English
I see this constantly with the professionals I work with, and it tends to run in both directions at once, which is part of what makes it so hard to unpick.
On one side, they've had colleagues or managers from outside Spain tell them their English is wonderful, so impressive, brilliant for a non-native speaker, which feels genuinely good for about thirty seconds and then does absolutely nothing for the confidence that evaporates the moment they have to chair a meeting with native speakers on the call or present to a board in a language that suddenly feels three sizes too small.
On the other side, they've spent years with an internal critic calibrated to a standard of perfection that was installed by classroom English, red pen corrections, and a school culture that treated a misplaced article as evidence of fundamental inadequacy, which means the bar they're measuring themselves against has nothing to do with communication and everything to do with an idea of flawlessness that native speakers don't even hold themselves to in their own language.
Both voices are measuring them against the wrong thing, and as long as they're listening to either one, they can't hear the only voice that actually gives them accurate information about where they are and where they're going.
Whose Voice Actually Matters
The question I ask my clients isn't really about how good their English is, it's closer to: can you show up in English as the person you actually are in Spanish? Can you get your point across? Can you hold a room? Can you be funny when you want to be funny and serious when the situation calls for it, and are you improving compared to where you were six months ago, regardless of where anyone else happens to be?
Because that's the benchmark that tells you something real, and it's the one that's entirely within your control, which is not something you can say about your nephew's admiration or your friend's four out of ten or the native speaker in the room whose approval you've quietly decided is the only one that counts.
I'm not waving a flag for inadequacy here, I want to be clear about that, because there's always room to improve and I'm the first person to say so. What I'm waving a flag for is self-belief and progression and the idea that you show up as yourself, the person you actually are in your own language, and you let that be the standard, because fluency was never really the point, and communication was always the point, and the only voice worth listening to at the end of the day is the one that knows the difference between where you started and where you are now.
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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.
