The Most Qualified Person in the Room Isn't Speaking
By Richard Marshall
Why Successful Executives Still Freeze When Speaking English
You've already got the walls of the house.
The grammar, the vocabulary, the structures, years of study, years of working in English, years of reading and writing and following every word in the room. That foundation is solid. Most of the senior professionals I work with have been building it for decades.
And yet something still isn't working.
In every piece of research I've done with clients and professionals, not one person has said they feel confident before an important meeting in English. Not one.
Why More Study Alone Won't Fix This
As adults with limited daily exposure to English, our language skills reach a plateau. We settle into a skill zone and stay there, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of our careers.
Grammar matters. Vocabulary matters. Pronunciation matters. These are the foundations of the language and they are worth refining. But for the professionals I work with, more study alone doesn't move them forward.
The issue runs deeper than the language itself.
The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling
What I've found, working with executives and senior professionals across industries, is that the gap between knowing English and feeling confident in English is almost entirely psychological.
In their first language, these are authoritative, precise, compelling people - the kind of person a room naturally orients toward. They switch to English and something changes. Not their knowledge. Not their vocabulary. Something underneath all of that.
The identity doesn't travel.
The person they are in Spanish doesn't automatically come with them when they switch languages. What my clients describe (and what the research consistently confirms) is a form of imposter syndrome specific to second language use. They find themselves doing something that has nothing to do with communication: trying to prove they're intelligent, trying to prove they belong in the room. I've sat across from CEOs with thousands of employees carrying exactly this weight.
What Actually Changes Things
In my work, we address both layers. The technical work (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation) gets refined and embedded. But we only get to that work properly once we've addressed what's underneath it: the beliefs, the habits and dynamics, the deeply rooted experiences that shaped how someone feels when they open their mouth in English.
Because here's what I've learned: you can improve someone's grammar and they'll still freeze. Fix the psychological layer first, and the technical work lands differently. It sticks. It becomes usable under pressure rather than disappearing the moment someone looks at you expectantly.
The objective isn't to stop caring about language. It's to stop letting the fear of imperfection make the language unavailable to you.
When that changes, everything changes. They begin to accept that they can be understood, and that being understood was always the point. Not perfection. Not flawless grammar. Communication.
The house has been built for years. The work we do together is learning to live in it, and then going back to make it even better, from the inside.
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If this sounds familiar, you can find out more about working together HERE.
