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A bilingual podcast for professionals who know English but freeze when it matters.
Richard Marshall coaches senior executives and professionals on the one thing language classes never taught them: confidence. Not grammar. Not vocabulary. The ability to trust yourself enough to speak.
Each episode explores why capable, intelligent professionals go silent in meetings, presentations, and high-pressure conversations - and what actually changes that. Expect honesty, psychology, and no grammar exercises.
If you've ever felt smaller in English than you do in your own language, you're in the right place.
Why Fluent Professionals Still Freeze When Speaking English at Work
You already know the grammar. You've spent years on it. The problem isn't your English — it's that you don't feel like yourself when you speak it. This clip gets to the heart of why so many professionals go silent in meetings and presentations, even when they're running the room: it's not a language gap, it's a confidence gap. If you've ever felt like a different person when you switch to English, watch this.
How I Overcame My Fear of Speaking a Second Language (And How You Can Too)
I know what it feels like to have the words stuck in your head and no way to get them out. For years I avoided speaking Spanish - hated my accent, worried about mistakes, stayed quiet rather than risk getting it wrong. This clip is about what changed. Not a method. Not a course. A mindset. I'm now speaking Spanish on camera, imperfect and unbothered, because the point is getting across and that's what actually matters. If you're a professional who knows English but keeps yourself quiet to avoid embarrassment, this clip from my podcast 'From Lost To The River' is for you.
Why Perfectionism Is Killing Your English Confidence (And How to Fix Your Mindset)
Perfectionism is one of the most common reasons professionals stop themselves from speaking English at work. In this conversation, author and mindset coach Ben Eden shares a simple but powerful reframe: instead of waiting until you feel confident, act like the person who's already there. Progress is progress, no matter the size — and when you start measuring yourself differently, everything changes. If you've ever left a meeting wishing you'd said more, this conversation is worth your time.
Why Your Brain Lies to You Before You Even Open Your Mouth
Before you've said a single word, your mind has already decided how it's going to go wrong. In this clip, Richard unpacks the psychology behind why English speakers freeze before they speak - the fear of being misunderstood, the fear of looking foolish, and the story we tell ourselves that feels completely real but isn't. F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. If you've ever walked away from a conversation thinking you failed, only to realise nothing actually went wrong, this one's for you.
Why Senior Executives Struggle to Speak English at Work (Even When They're the Most Qualified in the Room)
Something specific happens to professionals at the top of their careers when English enters the room. They've built their identity around authority, expertise, and the respect of their teams - and suddenly younger colleagues are more comfortable in the conversation than they are. This clip gets into why that happens: the difference between the professional who just gets in the pool and communicates, and the one still paralysed by a school system that taught them English was about getting it right, not getting it across.
How 'From Lost to the River' Was Born
Most podcasts about learning English will teach you the present perfect, walk you through a phrasal verb of the day, or sit you down with a native speaker and ask you to repeat after them.
From Lost to the River is not that podcast. It never was.
It started in a training room in Alcalá de Henares
On the outskirts of Madrid, I was running English classes for a group of senior professionals at Toys R Us. On paper, these were language lessons. In practice, they became something else entirely — weekly conversations where intelligent, experienced, successful people sat across from me and told me, in carefully constructed English sentences, that they felt stupid.
Not that their grammar was weak. Not that they needed more vocabulary.
That they felt stupid. Small. Like a different, lesser version of themselves the moment the language changed.
I heard the same things, week after week
The schooling system had taught them that English was about getting it right, not getting it across. Decades of grammar exercises, fill-the-gap worksheets, and teachers who interrupted mid-sentence to correct a tense had left a specific kind of damage — not a language gap, but a confidence one.
They could construct a sentence. They just couldn't trust themselves to say it.
One of them told me she dreaded meetings where younger colleagues seemed more comfortable in English than she was, even though her technical level was higher. Another described the feeling of speaking English in front of a native speaker as sounding like a child instead of an adult. Another said his main goal wasn't fluency — it was simply to feel like the same person in English that he was in Spanish.
That last one stopped me.
Because that's not a language problem. That's an identity problem with a linguistic surface.
Something else was happening at the same time
I was driving to Alcalá four times a week listening to Spanish podcasts — not studying Spanish, just listening to conversations about things I was genuinely interested in. Neuroscience. Psychology. Coaching.
I wasn't filling in worksheets. I was just letting the language in, slowly, and something was shifting. I was starting to feel more like myself in Spanish. Not more accurate. More myself.
I started recommending podcasts to my clients. English ones, on topics they actually cared about. Not BBC Six Minute English. Not a phrasal verb of the day. Real conversations, real language, real people talking about real things.
And I watched what happened when they stopped studying English and started living inside it.
The podcast grew from those sessions
From the questions my clients asked me. The fears they named. The breakthroughs I watched happen in real time when someone stopped trying to be correct and started trying to connect.
I interviewed guests — a pilot, an author, a friend who'd been speaking English for years but still called his own level "peachy peachy" — because I wanted my clients to hear other Spanish professionals speaking English out loud, imperfectly, and surviving.
Because that's the thing nobody tells you.
The fear of being understood badly is almost always worse than the reality of being misunderstood. And the moment you stop performing your English and start using it, something changes.
This podcast is for the professional who has spent years studying a language they still don't trust themselves to speak
Not because their English isn't good enough.
Because nobody ever told them that the problem was never the English.
That's what From Lost to the River is about. That's what it was always about.
