Let’s face it. As a business owner, you are busy running a business. You need English to move ahead and grow, but improving your English is taking longer than planned. You’re not even sure if you are making progress at all.
You don’t feel self-confident when communicating in English. You often have trouble understanding spoken English, and your business clients sometimes find it hard to understand you speaking too.
You keep thinking in your native language and your English speaking fluency suffers because you are constantly translating from your first language. You don’t feel you know enough vocabulary to communicate your ideas with clarity.
You are missing business and career opportunities because your English is not up to the level where you need it to be.
Now let me tell you this. Going on this way may easily lead to losing momentum and interest in learning and you will be more likely to just give up before you reach the level of fluency you are looking for.
The problem is that you haven’t been learning English in a systematic way to get what you need to advance your communication efficiency in English.
You have been trying to learn new things from different sources, but without knowing how these pieces come together, you have been pretty much just missing the point and probably wasting your time, not knowing how to practise in an efficient way that renders clear results.
And you haven’t been able find out why you are not making the desired progress.
Let me use an analogy to help you understand why this is critical.
Suppose you want to convert a conventional van into a camper van. How are you going to go about it?
You are not going to jump and grab a saw and a hammer, start cutting wood and fix wall panels in right away, are you? You will need to follow a systematic approach.
- Check the current state of repair of the vehicle to know what structural improvements are needed to add accommodation elements
- Repair and prepare the existing structure to get ready for the transformation work
- Build and/or purchase the additional components needed and complete the conversion process
Let me walk you through 3 steps that you need to do in order to advance your business English communication efficiency.
1. Have a clear idea of why spoken English is challenging to understand
Knowing the real reasons why your ears sometimes don’t catch even simple expressions that seem so easy to understand when you see them written down is fundamentally important if you want to become a trained and efficient listener.
If you don’t know how spoken English actually works, you will keep groping in the dark, hoping that over time things will just fall in place and you will start understanding speakers better and better by simply spending more time listening.
You can keep listening on end, but if you don’t train listening the right way, you are just wasting your valuable time. You could be caught up in a loop of frustration and be prone to give up on it as something impossible to do.
It is not impossible to do. It’s actually something that in my experience anyone should be able to do. And there is a way to get there.
You need to know HOW to listen, in order to experience over and over again the difference this makes when it comes to understanding spoken English.
Spoken English has a couple of features that you need to work on in order to become skilled at understanding it. To name the most important ones:
- keyword stress versus grammar words
- contractions and intonation
- word linking
Instead of wanting to understand all the words of what people are saying, and getting lost because you are not able to understand every detail, you should start by discovering how to listen to key information first.
In spoken English certain words are emphasized more than others. Also, two or more words are usually linked into one single flow when speaking, which is completely different from what you see on paper with each word separated by a space. Once you understand how this and a couple of other features works, you can use this knowledge in practice to experience a shift in your ability to follow English speakers easier.
To give you an example, here’s a video lesson tutorial for you to better understand the concept of sentence stress in practice. It explains why sentence stress is one of the key elements fo understanding spoken English, and how it works to communicate the meaning.
2. Learn to build confidence and fluent clarity when doing business in English and discussing your business project
Without self-confidence nothing works in a lasting way. Your business partners will sense insecurity, no matter what the root is, and that will negatively affect the way they look on you, which in turn will affect the success of your business dealings. Confidence in what we do as professionals is a challenge for most people, so you are not alone.
When it comes to speaking a foreign language, there are certain factors that come into play that can easily further erode your self-confidence. Do not let that happen. Make sure you learn how to build that confidence and do not miss business opportunities for reasons that should be out of the way, so you can fully focus on what your goal is: giving the best possible service to your customers.
The number one thing you need to do is to activate your existing knowledge in English instead of worrying about learning new things just now. You are going to learn new vocabulary and develop skills through active learning much easier this way later, rather than trying to memorize a lot of new things first in order to become a successful speaker later. Activate and use what you already know. This will create a fertile learning field for you to plant it with new knowledge.
3. Understand how to apply all that you learned in professional business situations in English
By activating your existing knowledge in English and building on it, you can get to the point of implementing sooner, and that is what you should do. As a business owner or professional who needs to use English for their business communication on a regular basis, you are in the best position to learn and implement at fast speed.
Applying new learning points is the way to fixing them into your skillset, and the best place is real life. Use every meeting, presentation or socializing situation to put new learning points into practice, including techniques you learn about how to listen successfully and how to become a more confident speaker. Do not get overwhelmed though, build new knowledge into your business interactions step by step.
See what José Luis, a student of mine, founder of a robotics company had to say about this learning experience recently:
Gabor is an excellent English coach and a bit of a magician.
What I value most about him is his enthusiasm. He knows how to transmit his security and convinces me that it is possible to improve my English.
He is very structured and knows how to propose methods and alternatives so that I can improve those points in which I have more difficulties.
He is very flexible to adapt to my needs and never has trouble offering me a summary or a personalized video to explain those details I need to know.
He is always analysing my performances and behaviours to adapt his coaching sessions to my realities.
I am in constant touch with him to make sure I don’t lose his positive influence on my English.
Hope these tips can help you see what to work on in order to become an efficient English communicator in the shortest possible time!