How to Sound Powerful in English (Even If You’re Nervous) | The Fluent Edge Ep. 1

Sean: Hello and welcome to the Fluent Edge Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Watson, and with my co-host Dr. Howie Jacobson. And this is our maiden voyage podcast, hoping to help English learners who are professional people working in various situations where sometimes English is a problem. , you might be quite advanced with your grammar. You might be quite advanced with your general vocabulary. But for example, when you. Step into a meeting you might experience anxiety speaking up or giving a presentation. From my point of view, I'm going to help you as much as I can with becoming a more powerful English speaker and also developing your vocabulary, working on phrasal verbs, idioms, colocations, and I'll just give you a little bit about my background. So I am a business English fluency coach. I also help people with public speaking, and I also do my best to provide the right amount of confidence for you to move forward.. Now over to Howie.

Howie: Thank you, Sean. I'm Dr. Howie Jacobson. I am a coach, a business coach, performance coach. I work with executives and teams on high performance, and I would say 97% of what I work on is communication. So when we were talking earlier about working together, it seemed like this would be a great fit. I am.

A new language learner. I had moved to Spain a little over, a little under two years ago, and I'm learning Spanish, so I'm very sensitive now to how to speak about how language gets learned about the difficulties. The first thing I realized when you started speaking is, oh the words maiden voyage is an idiom that some people might not know, and I would never have thought about that before, except I'm now developing sensitivity as a language learner.

I also do not know what colocations are, so I'm excited to learn about that. My part here is partly to be learning from Sean, along with the rest of us, about how to communicate better in English. Even though it's my first language, I'm sure there's obviously things that I can learn as well and to contribute. A way of speaking in English that can be effective multi nationally in helping people understand us, in being influential, in being appropriate, in setting the tone for our teams, for our organizations, and to help us be as successful as possible in our world.

Sean: Fantastic. thanks for that, Howie. I'm really looking forward to, combining our skills together and helping people in a really different way. I don't think there are any other YouTube channels that have this type of mix of people working together to help others.

So I think it's a really special niche and I just thought I'd mention a couple of people I'm working with right now and the pain points that they're experiencing in their workplace. For example, I'm working with Daniella.

She's in finance and she recently immigrated to Canada from Chile. She's got great vocabulary. She's very disciplined with language learning, but when she's in a fast paced meeting she feels nervous especially when she has to present to senior stakeholders. And she wants to speak more concisely, but she overthinks everything she overthinks.

Her sentences. So I think Howie, in the past you've talked about executive presence, for example. Can you define what that is and how that could help somebody like Daniella?

Howie: Yeah. The way I think about it now is whoever has the lowest heartbeat in the room, I. runs the room. Now, not, I'm not talking about zero, I'm not talking about somebody who's dead, but someone who is in control of their nervous system and expresses confidence around that. They are the one who regulate everybody else.

And that's what we look for in leadership, even more than title, even more than expertise we are. And even on Zoom, even in these digital platforms, we even. If there was no video, if someone's just listening to this on audio, they can tell if I'm suddenly feeling nervous and I'm trying to prove my point too much .

You can hear in the tone of voice. The state of my nervous system and nervous systems are contagious because human beings are heard animals. And the more we pay attention to the nervous system cues of the people around us, the safer we all are. So for me, executive presence is about regulating your own body, your own nervous system, and then expressing that regulation through your voice, through your facial expressions, through your body posture, and through your gestures.

Sean: Wow, that's amazing. I'd never really thought of having nerves as being contagious in a group. But that's quite profound. That's really quite interesting. Yeah. I'll give you an example of another guy I'm working with. I work with a lot of people in finance, but also people in it. And I think one of the issues that it people face, even if they're working in North America for Google or Microsoft or smaller companies they don't really spend a lot of their time talking because they're programming. So when they suddenly have to jump into a standup meeting or they have to speak publicly, they really. Haven't developed their speaking skills very much, even though , in theory they've got the vocabulary, they've got the expressions they know the grammar. So that tends to be a problem.

So I'm working with a guy, let's call him Alex for now. He recently immigrated to Canada from Russia. And he's a developer and his biggest problem is that he sounds very monotone. When he's speaking and sometimes he doesn't articulate. It sounds like he's not opening his mouth enough, for example.

And I realize that very often with slovo languages there isn't this stress on being too expressive with your mouth, with your lips. They, it tends to be more closed than for English speakers. We tend to, smile more when we're speaking. We tend to. Be more demonstrative with our gestures too. So when he's in meetings, he feels that sometimes people just ignore him. They just move on to the next point because they can't really hear what he's saying. And the other point I think that is really a common pain point for a lot of. professionals who don't have English as a first language is small talk.

People get very anxious about how do they jump into a small talk conversation, especially when it's connected to local cultural references or local sports teams. So that's another big one. Yeah. Is there anything

That you could add to that

Howie, .

Howie: Yeah, you used the word anxious for all of these, and going back to our conversation about the nervous system is when we are anxious, we are performing at our worst in terms of creativity in term, right? Because anxiety is a function of fear and from a neurological perspective, fear is perception of threat.

So if there's threat. Anxiety, the difference between anxiety and fear. Fear is specific. I'm afraid of that person who's about to shoot an arrow at me. I'm afraid of that animal. I'm afraid of those storm clouds. Anxiety doesn't have an object. It's free floating. And so when we are under anxiety, our brains are searching for the thing to be scared of.

As opposed to when we are calm and socially engaged, we are then able to search for things like food and shelter and new pastures and mates, right? So there's the difference between defending and looking for opportunities. So defending threats or seeking opportunities and when we want to be creative, when we wanna be thought of as intelligent, as engaged in a social situation when we want to be.

Good conversationalists. It's very important to regulate our nervous systems, so I love how you teach people the skills so that they don't need to be anxious. And I can help people with the anxiety itself. And one of the things I've discovered living in Spain is people don't mind if I speak slowly and make mistakes.

What they do mind is if I ask them to repeat themselves 20 times because I don't understand them. So for me to speak more slowly, I understand it's not something that is going to get me in trouble, and so that's allowed me to relax and be a better speaker.

Sean: That's a really great point. I was just working with somebody yesterday on public speaking. So he's working in a company where he has to present in various situations. Sometimes at quarterly meetings sometimes standups, and he's in a senior position. But he feels that he's speaking too fast.

And when I started working with him, he was right. He is speaking. Too fast, especially when English is his second language. So we've started to work on pacing and breathing and finding those key words or those anchor words in his talk to help him create a foundation as he's going along with speaking. And so I think, for some people, even myself, sometimes I speak too quickly But I think when it's a second language for you or a third language and you already naturally are a fast speaker, but maybe your pronunciation is not that. Great in English, then , the message that you're trying to communicate can easily be lost. So that's , a really great point I think that you make about speaking slower is not necessarily a bad thing. It sounds worse when we're speaking in our second or third language. It sounds like you know that it's an eternity of time. If I suddenly. Make too much of a pause between my sentences.

But I think especially for public speaking with storytelling and drawing the listeners in to what you're saying pacing and slowing down and finding anchor words to pause on this sometimes has a much more powerful effect than just rushing through what you have to say.

Would you

agree with that?

been very close friends since: 1985

Sean: God. Was I born yet? I guess I was.

Howie: 40 years. met 40 years ago when we were both in a choir and you were a professional opera singer, and I was very amateur. And I've become only more amateur. But when you think about breathing and what we learned? How to breathe, , and the music we sang wasn't all fast.

Some of it was rapid, some of it was slow. And it's the contrasts that would make someone a great speaker. I find when I'm speaking too quickly or when people are speaking quickly, it comes across as I don't feel I'm valuable enough, so I have to really give you everything all at once, and I have to show you how intelligent I am and I have to share everything because if I stop speaking for a minute, you're gonna get bored and you're gonna go away and you're not gonna be interested.

As opposed to if I'm confident in myself, I can pause and know that you are going to be hanging on my words.

Sean: Well put, And that's a great expression

so basically people are completely focused and captivated by what the speaker is saying. They're hanging, they're literally clinging or holding onto what you're saying .

Yeah, and you're right, Howie. It has been a long time, several decades, and it's true. The opera world was a part of my life for several decades, since the time of our. first meeting. And I think one of the main things that I bring to people through my opera experience is this ability, to be more of an active listener, first of all. So for example, when you're on stage acting or when you're, in an ensemble of people you are throwing the ball around. You sharing the stage, but you really have to actively listen because that brings out. More of what the speaker or the deliverer of the words is saying, the quality of your listening.

So that's something that that I learned from theater and opera. And also I had to basically sing in six or seven different languages professionally, and my opera training was three years. And there was no way that I would've had time to learn six languages fluently. So what we did what a lot of us would do is work with coaches to really work on our diction and to understand the sentences or the words that we were singing. But at one point I wouldn't have been able to order a coffee in French in Montreal or a coffee in Milan, in Italy. But I was able to learn tricks to sound almost like a native. Speaker or singer in those languages. So all of the advice that I got along the way, I now try to pass on to my clients.

And there are all sorts of things that you can do to increase your credibility and your articulation et cetera. So all of that opera training has really helped me to help others as well.

Howie: Yep. That's one of one of the reasons I'm excited for this conversation is I know. All the gifts that you bring and and the passion with which you care about people being successful and being able to help them.

Sean: Yeah. So beyond that we've done all of the formal introductions and everything else. I don't know if it's worth going into pain points a bit deeper, or if you think we should go somewhere else,

Howie: I think that we should talk about how we will help people with this podcast. Like why should people very generously have been listening so far? And we're gonna come up with more episodes roughly the same time. This might be a little bit longer than usual, but maybe quickly, what are we giving people?

What should they look forward to? Why should they hit subscribe?

Sean: So I think there are several areas where we can really help people to go beyond where they're at now or whether they're stuck with language. Whether they're stuck in their careers whether it's a confidence issue. So I think language and leadership for my part business, English, of course that often includes phrasal verbs and probably a lot of people who are studying English would know what phrasal verbs are. But I'll let you in on a little secret. Most native English speakers. Do not know what phrasal verbs are. And I know in other countries grammar and the structure of language is taken much more seriously than in North America.

I never learned grammar. When I was in, in school, we had spelling, we had reading. We developed an opinion about a piece of literature, but we never really got the foundations of the language. So that's something that I have learned simply by learning other languages.

The other one is workplace idioms, I can give you a really cheesy one, I think that is, is overused, but even think outside the box, That's an example that could be used in any type of business situation. . Yeah, so I think helping people with all forms, all types of business English, so phrasal verbs colocations. Yeah. You talked about colocations earlier Howie. A good example of a colocation would be if I say I was doing 130 kilometers on the highway yesterday when the police stopped me, I was doing. Right. Instead of saying I was driving, which you could do, but very often in, in natural speech in English we substitute the verb for a different one. Another example would be did you make your bed this morning? In some languages, if you say, I made my bed, it means you built it, so those are examples of colocation. So a colocation is the most natural way for English speakers to say something in everyday conversation, even if there is an alternative more logical way to say it

Howie: When I was a, when I was a kid, my father told me a joke. He said, Hey, did you take a bath? Or I and I, yeah. He says, oh, good, 'cause we're missing one.

Sean: That's awesome. That's great. Or if I say, let's do lunch, right? So in some languages if I translated that, that would be like, let's make lunch together. You do the tuna sandwiches. And I'll, create the salad. Yeah, so those are colocations in a nutshell. There are many other examples I could give you. But I think make and do are particularly interesting because, for example, in German or French, they only have one word for make and do so in German, they would say, Chen.

And in French it's fair or fe so fair. But in English we have this possibility of using one or the other, make or do. So that's usually where I start with colocations . And I think in and I think another area that I can bring some of my experience or my expertise is maybe reviewing and looking at certain AI tools or. Websites that can help with your language learning or with your productivity.

I regularly test and try out various tools. And obviously we're now officially in this new age. Some people are calling it the cognitive industrial revolution . Because we're partnering with artificial intelligence, with robotics and we don't know where this is going.

It could be a dystopian future or it could be a future, that many people have envisioned for a long time where we would work less and spend more time creatively. But, that remains to be seen. But I know for myself, since I've started to use AI tools in my coaching and teaching, I've probably reduced my administrative tasks by, six to seven hours per week . So it really has changed everything. For example, I mentioned earlier that I was working with this executive who has to do a lot of public speaking in different situations. Normally I would've had to go on Google and research his job.

The types of scenarios that he would face every day. I would probably have to find an old PDF of a speech that somebody had put online, and I'd have to put this all together and then, send these ideas to my client and he would respond. But now often what I can do is just go to his LinkedIn profile, and in this case. He had a very long description of what he does and what he's done in the past, and now I can throw all of that into ai and also all of the information that I got from our first trial lesson or discovery call. And I can simply ask AI to create a rough roadmap or , an outline of a course that we could do together.

And then I'll send that to him. And usually it's maybe back and forth once or twice rather than. 10 times and he will just suggest a couple of things and then we'll move forward with that outline, with that roadmap. So that's one way that, I've used AI to really speed up the workflow and also make things much more personalized. Because in the old days when we would learn a second language, you'd have to buy a textbook. And often, after that textbook was sitting on your shelf. For a few months or a few years, and you'd open it, you suddenly feel how irrelevant it was

so I think now in this new age with ai, we're able to hyper-personalized material for our clients in ways that we couldn't even have imagined a few years ago. And then for the client side. I do recommend certain tools and platforms that they can use as supplementary material between our sessions, which really helps to speed up the learning process as well.

That's something else that, I can bring to the table .

Howie: When you bring something to the table, that's an expression. That's a, that's another idiom.

Sean: Yeah, exactly.

Howie: for myself I am delighted when you teach me new AI tools. Almost all of them end up with me paying 20 bucks a month for something else, which is gonna be a problem soon. But so far I have it under control.

I think we have a shared interest in things like productivity and personal knowledge management. So I think we're also gonna be talking a lot about how do we get into flow states? How do we manage our time, our, digital lives? How do we set the table for our best ideas? I'm also very interested in, the body and supporting the body with healthy habits.

That allow us to be our best. And I think both of us over the years for there was many years where we didn't talk except maybe once or twice a year. I. Or even less than that. And after five minutes we were both laughing at, oh, we're both into the same thing. We're both interested in that. We're both read a book on, psychedelics or

this particular author and we, so we have been in parallel.

For a long time and now we're bringing it together to to have fun. I'm doing this for fun. I do have a couple of spaces open for coaching clients. I'm happy to talk to people about that, but again, I'm hoping, obviously with any sort of marketing effort, a 1% conversion to client is very good, which means.

That this has to be a standalone value for people who never buy a thing from us. It's still something that I want people to value, to share with others, and that will make the world a better place.

Sean: That's awesome. And just one other thing I wanted to mention in terms cross-cultural communication we talk about direct and indirect communication and things like that. Those are other areas that we might have a bit of crossover on because I'm guessing that you've done. A little bit of that over time.

Howie: Yeah. And I'm excited to think about it in terms of English language because I've thought about it in terms of who stands, how close are you to someone else who arrives first at a meeting? Do you talk about. Your personal life. Does everyone go out to dinner after an offsite, right?

All these things that if you don't understand the context, you can be viewed as forward as rude, as clueless, as annoying. So I'm very interested in helping people understand and be sensitive and. We can't understand everything, right? We can't know everything in advance. So how do you speak in ways when you're say, Hey, you're my host.

How exactly does this go? What's expected of me here in a way that still retains their respect for us, that shows respect for them. And allows us, if we do make mistakes, to do it graciously, gracefully and to be able to laugh about it and develop deeper relationships rather than being discounted as a fool.

Sean: Very well said. And what are the typical pain points of somebody that you would work

with ?

Howie: Yeah, , I work, I would say mostly with native English speakers. At the moment actually I have a couple of clients who one speaks German and the other Portuguese, their English is very good, but clearly, they've learned it as a second language. A lot of it is around leading a team.

The people who come to me are brilliant, They're all way smarter than I am in, in almost every way imaginable. but they never learned to be a leader. They learned to do a thing, to be a programmer, to be a finance person, to be, the salesperson. And so they get promoted because they're so good at that, and now all of a sudden they have several problems.

One problem is the thing that they were good at is now a distraction because their job is to lead a team to make other people good at that. And because they're not good at leading, they will retreat to being the salesperson again, or the coder. And so they become the bottleneck , for their entire team or even the entire organization because they're better at it than everyone else, and it's more comfortable.

So what happens is they're now, they're overworked. They can't take a break. Their people are unhappy because they're not growing, they're not allowed to. They're given the chance to contribute. They may have, I. Problems with retention, their department may not look good. All of a sudden. There's a phrase in English called the Peter Principle, which is you were promoted up to your level of incompetence, and the idea is everybody's so good.

But then when you're good at this, you get promoted there and you're not good anymore. And I don't believe that's what happens. I don't believe that people mostly hit a ceiling. What I believe is they are not taught how to be a leader, how to shift their time, how to grow other people. And the problem with that is , the leadership usually begins, it's let's say the vice president or senior vice president level, or even in some organization's manager.

And when you hit your ceiling there. Because you're not able to make your team successful. You don't get promoted higher. You don't get to fulfill what it is you wanna do. You don't get to have the impact you wanna have, and the only way to get promoted is to develop other people, to make yourself unnecessary at your current level.

Sean: Wow. Lots of great expressions in there. And I was trying to write some of them down, but the, one of the last ones you mentioned was to hit the ceiling again, in some languages that idiom would literally mean just to hit the ceiling with something like, with a ball.

But yeah, in a business context, that's a great idiom. To use. So I guess just in a nutshell we're really trying to create something completely new. I've spent a lot of time researching other English YouTube channels English podcasts, et cetera, and most are really focused on grammar or just simply instructing people, giving people new vocabulary. But in terms of trying to help a person holistically. In a more general, in a wider sense, I think that what you and I can offer people, Howie is really quite unique at the moment.

And I'm really hoping that this will help people globally

Howie: and one way that we can get there is if people give us feedback. If

Sean: yes.

Howie: give us comments, tell us what they like, what they don't like, what they'd like more of, what they'd like less of. So it makes it very easy for us to be smart if you just tell us what to do, I.

Sean: Yeah,

I think that's a great idea to get feedback from people. So I would encourage everyone to leave feedback in the comments. We'll also have an information email address and the description. So if you wanted further information about the podcast and then we'll also provide individual, coaching links both for Howie and myself where you could work with us privately.

And if you got value from this, if you felt that you learned something from this today, then share it with somebody. Who could use a little fluent edge in their lives. So yeah, I think with that, Howie, is there anything else you'd like to say to wrap things up ?

Howie: I think you did a fantastic job. I'm I'm happy that we're doing this. We've talked about it for a while and it feels good to take the plunge to take that forward step, and I look forward to working with you and to seeing the community that coalesces around this beautiful mission.

Sean: Thanks. Howie.

Howie: Right on. All right. Take care, Sean. Take care everybody, see you in the next episode.

Sean: See you next time.