By: Arthur Johansen
3 steps for IT leaders to increase their English language proficiency so they can excel at leading their teams.
Getting rid of your English errors is not easy, otherwise you would have already perfected your English abilities.
After years of studying and speaking English, you still make many mistakes.
You are missing opportunities to excel and advance in your career, and gain the respect of all your colleagues and reports due to your average English skills.
You might think that the problems are:
– You haven’t spent enough time reading books or watching videos.
– You haven’t found the perfect ‘English environment’ to help you improve your English on a regular basis.
– You don’t have enough chances to practice with native speakers.
– You need to find another general English class with a book covering general English topics.
It’s not that those things aren’t helpful, because some of them might be. But the truth is that you haven’t been learning English in a comprehensive and systematic way that is tailored to you for improving your level of fluency in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
Let me use a Football analogy to explain it a little better:
Imagine you are a footballer who has played at the club level, but now you want to play for the national team in the World Cup.
You don’t just keep training the way you have been. You need to follow a systematic approach that will further develop and hone your skills, and you will need this training to be more personalized to fit your specific situation.
1st: an assessment is made of your current abilities and weaknesses, discovering all the aspects of your game needing improvement.
2nd: you get personal guidance and coaching from a trusted source. You need someone who is able to spot your weaknesses and help you overcome them in an effective way.
3rd: as you practice and compete at a higher level, you continue to get feedback to further refine and hone your skills.
Now apply this to your English learning journey:
In order to improve your English language proficiency so you can excel at leading your teams, you need to follow these 3 steps:
1st: Uncover all your specific errors and bad habits with English. Identify the correct solutions for these errors.
Obviously, you need to know what needs fixing before you can go to work on fixing it!
By engaging in carefully selected dialogue and responding to specific speaking prompts, you will know just where you are showing patterns of similar mistakes.
2nd: Practice specific aspects of the language, and get frequent and targeted feedback to help improve those areas unique to you.
Knowing your mistakes is not enough, you need to practice saying things correctly.
With targeted training and lessons that are focused on what you need to fix, your time spent learning will be more effective. I am sure you learned the rules of grammar years ago, and yet you still make grammatical errors. It is not about memorizing more grammar rules, but it is about becoming more familiar with all the nuances of the language and the contextual use of the grammar.
3rd: Further your advancement by training for high-level activities such as giving speeches and presentations, facilitating meetings, formal business writing, and even small talk.
After much dialogue and guidance, you are now better equipped to push yourself to engage in more challenging tasks.
Writing your own speech or presentation and then practicing it out loud, drafting formal emails and other written text, and engaging in spontaneous small talk will push your limits even further. These are things you cannot master by simply reading books.
I help my clients following this exact approach.
With my help, you will sound much more natural and confident when communicating in English. After working with me, you will be ready to participate and contribute confidently in all your meetings, in-person or virtual. And you will likely gain even more credibility as an intelligent and reliable leader. You will feel ready to handle any situation that may present itself where you need to use English to execute.
Send me a quick message so we can achieve your goals together! We can set up a time for a video call to talk about your next steps to becoming more fluent in English.
