Getting blocked when you speak English
- Catherine
- Sep 27, 2021
- 3 min read
When I was at university, I went for an interview for a job in Japan. It was a job I really wanted to do and that made me extra nervous during the interview. The interview was not so demanding and I should have aced it.
There were three interviewers sitting across from me (which already made me nervous) and one of them asked me “what books would you introduce to your Japanese students to help them learn about your country?” I love reading, it’s not unusual for me to read two books every week. Yet when she asked me this question, my mind went blank. Totally blank. I could not remember any single book I had ever read!
In the end I gave her an answer: Trainspotting. Perhaps you’ve read the book or watched the film, and you know that Trainspotting is about a group of friends who are also heroin addicts. As a way of helping Japanese students learn about the UK, I am not sure this book is the best advert!
No, I didn’t get the job.
This is a prime example of how your brain blocks in stressful moments. Many of my clients tell me their brain gets blocked and they can’t find their words in English in meetings or when they’re presenting. Even when they’re just having a conversation in English. Why does this happen?
There are a few reasons:
Firstly, your brain doesn’t react well to stress: the pre-frontal cortex, where your thinking happens, is flooded with hormones such as cortisol, which tell the neurons to stop firing. You go into fight-flight-freeze mode and your brain, which normally makes connections and finds information relatively easily, suddenly struggles to get the information out. The problem is that your brain sometimes doesn't know the difference between a real threat, and an imagined threat, meaning that the just the fear of getting blocked is as powerful as actually getting blocked.
Secondly, if you are speaking English as a foreign language, it is not as embedded in your brain as your native language, which means you have fewer neural pathways connecting the information. Even in non-stressful situations it’s harder to access foreign language words.
What can you do about this?
Remember that the brain learns and functions best when you are not stressed. Having a safe space to practise speaking a foreign language is very important as you will be able to embed what you need into your brain. Learning how to relax and keep calm in a stressful situation is crucial. Keeping a cool head is one of the keys to speaking more fluently. When you follow a training like “powerful presentations” with us, we work on techniques to decrease stress when you’re speaking in public. It’s also the reason why we create a fun and safe learning environment for all of our training courses. We want you to feel relaxed so you can perform as well as possible.
Practice: we all know that practice is the key to performance and it’s true for English communication as well. The more you practise talking about different topics, the easier it will be to talk about those topics when you are in a stressful situation. (I had not practised talking about a book in my interview preparation - that’s why my mind went totally blank. It was too stressed to search for the information that was not readily available.)
That’s why we run fluency club: It gives you the opportunity to practise speaking about different topics in English so that when you are at a meeting with a client, or at the coffee machine with the big boss, you have the words to talk about non-work subjects.
To recap, the easiest thing for you to do is to practise what you need to say in real life. Learning to deal with stress is the second very important thing, but I know this is not so easy. (I can tell you to walk in the forest, meditate, and do yoga...but you already know that, right?)
Comments