As an international business executive, you know something has to change when the thought of communicating in English at work makes you feel stressed and anxious. Expressing your ideas clearly to colleagues and clients is a challenge because you’re unsure of the correct vocabulary or expression to use. You need to repeat yourself often due to your accent or pronunciation and have difficulties with business emails.
You’ve watched countless videos, studied grammar books, and even spent money on courses and apps promising better English in a short amount of time. However, you’re still not at the level you want to be at in your career. The truth is that you’re going to burn out before you ever reach the level of English proficiency you want.
Instead of continuing to learn everything, you need to focus on what you need to advance your communication skills so you will be able to improve your job performance and secure future career opportunities.
Let me use an analogy to help you understand.
Let’s say your vitamin C level is low, and you want to fix it. Instead of taking concentrated vitamin C pills, you decide to take multivitamin pills. You know what’s going to happen next. You can take multivitamin pills every day, but your vitamin C level will not improve as much as you’d like because you are not focused on solving the problem.
It seems very straightforward, but this is exactly what has happened to your English learning journey. You have tried to learn everything about English, but really, you only have to focus on the English that you need to advance your English communication skills and make those meetings, calls and daily interactions a much more pleasant experience.
In order to improve your English, you need to follow these three steps.
Step 1. Master the functional language and vocabulary needed to better express yourself
This is essential because it’s only by mastering these particular phrases and vocabulary that you’ll truly develop the confidence to express yourself in a natural way. Stop focusing on memorizing those endless lists of vocabulary that you’ll probably never need, and start focusing on learning the expressions that really matter.
Step 2. Improve your pronunciation
What’s the point of knowing all those impressive new expressions if nobody can understand you when you use them? If you need to repeat yourself often because colleagues and clients can’t understand you, it’s time to find out what your pronunciation weaknesses are and start working towards improving them immediately.
Step 3. Learn how to write professional emails that will leave a great impression
Do you hesitate to push send on your emails fearing they may contain errors? Your email is often the very first impression a person receives of you. If you have ambitions and plan to get promoted, then you’ll need to learn how to write error free emails in English that get results. Focus on learning the correct structure and key phrases that you can use over and over again that will ensure your writing always leaves others with an excellent impression of you.
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