I Understand English, But I Freeze When I Speak: How to Build Confidence at Work

“I understand English, but I can't speak it.”

This is probably one of the most common things I hear from professionals when they first come to us. And the interesting thing is that, most of the time, we're not talking about people who don't know English. Quite the opposite.

Every day, I work with amazing professionals who have studied English for years. They've been to language schools, taken courses, studied grammar and invested a lot of money. But more importantly, they've invested time. Sometimes we're talking about five, ten or even more years of learning the language.

So when someone tells me, “I understand English, but I can't speak it,” my first thought isn't that we need to start over. Actually, I think we're in a pretty good position. The English is already there. Now we need to get it out of your head and start using it.

What you don't use, you lose

I strongly believe in a very simple idea: what you don't use, you lose. You can study a language for years, but if you don't use it regularly, especially for speaking, you start to lose that agility.

It's a little like going back to a sport after not playing for a long time. You still know what you're supposed to do, but everything feels slower and slightly uncomfortable at first. English can work in exactly the same way. You know the word. You're sure you know it. But it takes too long to come out.

Then you start thinking. You translate. You check the grammar in your head. You change the sentence. And by the time you're ready, the conversation has already moved on.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy those first few classes with a student who has this problem. Sometimes it only takes a couple of classes before we start seeing a change. First, they realize they can answer a question. Then they tell a story. Soon they're asking their own questions and reacting naturally to what someone else says.

It's almost like someone turned on a switch.

We didn't teach them English from zero in two or three classes. The English was already there.

The real fear is often: “What if I don't understand?”

Interestingly, many professionals aren't actually that afraid of speaking. What really scares them is what happens after they speak.

Imagine you're in an international meeting. You've prepared what you want to say, you ask your question in English and everything goes well. Then the other person answers quickly. Maybe they have an accent you're not familiar with, or they use an expression you don't know.

You didn't understand them.

Now what?

For some people, saying “Sorry, I didn't understand” is almost unthinkable. They feel as if they're publicly admitting that their English isn't good enough. They get nervous, anxiety kicks in and suddenly their brain seems to switch off. At that point, the problem isn't only English anymore. Emotion has taken control of the situation.

Part of our job is to make these moments normal. You are not going to understand everything. Asking someone to repeat something is also completely normal.

You can say, “Could you say that again?”, “What do you mean by...?” or “Just to make sure I understood correctly...” and continue the conversation.

That's not bad English. That's communication.

We also need to talk about shame

There's something else that comes up frequently in my classes but doesn't appear very often in English textbooks: shame.

I sometimes joke with my students about American tourists travelling to Spanish-speaking countries. Many of them arrive with very limited Spanish and just go for it. They use the words they know, invent a few others, use their hands when necessary and keep going. They're not standing outside a café for five minutes trying to construct the perfect sentence before ordering a coffee.

Yes, I'm generalizing a little, but I use the example because it helps us talk about something important. Many of my students know much more English than they think they do. The problem is that they're ashamed of showing an English that isn't perfect.

Once we recognize that shame, we can start working on it. Sometimes we can even laugh about it. Little by little, it stops controlling the conversation.

And that's when things start to change.

Your accent is like your nose

Then there's the accent. This one worries a lot of people.

I like to tell my students that your accent is like your nose. Yes, that thing in the middle of your face. It's part of you. You don't need to spend your life trying to hide it.

I'm Colombian. My English has a history, just as the English spoken by someone from Portugal, Brazil, France or Germany has a history. The goal shouldn't necessarily be to erase that identity so you can sound like someone else.

The important question is much simpler: Can people understand you?

That's why I'd rather concentrate on fluency. One of the things we work on is learning to read and speak in groups of words instead of processing English one word at a time. When you start recognizing these groups, your English develops a rhythm and begins to flow much more naturally.

Your accent doesn't need to disappear for you to become a confident English speaker.

“I know the English in my head”

When a student tells me, “I know the English in my head, but I can't speak it,” I actually see that as a good starting point. There's a lot there for us to work with.

Our job is to put that person into situations where they actually need to use the language. That doesn't mean starting with a 30-minute presentation to the board of directors. We can start with a social topic, a simple workplace situation, a question or a conversation about something that happened during the week.

Every time the student manages to express an idea, even if it isn't perfect, something important happens. They get evidence that they can speak English.

Then we ask another question. We change the situation. We push a little further.

I like to think of it as removing the rust from their English. The knowledge is there; we just need to get the machine running again.

“But I only have one hour a week”

Here's something about Go English Live that surprises some people: many of our students have just one hour of class per week.

So how can someone improve their English by studying for only one hour?

Well... it's not really just one hour.

Before class, students have access to everything on our LMS. They can watch the introduction video, listen to the unit podcast and work with the vocabulary. They don't need to spend hours studying, but when they arrive in class, they already know the topic and have had some contact with the language we're going to use.

Then comes the part that, for me, makes the difference: we use it in class.

The vocabulary they prepared appears in the conversation. Ideas from the video become questions and discussion points. The English stops being something they studied yesterday and becomes something they need today to communicate an idea.

That's exactly what we want.

The new homework: activation

I also like to challenge the traditional idea of homework. A professional who has already worked eight or ten hours probably isn't very excited about finishing an English class and receiving three pages of grammar exercises to complete that evening.

So instead, we talk a lot about activation.

The first step can be ridiculously simple: change your phone to English.

That's it.

Suddenly you're getting small doses of English throughout the day without finding an extra hour to “study English.”

Then find a podcast about something you genuinely enjoy. And I don't mean it has to be an “English learning podcast.” It can be about business, technology, padel, football, marketing, travel or anything else you'd listen to anyway.

Make some time for it every week. Don't turn the whole thing into an exercise. Don't stop every 30 seconds to look up a word. Listen, try to understand and keep going.

We want English to become part of your life instead of something that only exists during your English class.

One student who reminded me why we do this

I have a student who has always found pronunciation particularly difficult. He understands English, he has the knowledge and he can participate, but some words have been really difficult for him. Sometimes he would look at a word he knew and his natural pronunciation would come out so differently that it would stress him out.

We didn't try to “fix his English” all at once.

We worked little by little. One social topic at a time. Real situations. Situational English he could actually use. Some things improved quickly; others took much longer. And that's fine.

What matters to me is what happens when someone who used to be constantly worried about how they sounded starts to simply talk.

It's difficult to explain that feeling as a teacher. I still get goosebumps when I see a student who arrived feeling insecure start having a conversation, developing an idea, making a joke or defending an opinion in English without constantly thinking about every single word.

That's when you know something has changed.

Maybe you don't need to learn more English. Maybe you need to use the English you already know.

If you understand English but freeze when you speak, don't automatically assume you need another course full of grammar, vocabulary lists and exercises.

Maybe you need practice. Maybe you need to learn how to handle that moment when you don't understand someone. Maybe you need to accept your accent. Or maybe you simply need a place where you can speak, make mistakes, try again and discover that nothing terrible happens when a sentence isn't perfect.

Confidence doesn't magically appear before we start speaking. In my experience, it happens the other way around: we speak, we realize we can do it and, little by little, we become more confident.

Sometimes the English you thought you'd lost was there all along.

It was just a little rusty.