This excerpt from one of my Webinars talks about confidence when it comes to your English as a Second Language. The more your confidence can help you be yourself, the more trust you build in your cross-cultural relationships, especially when talking to native English speakers.

Video Transcript:

And I am so, so happy that you are here in today's webinar, because we're going to have a great conversation, not just about English and you know, but really about confidence and how you can build your confidence so that you can feel more like yourself when you speak English. And my goal here today is to just kind of give you an overview of what I believe it takes to get where you need to go in your communication. So, let's start with some data. This is some data, if you've been following me this past week or so you may already be aware of but did you know, that it only takes 30 milliseconds of somebody's speech for us to determine if they're from a different country than us. And if you think about that, that's, that's pretty quick, 30 milliseconds. So it's not a minute. And unfortunately, all of us, when somebody speaks our language as a foreign language, we somehow we might not trust that person.

Or we might not believe that person, or it just takes a little bit longer for us to make a connection with that person. And that's because our first languages are wired in our brains, going back to tribal times. So if you're standing on the border of one tribe or another, and you don't sound like the other person, it kind of is a warning of danger. Now we know in modern times today that doesn't, that's not true. It doesn't have to be true. There are ways that we can connect. We can build rapport and we can get past the way we might sound with our accents or our speech. So that's really important. The second thing I wanted to share with you is that you are part of the largest, fastest growing student body in the world. And that is the individuals who are learning to speak English.

So that's pretty great because quite often I know that a lot of my students, they feel like they don't belong or they feel alone in their English. And so I'm here to tell you, there are at least a billion people, that's a billion with a B who speak English as a second or foreign language. So the last thing you are is alone, and it's really about finding your tribe, finding your people. And I think today you're going to start to do that. All right. So I'm really excited to have you all here. I welcome you all.