Evan Carmichael addresses fear of making mistakes while speaking English as a second language in a management role. He argues fear is a signal to act on, not avoid, and recommends daily practice in small increments. Most colleagues speak accented English too and expect mistakes.
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my newsletter readers, Zari, who wrote in asking, "Thank you so much for the useful information. I have one question for you. I'm doing a master's. I want to work in management. The problem is that English is my second language and I'm afraid of making a mistake while communicating with others." Sometimes I may not understand in casual conversations, especially when they're making a joke. I'd appreciate your response. So thanks for the question. I feel your situation. I think what's the most important thing really to think about at the start, and this is for anybody who's facing any kind of fear, you can't let fear hold you back. If it's starting the business, if it's learning a new language, if it's doing something that you're uncomfortable with, it's natural to be scared, right? And that gets your adrenaline going, it gets your juices flowing a little bit. It's natural to be scared, but it's doing those things that scare you that allow you to live to your full potential. And if you don't do something because you're afraid of it, you're always going to regret it. You know, you're going to look back and regret not having taken that chance. And people rarely regret the chances that they took. It's the ones that they didn't take because they were too afraid to do it. So I don't want fear to hold you back from doing this. And for anybody who's trying to, you know, start a business or whatever it is that you're afraid of, tackle it, you know, go through with it so that you're not regretting it later on in life. Now, specific to language, you know, the best way to do it is to practice. And that's for anything too. If you're afraid of starting up, start up. Start up small and just do something every day to move that business forward. If you're trying to learn the language, do something every day to immerse yourself in that culture, in that setting, so you're always practicing and practicing. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you get, the better you'll get, the more you'll understand, and, you know, the more successful you'll be at whatever you're trying to do. So The easiest way to get over a fear I found is to start small. What I found is typically when you're afraid of something is because it seems too big, too insurmountable, your skill set is nowhere close to where it needs to be. Try to break it down into little pieces. Try to do something really small every day, and suddenly that big huge mountain that looked really scary isn't so scary anymore because you've already started taking those steps to climb it, and you're a lot more comfortable moving forward on it. I really don't want the fear to hold you back. You want it to be a counselor. You want fear to guide you a little bit and make sure you're not doing stupid or reckless things, but you don't want it to be a jailer. You don't want it to prevent you from doing things that you really should be doing and allow you to live to your full potential. So I hope that helps. Last thing about the language is it's also increasingly becoming a more global culture. The people that I deal with in my business are from around the world. Everybody has different accents. So many people are English as a second language. So, you know, you gotta get used to it. People will be understanding of where you are and will hopefully try to accommodate you. Obviously, the better you can bring up your skills to meet them, it will help you. But I wouldn't be too afraid of what other people think because they're used to dealing with people from different cultures and different languages. At least I am, and that's kind of part of my daily living with running my business. So hopefully that helps. Again, don't let that fear hold you back. Uh, if you guys watch and like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and try to respond to everybody as soon as I can. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
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