In this YouTube short, Hadar Shemesh expands on the concept of the “speaking police”—the internal critic that hijacks English fluency by over‑editing and doubting word choices. She explains that beyond reducing fluency, the speaking police forces speakers to operate at a “bare‑minimum” level: answering questions without adding stories, jokes, or opinions, effectively muting their personality. She describes how this self‑censorship erodes confidence, leads to missed social and professional opportunities, and diminishes self‑respect. She invites viewers to share their own experiences of these costs and hints that a future reel will explore the underlying causes.
Chapters
So in my previous reel, I talked about the speaking police, which is that voice in your head that makes your English come out funny, not as you planned, because that voice is judging, editing, overthinking, searching again and again for the right words, even though you might already have them. So I already talked about that, but now I wanna talk about the cost. So clearly that voice impacts your performance, what ends up being your English. So the first thing I could say, it impacts your flow. Fluency, it impacts the level of your English, and usually it doesn't match the real level of your English. So that speaking police is impacting how your English comes out. But that is not really the biggest problem with it, because I think the biggest problem with the speaking police is that it makes you do the bare minimum. And when you do the bare minimum, I mean, what does that look like? You only speak when people ask you questions. You only speak when there's no one else to speak for you. You just say the facts and the bare minimum, but you don't add the story around it even though you have it in your head. Or maybe you don't make that joke or share an opinion nobody asked for or tell a joke. Like, these are the things that we usually do, like where our personality comes out, and the speaking police dials everything down so that there's nothing interesting left. It's just like survival mode, right? Just the bare minimum. So I think that that is more critical than your English not being at the best level. It's just that only a shadow of you, a small percentage of you, is being expressed when you speak in English. And I wonder, and this is where I want you to respond, what does that do to you? How does that impact you in your life? 'Cause I'm really curious to know, because I remember at a time where I felt like 20% of who I really was because of English, because of my confidence, because of the situation in my life that I was in, because I know that when my speaking police is really high, and again, like, I know how to tone it down, everything changes for me. I don't feel like myself, and then I don't say yes to opportunities or to conversations, and it can impact my social life and my professional life, and just like even, I would say, the self-respect that I have for myself. So I'm curious to know if you have experienced that cost. And if so, what does that look like for you? And I wanna talk about the cause of that, but that might have to be in the next reel.
