Meetings, consults and interviews can create anxiety, particularly when they take place in a foreign language.
There can be a fear of judgement of some sort.
Of objections. Of difficult questions.
Like:
– “That price is too expensive for me.” Or
– “I don’t understand what you mean.”
– “Is that relevant?”
Even a question as simple as: “what’s your view on this?”
can create mental movies of saying the wrong thing and everybody stopping and staring as if we’d just walked into a village pub in the middle of nowhere!
That’s when we go into what we could call our “primal child” mode.
We fall back into childhood tricks of:
🔸 Fleeing: hiding under the covers of our bed when we’re scared.
🔸 Fighting: not letting go of our toy when someone else wants to play (keeping tight hold of our opinion and the need to be right OR keeping hold of our story about ourselves and what we can and can’t do).
🔸 Freezing: just sitting there in silence and not knowing what to say or speaking up but then getting lost in a thick forest of words.
AND we’re no longer able to access all the words we do know as well as our own intuition in the moment.
So what is the solution?
When communicating in English as an Entrepreneur or Corporate Professional in meetings, consults or interviews,
you first need to switch to weather forecaster mode.
We’ve all watched the weather forecast, haven’t we?
The male or female presenter is presenting the information, their predictions.
There is no sense of doubt.
The forecaster isn’t worried about our judgement of them.
They’re not thinking:
“What if I make a mistake or I’m wrong?”
“Imagine I say it’s going to rain and it doesn’t – what will they think of me?”
They’re not in that mode of thinking.
They’re neutral. It’s not about them.
They’re just giving us some useful information so that we can stay dry or cool or warm.
And because of this calm “neutral” energy that the forecaster transmits,
we believe and trust what we’re told. We make plans.
We get a feeling of certainty when we watch it.
It leaves no room for doubts in our audience.
But how DO we move up to neutral when we’re down here feeling nervous and going into our primal child mode of fight, flight, freeze?
Well, when we’re in this mode, We see ourselves as threatened in some way. We’re caught up in the movie in our mind.
We feel scared, empty.
So we need to fill ourselves up first.
We need to create the 2S’s: security and sufficiency.
Security: by reassuring our primal child like we would our own child or a friend
We wouldn’t say to our child: “oh, stop crying and get over it!”
We’d say: “nothing is wrong. You’re safe. There’s no danger here. Those emotions are normal because you think the movie is real. It’s not.”
Sufficiency: we’re going to switch off from the idea that our worth or identity is attached to this moment.
We are who we are and that will never change. And we have the words we need. It’s simple and doable.
That’s how you can get to neutral and step into weather forecast mode.
Our non-verbal communication speaks louder than our words.
Let’s make it calm, certain and confident!