Or: why your best people go quiet the moment the call switches to English
Here’s a pattern I’ve seen enough times to trust it. Someone runs their meetings, negotiates the difficult contracts, gets pulled into the room when something’s on fire, and is completely fluent in doing all of that, right up until the language changes. Then the same person who built the five-year strategy starts speaking in short, safe sentences and lets the sharper argument go unmade. Not because the English isn’t there. Because something else has taken the wheel.
I don’t think this is primarily a grammar problem, and treating it as one is why most corporate language training doesn’t fix it. It’s closer to what happens to anyone under evaluative pressure; the same mechanism that makes a fluent public speaker seize up in a job interview. The vocabulary hasn’t gone anywhere. The access to it has.
This is the problem Thriveful was built to address: a framework I developed at the Edward de Bono Institute in Malta, working from de Bono’s lateral thinking tools rather than conventional language pedagogy. De Bono spent his career arguing that thinking is a skill you can deliberately structure, not a fixed trait, and the same turns out to be true of speaking under pressure in a second language. It draws too on NHS-certified mental health peer support training, and separately, systems and technical liaison work connected to Europol and Interpol; three fields that have nothing to do with each other except that each taught me some version of the same lesson: performance under pressure is a different skill from competence, and you don’t train one by drilling the other harder. You don’t fix stage fright with more rehearsal of the lines you already know. You fix it by restructuring what happens in the half-second before the sentence comes out.
That’s roughly what I do with leaders who’ve hit this wall, coached a couple of thousand of them at this point, with results that hold up. Less ‘more English’, more lateral-thinking technique applied to the actual bottleneck, so the strategist doesn’t disappear when the room does.
If that’s familiar, in yourself, or in someone on your team who’s plainly excellent and inexplicably quiet in the wrong language, that’s the actual problem, and it’s solvable.