Feel the fear and say it anyway

Your English is probably better than you think. The hard part is the two seconds before you open your mouth. A self-help book from 1987 has more to say about those two seconds than most grammar books do.

1. The two seconds

You know the feeling. Someone asks you a question in English. You understood it. You even know the answer. And then something in your chest goes tight, your brain starts checking the sentence for mistakes before you've said it, and by the time you're ready, the conversation has moved on.

That isn't a language problem. You had the words. It's fear, and it's very good at pretending to be a language problem, because "my English isn't good enough yet" sounds much more reasonable than "I'm scared".

2. What Susan Jeffers worked out

In 1987 an American psychologist called Susan Jeffers wrote a book with the best title in the whole self-help section: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. She wasn't writing about languages. She was writing about changing jobs, leaving relationships, starting over. But she could have been writing about your next English conversation.

Her big idea is simple and a bit annoying. We wait for the fear to go away, and then we'll act. It doesn't work in that order. In her words: "The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it."

So the confidence comes after the speaking, not before it. Nobody has ever felt ready first.

3. The fear doesn't leave, it moves

Here's the part of the book I like most. Jeffers says the fear will never go away as long as you keep growing. That sounds depressing until you think about what it means for learning English.

The fear you feel ordering a coffee today will be gone in a month, because ordering coffee will be boring. Then it'll turn up again when you try a phone call. Then a meeting. Then a joke, which is the scariest thing you can do in another language. Feeling it means you're at the edge of what you can do, and the edge is exactly where you learn.

4. Everybody is scared, including me

I live in Kraków now, but I started learning Polish many years ago, so I know this feeling from the other side of the desk.

In the early days I'd build a sentence in my head, word by word, check the endings, then check them again. Half the time the moment had gone before I said it. When I did say it, it mostly came out fine. When it didn't, people were patient and helped me finish it.

Nobody laughed. Nothing terrible happened. The disaster I was so scared of never actually turned up.

Jeffers says that everyone who goes somewhere new feels this, everyone, and that you're not alone in it. The man next to you in the meeting who seems so relaxed? Scared. The native speaker you're worried about sounding silly in front of? Probably far more worried about their own Polish, or Spanish, or French.

5. Mistakes are cheaper than you think

Most of the fear is about mistakes, so let's be honest about what a mistake costs.

If you tell me your husband is a very good cooker, I will picture an oven with legs. I'll smile. I will also know exactly what you mean, and the conversation will carry on. That's the price of the mistake: one small smile. The price of saying nothing is the whole conversation.

When I listen to someone speaking English, I'm listening for what they mean. So is almost everyone else.

6. How to do it anyway

A few small things that make the two seconds shorter:

Have your first sentence ready. Before a call or a meeting, decide how you'll start. "Thanks for making time. I wanted to ask about..." Starting is the hardest part, so take it off the list.

Say one thing more than you wanted to. If you'd normally answer "yes", answer "yes, I think so, because..." It's a tiny step past the comfortable line.

Tell yourself you'll handle it. This is Jeffers' trick, and it works. You're not promising yourself that nothing will go wrong. You're promising yourself that if it does, you'll deal with it. You don't understand the reply? "Sorry, could you say that again?" Handled.

Practise where it's safe to be bad. In a lesson, mistakes are the job. The more of them you make with me, the fewer will catch you out in the real world.

The fear isn't going anywhere, and that's fine. You don't need to get rid of it. You just need to say the sentence while it's still there.