By Olga Smith
We have been teaching accent reduction and public speaking on our courses and individually for more than 25 years and have noticed that there was one thing in common among all of our students - they are all high achievers: PhDs, diplomats, barristers, CEOs, MDs of large corporations and even celebrities. Here are some more of our students’ frustrations associated with their accents:
”I am a PhD, but people speak to me in pidgin English because of my accent”.
”I want to get rid of my Cockney accent because I work as a lawyer and my accent doesn’t sound appropriate in court”.
”I do not have a social life because people cannot understand my Turkish accent”.
One of our recent students confessed that despite the fact that she was the most knowledgeable in her finance team, her salary was very low because of her speech. She paid for her accent reduction lessons but avoided working on her speech for over 2 years, and now she has to chair very important project meetings. She is in utter panic and told us that she regrets not having accent reduction lessons and speech training earlier.
I was always interested in how to become lucky. I heard things like this: “luck is believing in luck”, “luck is being at the right place at the right time”. I have developed my own formula that really works best: prepare in advance for your lucky chances. If you want to be able to grasp your lucky chance, get ready for it and make sure your speech doesn’t hold you back but is your asset that opens doors to wonderful opportunities.