I met Roxana on LinkedIn and discovered that she is a fear specialist. Apart from being curious about what that means, fear or anxiety often come up in conversations about accepting new challenges or being more visible in additional languages. So I thought it would be interesting to discuss this with Roxana on the podcast – and this is what happened!

We talked about:

🎧 Roxana’s story with language and why she became a fear specialist
🎧 How we can respond to the fears associated with communicating in an additional language to share our messages and ideas
🎧 What we can say to ourselves to have a more constructive mindset when we’re about to do something that scares us
🎧 How we can redirect our attention when we focus too much on things in the past or future that reinforce our worst-case-scenario fears
🎧 How being curious can lead us to expect good things, rather than waiting for the worst to happen.

Click through to the show notes page to find out more about Roxana and her work: https://englishwithkirsty.com/podcast/episode301/

How about you? Do you have any tips to add about how you move through your language-related fear and take courageous steps to move out of your comfort zone?

I’ve been planning this episode for a while, but what better topic for episode 300 than one that combines two of my favourite things – languages and animals.

I wanted to have a conversation with language professionals who’ve integrated their interest in animals into their work.I found four guests to explore this topic with me and the episode is going to be in two parts. The other part is coming soon, but in this conversation with Ruth, Silvia, and Isabel, we talked about:

🐕 My guests’ stories – how they came into the language field and some of their animal-related projects
🐈 How we can use language intentionally, especially when talking about animals and how we relate to them
🐄 How to stay up-to-date with industry news and changing language in their various fields
🐾 Some of the special animals and the role they’ve played for my guesrs, including whether those animals are present online
🐇 Advice for translators and interpreters who want to specialise in content related to animals

I had a lot of fun with this conversation! Thank you to my guests for sharing their advice and stories.

Find out more about the guests on the show notes page: https://englishwithkirsty.com/podcast/episode300/

It’s story time! I’m a language trainer and mentor. I work with others to help them on their language journeys with English. But I’m also a learner with three languages at different stages of fluency. And that’s really good because I also have the perspective of a learner. Not all of my clients have the same challenges as me – though many do! My solutions won’t work for everyone! But there are things that I can share from my experiences of improving my language skills that will probably resonate with some of my listeners too.

In this episode, I’m talking about an experience from my Portuguese class. My Portuguese level isn’t at the same level as the English of mmost of my clients, but we’re not talking about language level today. We’re talking about the choices that we make when we don’t feel sure. Sometimes they are choices to protect us and make us feel safe, but they can also dilute our message.

My task was to describe three of my services in English and then to talk about the same three services in Portuguese. This is what happened and the feedback I received when we compared them. I’m not talking about aspects of the language, so you don’t need to understand Portuguese to listen to this episode.

Has anything similar happened to you? Are there occasions when you play it safe with your additional languages? What could the consequences of that be? The first step to fixing something that isn’t serving us is recognising the patern or behaviour in the first place!

And, as we were talking about my mentoring service, where we look at how you communicate, how you communicate in English, and how you can use your English voice to be more authentic and impactful, you can find all the details here: https://englishwithkirsty.com/discover-your-voice-in-english/


Also, you can connect with me on LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirsty-danielle-wolf-a8478235/