3 Mistakes Unconfident English Speakers Make With Meeting Preparation
Today, I’ll guide you through three common mistakes non-native speakers make concerning preparation for a work meeting in English.
By avoiding these mistakes, you will feel more confident about expressing your ideas, giving suggestions, and answering questions during your meetings.
Understanding how to prepare effectively for meetings can significantly impact your participation.
However, non-natives often find this challenging due to time constraints, not knowing what effective preparation looks like, or believing that the meeting content will be straightforward, thus not requiring additional preparation.
To ensure success in English meetings, establish a consistent preparation routine.
It is wise to adopt a systematic approach when it comes to preparation, even if you believe the content in the meeting will be familiar. When a client tells me that they didn’t participate as well as they expected during an English meeting, it is normally due to this reason.
With that being said, here are the three preparation mistakes commonly made by non-natives:
1. They Skip Preparing Mentally
2. They Fail to Organize Their Thoughts
3. They Don’t Plan for Possible Questions and Prepare Answers
Let’s dive deeper into each point.
1. They Skip Preparing Mentally
The first step in preparation for an important business meeting is getting your mindset ready.
Your goal is to achieve a state of mind that is conducive to participating successfully in a meeting and you do this through mental ‘programming’.
Prior to the meeting, feed your mind with positive messages and reject negative self-talk.
Examples of positive messages can be: “I’m more than capable of expressing myself today.” “This meeting is going to go great today.”
Conversely, negative self-talk is that inner voice telling you how bad you are at something and is common among unconfident English speakers leading up to meetings.
Negative self-talk has the power to make you feel inferior. It can be identified as excessively critical and pessimistic. However, there is a way to deal with it.
In order to overcome it, you must become aware of it and then replace it with more supportive and encouraging statements.
Mastering your inner self-talk is crucial to becoming a confident English speaker. It’s challenging at first but gets easier.
In the Impacful English Academy, I teach a three-step process to overcome negative self-talk. Learn more here.
2. They Fail to Organize Their Thoughts
The next step non-natives often neglect is structuring their thought process for the ideas they want to bring to the meeting.
To do this, ask:
What must my listeners understand?
What are the main points I want to cover and how can I organise them best?
What outcome do I want to achieve at the end of this meeting and how best can I do that?
Before the meeting, I suggest practising aloud what you have to say a few times. This will make an enormous difference to your confidence on the day.
Preparing your message will help you speak more fluently and more objectively. Additionally, it will help you avoid having mental ‘blocks’.
Using speech frameworks helps with this.
I teach my one-to-one clients an easy to apply framework within the first few sessions of my coaching program because I believe frameworks are so important to achieve fluency.
3. They Don’t Plan for Possible Questions and Prepare Answers
The third mistake I see people making is a lack of planning for potential questions even though it is common for non-native speakers to fear getting a question and not being able to answer it.
If you do have this fear going into a meeting it can lower your confidence, therefore it is something you need to prepare for.
I suggest thinking about the possible questions the other meeting participants might want to ask you.
Ask yourself:
What might they not understand?
What might they disagree with?
What might they need more information about?
Then prepare your answers mentally and practice saying the answers aloud.
You won’t be able to predict all the questions that will be asked, but doing this could help you prepare for some of them and, as a result, will make you feel more at ease and confident going into the meeting
Conclusion
By avoiding the three common mistakes highlighted in this article: failing to prepare mentally, not structuring key points, and neglecting to anticipate possible questions, you can greatly improve your performance in meetings.
Action Steps
Start with Your Mindset:
Begin each preparation session by focusing on your mindset. Replace any negative self-talk with positive affirmations to build confidence and set a positive tone for your meeting participation.
Structure Your Key Points
Clearly define your main ideas and outcomes. Organize them logically and practice speaking them aloud. This will help you deliver your message more fluently and reduce the chances of getting stuck on vocabulary or ideas.
Anticipate Questions:
Spend time thinking about possible questions that might arise and plan your responses. Practising these answers out loud will help you feel more prepared and confident when addressing unexpected queries during the meeting.
Start implementing these strategies today to transform your meeting experiences and boost your professional success.
