How to Prepare Confidently for an Important Business Meeting in English
Preparation is key to your success as a confident English speaker.
In this lesson, you will learn how to prepare your state of mind as well as the message that you want to communicate in an important business meeting in English.
Here are 6 steps to help you walk into the meeting room confident that you will participate successfully.
1. Prepare Your Mind
The first step in preparation for an important business meeting is getting your mindset ready. In other words, the goal is to achieve a state of mind that is conducive to participating successfully in a meeting.
When you enter the meeting room confident that you are capable of expressing your ideas and are prepared for any possible scenarios that come up, you will exude confidence and feel relaxed instead of feeling stressed and anxious. Moreover, the quality of your participation will reflect your state of mind at that time. Therefore, it is important to cultivate the state of mind you need, 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.”
Dealing with Negative Self-Talk about Your English
Negative self-talk, on the other hand, is literally that inner voice telling you how bad you are at something and is very common amongst unconfident English speakers leading up to meetings.
Negative self-talk has the power to make you feel inferior and feel like an imposter and t can be identified as unrealistic, self-defeating, excessively critical, and pessimistic. However, there is a way to deal with it.
In order to overcome it, you must replace it with more supportive, complimentary, and optimistic thoughts.
Mastering your inner self-talk is crucial to becoming a confident English speaker. It’s challenging at first but gets easier.
I teach my clients 3 steps to overcome negative self-talk. They are:
Step 1: Identify negative self-talk:
You can use emotions as signals to identify your negative thoughts, such as when you are feeling angry, frustrated, stressed, anxious, or upset.
Step 2: Confront your negative self-talk:
Challenge it by asking questions such as: “Is this thought a fact or is it an assumption?” “What is the worst thing that could happen?”
Step 3: Change your self-talk from negative to positive:
Here are a couple of examples of how you can switch negative self-talk to positive self-talk:
Example 1:
“I make too many mistakes. My English is not good enough therefore I shouldn’t be here.” (Negative)
“I may have room for improvement, but I‘m capable of communicating my message and that is what’s important for this meeting.” (Positive)
Example2:
“What a nightmare… I have to give a presentation in English in front of the Board.” (Negative)
“What an opportunity it is to give a presentation to the Board! I’m going to make sure I give a great presentation and, most importantly, this experience going to help me grow as a person.” (Positive)
2. Prepare Your Message
The next step is to prepare what it is that you want to communicate. What must your audience understand? What is the message you want to give?
Before the meeting, I suggest practising aloud what you have to say a few times so you get used to saying it, and consequently, this will make an enormous difference on the day.
By practising your speech beforehand, you will naturally focus on the message and focus less on the structural/grammatical aspect of the speech. This will help you speak more fluently and more objectively, and additionally, it will also help you avoid having mental ‘vocabulary blocks’.
If you have time, I suggest writing down (or typing on a document) the more complicated aspects of your speech and the most important parts of what you’d like to say because this helps you structure your speech as well as remember it.
3. Anticipate Potential Questions and Plan Your Answers
I have heard many clients say that they fear somebody asking them a question and then being able to understand them.
If you do have this fear going into a meeting it can lower your confidence, therefore it is something you need to prepare for and be ready for tackling.
I suggest thinking about the possible questions the other meeting participants might want to ask you.
Ask yourself: What may 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 may not be able to predict all the questions that could 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.
4. Prepare How You Will React if You Don’t Understand Someone
Not being able to understand somebody in the meeting can make people feel uncomfortable and nervous because they don’t know whether they are missing something important.
Therefore, it is important to have a strategy in place so that you know what to do if this happens.
First of all, it’s important to keep calm and stay in a confident state of mind. If you feel yourself getting nervous, take a deep breath and shift your focus from, “I don’t understand. This is making me feel anxious.” to “I’m going to make sure that I understand what this person is saying.”
Secondly, it is perfectly acceptable to use interrupting and clarifying expressions politely, for example:
Interrupting Expressions
Sorry to interrupt, but…
Excuse me, I’d like to say something here.
Please hold on a moment. What you’re saying is…
If I could just jump in for a moment…
May I interrupt you there for a second?
Clarifying Expressions
I’m sorry, but I’m not very clear about…
Do you mind explaining that again, please?
What do you mean by…?
I don’t quite understand what you mean by…
So just to be crystal clear, what you’re saying is…
Are you saying that…?
If I understand you correctly, you mean…
Let me see if I understand you correctly, you mean that…
I suggest learning and practising 1 or 2 of each of these interrupting and clarifying expressions so that when you do use them you will feel more confident and comfortable.
5. Have a Mental Strategy in Place if You Struggle to Express Yourself
If you struggle to express yourself or find that your mind starts to race as you are speaking and you lose your objectiveness, take a deep breath, speak slower, and purposely keep things simple.
In the previous step, you learned clarifying messages to help you understand what others are saying, whereas now you need to learn expressions which help you clarify what you want to say.
Use phrases like these to help you clarify your message:
Let me start that again…
What I’m trying to say is…
What I mean is…
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
To illustrate…
Well, in other words…
Something else you can have ready in your mind is a simple 3 part structure to follow like this one:
1. Give context with an introduction sentence.
2. Talk about 2/3 ideas, arguments or points using sequencing phrases, for instance, “Firstly.” “Secondly.” “Finally.”
3. Finish with a concluding sentence to sum up your general idea or argument.
This structure is particularly good for when you want to express an opinion.
6. Post-Meeting Reflection
Reflection is an important step for improvement in any life area, therefore, after your meeting reflect on how your participation went, considering your successes and challenges.
Ask yourself the following questions to help you with this:
Did you keep quiet or did you speak up?
What caused you to not voice your opinion when you had one?
How did you react when you didn’t understand someone?
Did you speak clearly and objectively or did you ramble?
What could you have done differently to be more participative?
What can you improve on for next time?
Collect insights so you can anticipate any possible challenges for future meetings, then look back at these insights to measure your success.
Take Action
I encourage you to create a ‘pre-meeting’ checklist with these 6 steps and the expressions that I have given to you and get into the habit of going through the checklist before your meetings.
Of course, you may not have time to do it before every meeting but try to do it as frequently as possible.
Some of my clients do this routinely before English meetings and it has been very effective for them.
