You’ve prepped all your social media posts, you've got your content strategy and you know what you need to do, but as soon as it comes to showing up on camera, you feel the old familiar rush of anxiety and your whole body tries to convince you to stay safe and not post a talking head reel or a B-Roll video, and surely never ever go live. Sound familiar?
Despite knowing you need to be seen to grow and scale your business, you can’t seem to get rid of that internal monologue of why it’s too scary and why you couldn’t possibly be successful in a foreign language.
For every reason why you should post, upload or go live, you find reasons why you shouldn’t:
“no one will understand me because of my accent”
“they’ll hear my accent and won’t take me seriously”
“the people I grew up with will think I’m full of myself for talking in English”
“they won’t even listen to me with that accent”
“no one’s gonna be interested in what I have to say because of how I say it”
“everyone will swipe to the next reel as soon as they hear my accent”
“even if I did land clients, I’m afraid they’ll ghost me once they hear my accent”
So why even bother. Right?
Not quite.
A big part of your fear of judgment might be rooted in the century old negative accent bias towards non-native English speakers. And you’re not alone. Every non-native English speaker who has a global audience, who works in an international environment or who spends time abroad tends to experience it at one point or another.
Negative accent bias unfortunately seems to persist, and no matter how many times you try to convince yourself that you’re knowledgeable enough, some people will still think otherwise simply upon hearing your foreign accent.
While reducing your foreign accent is like fighting the symptom instead of the root cause and sure won’t solve negative accent bias at its core, it does help your business grow if it means you’ll be ready to post that video of you talking to the camera and without everyone constantly asking you to repeat what you just said.
Imagine you…
won’t have to worry about people not being able to understand you
press record to create content without overthinking how you speak
have strangers actually wanting to hear you talk about your offer
collaborate with fellow entrepreneurs all across the world
get others to pay attention to you and be curious to know more about your business
inspire other non-native English speakers to put themselves out there too
build the global business you know you’re capable of running
All because you trained a couple of your muscles to habitually move a bit differently in a language that used to make you feel self-conscious. Once you show up confidently on camera, more leads can become engaged when they see and hear you talking freely and know what to expect if they wanted to work with you.
No more misunderstandings because of your pronunciation, no more being afraid to share your thoughts in a foreign language, no more hiding in the corner, no more missed opportunities to share your story.
I’m not saying you need to reduce your foreign accent to be successful - however, if it helps to increase your self confidence knowing you have one less thing to worry about on your entrepreneurial journey, I say go for it!
