You Don’t Have an English Problem. You Have a Confidence Gap.

If you’ve ever taken an English course, hired a tutor, or watched YouTube videos to improve your communication at work – and you still feel stuck – I want to tell you something important: your English is not the problem.

Over the course of my over 5,000-hour coaching practice, I’ve come across professionals like senior product designers, staff software engineers, data analysts, product managers, and people managers whose first language isn’t English and would tell me, “Joyce, I need to improve my English.”

However, within the first 20 minutes of our first conversation, something else comes up.

It becomes apparent that they’re not struggling with grammar. They know the rules—and learning it in a formal academic setting means they know the rules often, very well. They’re not struggling with vocabulary either. Because they take more time to read, listen, and watch English media with the intention to learn, their vocabulary is often advanced.

What they’re really struggling with is this: the moment they open their mouth in a meeting, a voice inside them shuts them down. It says, “Wait, is this the right word? Will they understand my accent? Do I sound smart enough?”

So they hold back, filter themselves and let the moment pass.

Sound familiar?

The Myth of the English Problem

Here’s what I’ve learned from working with technical leaders, and people managers across top companies in tech and consulting in Chicago and across the world: the key to executive presence and clear communication isn’t perfect English.

This shifts the problem—and opportunity—from purely a language problem to one that tackles confidence, mindset, and identity.

This is something that no English course will ever teach you.

What Coaching Actually Reveals

A year ago, I had a client from Brazil who was assigned by his employer, a global electronics company, to oversee their U.S. manufacturing plant as a lead engineer.

Back in Brazil, his peers respected his calm authority and technical excellence. Here in the U.S., he found himself going quiet in meetings with American executives. When he mustered the courage to speak, he’d second-guess himself mid-sentence not because he was unsure of his opinion. It was more because he didn’t know how his view would land.

He approached me wanting to work on his English as he aimed for a promotion and help his family assimilate in the U.S. We worked together for three months—hardly tackling grammar. We focused more on learning American workplace jargons and idioms, and adapting his communication style to the culture. Not wanting to change his accent, we practiced vocal drills to improve his leadership presence and verbal clarity. Most of all, we worked on the inner game—reconnecting with his natural leadership strengths and taking on a mindset that renewed his self-confidence.

By the end of our work together, he already felt comfortable communicating with his leaders and peers. He had conveyed his desire to be promoted, which his manager supported.

My client appreciated my openness to customize our sessions until he got to a state where he achieved confidence, clarity, and fluency.

The Real Gap

If you’re reading this and you’re still thinking that you need to fix your English, I want to gently push back on that.

Just like my client, it helps to ask yourself: In your first language, are you articulate? Are you confident? Do you have strong ideas and the words to express them?

If your answer is yes, then the gap may be more than just your English. It goes more than just about translating your thoughts in your native language to English, but also of how you bring yourself into every conversation, meeting, and presentation. This is what I call the confidence gap, which can show up in the following ways:

1. Vocabulary anxiety – you know what you want to say but freeze searching for the “right” English word, losing your train of thought entirely.

2. Accent self-consciousness – you’re so focused on how you sound that you stop focusing on what you’re saying.

3. Cultural blind spots – you don’t always know the unwritten rules of American workplace communication, i.e. when to speak up, when to push back, and how to read the room.

4. Identity filtering – you’ve spent so long translating yourself for other people that you’ve lost touch with how naturally authoritative you actually are.

I invite you to take a pause now: What confidence gap most hinders you?

What Actually Closes the Gap

At The Leadership Voice Studio™ in Chicago, I help my clients convey their knowledge and expertise in English so they can more effectively influence their peers and stakeholders in their American workplace. Learning plans are customized for every client, which can include any combination of the following:

• Vocabulary expansion through familiarization with local idioms, industry jargons, and regional phrases and terms that are not commonly found in text books.

• Pronunciation clarity and accent confidence using vocal drills that addresses to my client’s specific gaps, as well as a coaching approach that gets deeper into the fears and limiting beliefs.

• Cultural intelligence by reflecting on lived experiences, as well as grounding our lessons on real-world scenarios through role plays and simulations that mirror actual meetings, presentations, and difficult conversations you face at work.

• Inner work involving identity that bring deep and lasting transformation not only to how my clients communicate, but also in how they show up, relate with others, and lead.

If you’ve spent years trying to “fix your English,” maybe it’s time to ask a different question: What if your English was never the biggest obstacle?

The real work might be in learning to trust the voice that you already have. This is the work I do every day with some of the brightest and most talented American-born and imigrant professionals across corporate America who want to lear with greater clarity, confidence, and influence.

If that sounds like where you are today, I’d love to have that conversation.

Start With One Conversation

Ready to Close Your Confidence Gap?

If this resonates with you, I’d like to invite you to book a $100 trial session with me – in person at The Loop, Chicago (just across Willis Tower or Sears Tower for the locals) or virtually worldwide.

In 60 minutes, we’ll get specific about what’s really holding back your communication. You’ll leave clear about your improvement areas—and whether working together is the right next step. The $100 is credited toward any coaching program.

The Leadership Readiness Gap: Preparing Chicago’s Future Leaders for the Invisible Workplace™

Chicago is winning the talent war, but the harder challenge – what happens once that talent walks through the door – barely came up.

At the recent Chicago at a Crossroads fireside chat with leaders from CBRE, Google, and JP Morgan Chase, the conversation was energizing and the case was clear: people are Chicago’s greatest asset and competitive advantage. A similar focus shaped the World Business Chicago panel on employer-driven work-based learning this June, where leaders from business, education, and nonprofit sectors explored how organizations can better prepare talent for future opportunities.

Both conversations were necessary. However, they were largely incomplete.

The focus, understandably, was on attraction and workforce readiness, which was to get the talent in the door, technically prepared. What received far less attention was what organizations must do after that: developing the talent to stay, grow, and eventually lead in workplaces that look very different from the ones many current leaders were trained for.

That gap is what this article is about.

Talent is Already Here

The numbers are compelling. Business expansions in 2025 are projected to create nearly 20,000 jobs across Chicagoland, and the region’s labor force has grown to nearly five million workers—a trend strengthened by immigration flows that contrast sharply with population declines in many other U.S. metros.

Chicago’s universities, major employers, vibrant neighborhoods, and relative affordability compared to coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco make it a magnet for ambitious talent nationwide. Thousands of Illinois employers also sponsor highly skilled professionals through programs like H-1B visas, bringing global perspectives, multilingual capabilities, and entrepreneurial energy into regional workforce.

Attracting talent, however, is only the beginning. The bigger challenge is preparing that talent to stay, grow, and eventually lead—in workplaces that look very different from the ones many current leaders were trained to navigate.

Beyond Workforce Readiness

Much of the public conversation about Chicago’s workforce focused on readiness: ensuring employees have the technical skills, credentials, and experience to secure meaningful employment. Those investments remain essential, but as AI and emerging technologies continue to reshape industries, jobs, and career pathways, technical capability alone is becoming an insufficient predictor of long-term success. The same expertise that helps an employee secure a role today may not be enough to help them lead tomorrow.

What I increasingly observe across organizations is a growing Leadership Readiness Gap: the distance between technical readiness and leadership readiness.

Many organizations invest heavily in recruiting talent, building technical expertise, and developing workforce pipelines. Leadership capability, by contrast, is often assumed to develop on its own over time.

In my experience, it rarely does.

Organizations are discovering that many of their highest-potential employees are exceptionally prepared for their current responsibilities—yet far less prepared for the leadership challenges ahead.

Across coaching conversations with executives, managers, and technical professionals, the same questions surface repeatedly:

• Can they influence stakeholders without formal authority?

• Can they handle difficult conversations and competing priorities?

• Can they build trust across functions, generations, cultures, and communication styles?

• Can they maintain confidence and effectiveness when conditions are uncertain?

• Can they establish visibility and credibility in increasingly hybrid workplaces?

• Can they communicate effectively in digital and AI-enabled environments?

• Can they leverage AI strategically while strengthening the distinctly human skills that technology cannot replace?

These are not workforce readiness questions. They are leadership readiness questions that may prove to be among the most consequential ones organizations ask as they build Chicago’s future leadership pipeline.

Wondering how your organization scores?
Take the free InvisibleWorkplace™ Assessment – 10 questions, instant insights.

The Rise of the Invisible Workplace™

The workplace many leaders were prepared for no longer exists.

A generation ago, leadership visibility was largely physical—built through proximity, hallway conversations, and in-person observation. Today, much of work happens in what I call the Invisible Workplace™: employees collaborate across time zones and digital platforms, influencing stakeholders they may never meet face-to-face.

But the Invisible Workplace™ isn’t just about technology. It’s the unspoken dynamics that shape careers—often without anyone naming them:

• the first-time manager learning how to lead former peers

• the technical expert struggling to gain influence across a cross-functional initiative

• the relocated employee, expatriate, or H-1B professional learning workplace norms that exist nowhere in the employee handbook

• the emerging leader figuring out how to manage upward and build credibility with more experienced colleagues

For Chicago employers, this matters. Immigrant and international professionals are a meaningful and growing source of labor force growth, Many arrive with exceptional technical expertise and needing to develop leadership behaviors that were never formally taught.

These dynamics do not show up in job descriptions. They are hard to develop through traditional training yet, they increasingly determine who is ready to lead.

The leaders who thrive are not always the ones with the strongest technical skills. They are the ones who can communicate clearly, build trust, and create alignment when the path forward is unclear.

The question is: how ready is your organization?

Take the free Invisible Workplace™ Assessment

Get a research-backed snapshot of your organization’s leadership readiness in under 10 minutes—10 questions, instant insights.

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Prefer to talk it through first?
Schedule a complimentary 20-minute conversation with Joyce.

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Joyce Talag, PCC, is the founder of The Leadership Voice Studio™ and creator of AMPLIFY™, a leadership communication experience that helps organizations accelerate leadership readiness. She has supported more than 1,500 professionals through over 5,000 coaching sessions across technology, healthcare, consulting, financial services, and social impact organizations.

Joyce is a member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Workforce and Technology Councils. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Executive Presence for ESL and EAL Professionals in Tech: The Invisible Work Behind Leadership Communication

Many multilingual professionals in tech are told to “improve executive presence.”

But few people talk about the hidden work happening underneath that feedback.

As an executive communication coach for immigrant professionals and multilingual leaders in tech, I’ve observed that executive presence often requires additional mental bandwidth for professionals navigating language, culture, and perception simultaneously.

Especially for:

• ESL/EAL professionals

• non-native English speakers

• immigrant technical experts

• engineers transitioning into leadership

• multicultural people leaders in corporate tech

Executive presence is not only about speaking clearly.

It is also about navigating tone, credibility, perception, cultural expectations, communication norms, and stakeholder dynamics.

The Invisible Cognitive Load of Leadership Communication

Many technical professionals are already operating at high levels cognitively, but when leaders are also translating thoughts into business English, filtering communication styles, worrying about mispronouncing words, adapting accents or tone, or monitoring reactions in meetings, the cognitive load multiplies.

This often creates hesitation in meetings, overexplaining, reduced confidence, communication fatigue, and difficulty projecting executive presence with an accent.

Over time, this affects not only communication performance, but also energy and leadership capacity.

Why Executive Presence Coaching Must Go Beyond Surface-Level Communication Skills

Traditional executive presence training often focuses only on confidence in presentations. However, leadership communication for non-native speakers requires a more integrated approach.

At The Leadership Voice Studio, my work combines leadership development, culturally-responsive executive communication, and business English coaching. This is because communication challenges are not always about fluency. Sometimes they are about invisible adaptation fatigue—which I fully understand as someone with the lived experience and who has coached over 5,000 sessions with people managers and technical experts across U.S. workplaces.

Building Executive Presence Without Losing Yourself

For multilingual leaders, executive presence should not require constant self-erasure. The strongest leadership presence does not come from sounding identical to everyone else in the room. It comes from clarity and groundedness in who you are so that you can communicate with greater alignment, influence, and authority while still sounding like yourself.

Struggling to communicate with confidence in high-stakes U.S. workplace environments?

Many multilingual and immigrant professionals in tech are not lacking expertise.

They are navigating invisible cognitive load, executive presence pressure, and communication expectations that were never explicitly taught.

If you want support navigating:

• executive presence with an accent

• leadership communication in U.S. workplaces

• stakeholder conversations

• visibility and influence

• communication anxiety in meetings

• transitioning from technical expert to recognized leader

Start with an Executive Communication Strategy Session.

Together, we’ll identify:

• where communication friction is happening

• what may actually be driving it

• and what a more aligned leadership communication strategy could look like for you.

BOOK NOW

Executive Communication for Non-Native English Speakers: How to Be Heard in U.S. Workplaces

Being heard in meetings isn’t just about English—it’s about how you structure and share your thinking.

After a few years of working in the U.S., many professionals reach a point where something begins to feel off, though not always in a way that is easy to name.

On paper, things are going well. They are delivering consistently, contributing to their teams, and are often seen as dependable and capable. And yet, there is a quieter realization that begins to surface over time. They are not always being heard in the way they expect. Their ideas do not land as clearly as they intend. They are not leading conversations as often as they could. Opportunities seem to move toward others, sometimes those with less experience but more presence.

In my work as a leadership and communication coach—particularly with immigrant professionals and non-native English speakers in tech—this is one of the most common patterns I see. And it is often misunderstood.

It’s Not Just About English

Many assume the issue is language. They believe they need to improve their English, sound more fluent, or eliminate their accent. But in most cases, that is not the real challenge. These professionals are already capable communicators. What is happening is something deeper, shaped by how communication and visibility are influenced by cultural experience.

In many cultures, professionals are taught to be respectful of hierarchy, to speak when invited, to avoid making mistakes in public, and to let their work speak for itself. These are strong foundations. They cultivate discipline, thoughtfulness, and credibility. They create professionals who are careful, prepared, and grounded.

But in many U.S. workplaces—especially in fast-paced environments like tech—leadership is communicated differently. You are expected to share your thinking early, to speak even when your ideas are still forming, and to lead with your main point rather than build toward it. Your contribution is not only evaluated by its quality, but by its visibility in real time.

Without these behaviors, it is easy to be perceived as less confident or less ready, even when that perception is inaccurate.

Executive Presence with an Accent

For many immigrant professionals, the challenge is not simply knowing what to say. It is feeling comfortable saying it. Increasing visibility can feel like drawing too much attention, speaking out of turn, or being perceived as too direct. This creates a quiet but persistent tension. You know you have something valuable to contribute, yet you hesitate in the moment when it matters most.

The shift, then, is not about changing who you are. It is about evolving how you communicate your thinking so that it can be received in a different context. This often begins with a few simple but meaningful adjustments: learning to lead with your main point rather than building toward it, reducing the tendency to over-explain in favor of clarity, and choosing to contribute intentionally rather than waiting to be invited.

Over time, these shifts change not only how others perceive you, but how you experience yourself in those interactions. Your presence becomes more grounded. Your communication becomes more effective. Your leadership becomes more visible.

And importantly, none of this requires you to sound like someone else.

Executive presence is not about eliminating your accent. It is not about adopting a different personality. It is about clarity, structure, and confidence in your message. When those are in place, your voice carries.

Building Visibility Without Losing Yourself

The most effective professionals I have worked with have not abandoned their cultural grounding. Instead, they have learned how to translate it. They remain thoughtful, but become more direct. They remain respectful, but become more proactive. They remain grounded, but become more visible.

This is the work of moving from being a strong individual contributor to becoming a visible leader.

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If you are a non-native English speaker or an immigrant professional working in a U.S. company and you are ready to strengthen how you communicate and show up, you are not alone—and this is not something you have to navigate on your own.

👉 You can book an Executive Communication Strategy Session here:
https://joyfultransformations.org/executive-session