Do you ever feel nervous about having difficult conversations in English?
I imagine this might be something that's crossed your mind and I want to share with you one small word that you can use to help you feel more confident that you're delivering those messages diplomatically.
Let's take a look and crack on.
Welcome back to Confident Business English.
My name is Anna.
I'm a neuro language coach, and this is the podcast.
If you are a senior manager, you already have to communicate in English at work and you want to build your confidence.
So you're a senior manager.
This requires you to do different things.
And one of those.
Unfortunately for you, you get to have the difficult conversations, whether that's people within your team, whether that's managing a contractor or somebody external.
This is just part and parcel of your job, which means that communicating diplomatically in your own language, of course, but in English and building that skill is something that is absolutely worth it for you and the reason why I want to focus on it in this episode.
In true neuro language style, we're going to chunk this up and we are just going to look at one single word today.
I'm not going to overwhelm you with lots of things, because I really want you to take this one away and see if you can try and use it after you've listened to the episode.
I chose this word because it's something I don't hear a lot of people using and I think would be great for you to add into your vocabulary.
The word is somewhat and this is Somewhat.
All together it's one word, so I want you to forget the individual part.
Some and what
Just forget that.
Somewhat.
It's an adverb.
What this beautiful adverb does is it essentially means a little, to some extent.
More than slightly, but less than quite.
So it's this beautiful middle ground that you can throw in there when you want to communicate any type of concern or risk or uncertainty.
Let's imagine then that you're giving some feedback to your team.
They gave a presentation yesterday and you want to tell them, look, the presentation was unclear.
Nobody understood what you were saying.
And we could say that, but if we added a little, somewhat in there, you're giving them that direct feedback.
We want to be authentic. but you're softening it slightly.
And you could say, look, I have to be honest.
The presentation yesterday was somewhat unclear.
However, and then you could move into a positive point.
It just takes the edge off that negative feedback.
And it's not really unclear.
It's not even quite unclear.
It's somewhat unclear.
Somewhere in the middle.
Let's have a look at another example.
Imagine that you're working on a project and you want to communicate that a deadline is completely unrealistic in your opinion.
And you could say that you could just say, look, this deadline is absolutely unrealistic.
Okay.
There's a time and a place for that.
But what about if I said, you know, the deadline, I have to be honest, seems somewhat ambitious.
The deadline seems somewhat ambitious.
Another situation could be imagine that you have to feedback about what the client has said.
Maybe you're a consultant.
You don't exactly want to tell them, look, the client didn't like it.
I mean, that's fine.
You're saying it as it is.
But you're like well, maybe a better way to say it could be the client was somewhat hesitant or they were somewhat unhappy with what we had done.
It's not that the client didn't like it.
The client hated it, which is still clear and understandable.
But if this is a sensitive conversation, maybe the people in the room.
This is a little bit of a contentious issue.
I have to be honest, the client was somewhat hesitant or unhappy with the situation.
Perhaps you could be like one of my clients actually, who this week is going to a leadership away day, a team building session, and they have to give their opinions about the current structure in the company.
You could say something really direct and you could say look, I feel like the current structure is completely inefficient.
Understandable, direct, clear.
If we want to add that diplomatic touch, it could be well.
I would say that in my opinion, from my perspective of course.
The structure as it is now is somewhat inefficient.
As you can hear again, somewhat takes the edge off, just softens it a little bit, creates some of that space for discussion.
It's not just, I think this is terrible.
No more discussion can be had.
You're giving that constructive feedback in a really neutral way.
How can you use it then?
I'd like to touch on that before we do some examples.
We use somewhat with an adjective.
So for example, you could say the plan is somewhat risky.
It's not really risky, but it's somewhat risky.
We could also use it to describe people's reactions.
If there was a presentation, you could say, well, the team was somewhat confused.
They weren't quite confused.
They weren't a little bit confused.
They were somewhat confused.
Somewhere in the middle.
You could actually also use it as a comparative.
You could say the costs are somewhat higher than last year, which means they're a little bit higher not a lot higher, but they're somewhat higher.
That could actually help you to communicate when you do have a cost increase and you don't want to say much higher and you don't want to say quite higher.
You could say somewhat higher, because you don't want to trigger that.
Oh my goodness, we're spending a lot more money than we were before.
You could also use it with an adverb.
Let's say they're giving a status update on a project.
You could say the project is moving somewhat slowly, but there's nothing that we need to be overly concerned about.
Again, we're getting across somewhat, which is in the middle, a little bit, but not really slowly.
It's just that.
Nice middle ground.
All right, let's have a look at some sentences.
And this is where you get to practice, and this is a really important part of this process is to close the gap between you learning something and you practicing something.
The smaller we can make that gap, the better, because that's going to help you feel more confident, to say it.
Here's how it's going to work.
I'm going to give you a sentence and I want you to rephrase it with somewhat.
For example, if we focus on feedback and evaluation, it could be look, John.
The report is really unclear.
Which you could rephrase to, look, John, I have to say the report is somewhat unclear.
You could change it around a little bit.
You can add a couple of things on there.
But what I want you to include is the somewhat.
Here we go.
First one.
John, I'm sorry, but the presentation was really rushed yesterday.
Great.
Now, here's an example of something that pops into my head.
I might say something like listen, John.
I have to say that yesterday the presentation did feel somewhat rushed.
Would you agree?
I'm using a couple of things there.
I'm, of course, using our somewhat, which is making that a little bit more neutral.
But instead of saying it was somewhat rushed, which is like, there's no question, it's a fact.
I said it did feel somewhat rushed.
I'm using the auxiliary in my sentence, which is a bit of an unusual quirk that we do in English.
But the difference there is I'm saying it's not a fact that It's just my perception.
Maybe my perception is wrong.
And these are the types of nuances at a senior level that can really help you communicate in that way that you're looking for.
Let me repeat that one for you.
Maybe you've got a meeting coming up this week that that could be really handy for.
Listen, John, I have to say, I did feel the presentation was somewhat rushed yesterday.
Would you agree?
All right, let's do a couple of ones for feedback.
Here you are, rephrase this sentence with somewhat.
I'm sorry, Anna, but the instructions were confusing.
That could rephrase to I'm sorry Anna, but I felt the instructions were somewhat confusing or using the technique before.
I have to say, Anna, I did feel the instructions were somewhat confusing.
Here's another one talking about risk and concern.
So let's talk about timelines here.
Rephrase this one with somewhat.
I'm sorry, but in my view, the timeline is absolutely unrealistic.
Which could rephrase to.
I have to say that, in my view, I do feel the timeline is somewhat unrealistic.
Here's another one.
Imagining that you work in the finance team and you could say to somebody look, I'm sorry, but the budget is too high.
Rephrase that with somewhat.
I'm really sorry, but I have to be honest.
I do feel the budget is somewhat high.
Next one imagine you've been invited to a meeting to talk about one of the systems that you use on a daily basis and unfortunately, you hate this system.
And the direct way of saying it would be, I'm sorry, but this system is completely outdated.
How would you rephrase that sentence to be more diplomatic with somewhat?
A couple of options.
You could say I feel the system is somewhat outdated, or that little auxiliary in the sentence.
I'm sorry, but I have to say I do feel the system is somewhat outdated.
All right, that brings us to a close for today, and I hope that you've got one small word that's really practical for you to take away and to try to implement.
I would love to challenge you to try to use that word in one of your conversations this week.
Put it on a post-it note, write it down somewhere, write a sentence that you can actually imagine yourself saying, and go for it.
As I said at the beginning, go for it, try it.
If you're a little bit nervous about using it, just copy and paste one of the sentences that I've used in the podcast today.
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Thank you so much as always for squeezing in this time with me, and I will see you same time, same place next week.
Bye-bye.
