Let's look at three things that came up in my recent client sessions small little shifts that will help you sound more confident, more precise and more credible with your English at work, because at a senior level, how you say things really matters.
Let's crack on.
Welcome back to Confident Business English.
My name is Anna.
I'm a Neural Language Coach and I help senior managers from all over the world feel more confident with their English.
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So the first thing I've got on my list today is business phrasal verbs.
I was in a session with a client yesterday and all of a sudden they were like oh, is it a problem came up.
A problem came out?
Oh, what about come up with?
How do I use that?
I thought this is an excellent topic to bring onto the podcast, because I'm sure that you may have had this doubt as well.
And it's really important for you to be able to distinguish these phrasal verbs, because they're ones that come up on a daily basis if you have to use English all the time.
Absolutely worth your time to know, get right and understand well.
Let me take you through the ones that I have on my list.
By no means is this all the phrasal verbs with come that you're ever going to hear in the workplace, but I'll take you through it and explain the meaning and some key points about each one.
The key point to get across first of all is yes, all of these phrasal verbs have the same verb come up, come out, come up with but they all mean totally different things.
Yay.
But don't worry, I'm going to help you make it make sense and help you feel more confident with this.
The first one I've got here on my list is to come up with a beautiful phrasal verb, a business classic.
You may have already heard this actually, because it's very, very common.
But the key point is what on earth does it mean and how can you use it?
You probably heard your colleague say something like oh, we really need to like, come up with a plan.
But I don't know, I'm just finding it really hard to come up with an idea about what we can do to try to sort this out.
From the context you might be able to understand.
But here we're in the world of creation generation,
If you have to come up with an idea, you have to think of an idea.
That's the generation.
You could even think about it like a whiteboard, brainstorming.
Okay, we've got a problem.
We need to come up with a plan.
Let's think about how we can do that.
Important technical point here.
Somebody comes up with something.
Really natural co-locations in a business context, just to get you started to come up with an idea, to come up with a plan.
Start there first.
Also, when you have a three-part phrasal verb, come up with those three parts are always together.
We can't split them up.
It's like a thruple.
Have you ever heard of that?
It's a relationship that has three people.
And the reason I'm saying that is because I was watching a TV program called Couples Therapy.
Wonderful series.
And on that series, they had a thruple.
So that's what just made me think of it in that moment.
But this is a phrasal verb, thruple, if you will, always together.
It would sound a little bit clunky if you said something like, I came up an idea with.
I'd probably get there, but it sounds clunky, I'm going to be honest.
Other ways that people use it, which are understandable but not technically correct.
Things like it came up to me an idea very common for Spanish speakers, Portuguese speakers, because it follows the structure that you would find in those languages.
Would I understand you?
Yes.
Does it sound a little bit clunky?
Yes.
This is an important note actually with this specific phrasal verb.
It doesn't track very well into Spanish actually.
So if you are a Spanish speaker, you kind of just have to learn it for what it is.
The reference back into Spanish doesn't help you so much here.
Next, something comes up.
I'm really sorry.
I couldn't come to the meeting yesterday.
Something came up and I had to deal with it.
A question actually came up yesterday in the meeting and I was wondering if we could talk about it.
Something comes up.
What does it mean?
It's when something happens when you weren't expecting it.
It wasn't planned.
Imagine when you're playing a video game.
And I say this because, after months of negotiation, I finally agreed to play a video game with my partner.
Maybe you've heard of it.
It's called It Takes Two.
It was this pioneering video game where you had two players.
It was actually.
I have to admit it.
I hate to say that he was right, but it was actually really fun.
But these things would just come up in the middle of the game, right, when I didn't expect it.
That's what makes it interesting and fun.
You can think about it like that, the video game.
Something can come up, it can be a problem, it can be an issue, but it doesn't have to be negative.
It could just be neutral, right?
A question came up in the meeting yesterday.
That's neutral.
It's not positive.
It's not negative.
It just, it is what it is.
It could even be positive.
If you're talking about in the context of opportunities, maybe there's an internal role that you're like.
Oh wait, a second.
That sounds like just my cup of tea.
An opportunity came up and I took it.
It happens unexpectedly.
It wasn't planned.
But here it is.
The next phrasal verb on the list is come out.
At its core.
I want you to think about this phrasal verb as something becoming visible or available to people.
If you work in the context of any job that has to do with monitoring regulation legislation, legal updates, for example, policy policies, whatever it is, this is a very useful one for you.
Why?
Because when something is released on an official channel, it comes out.
For example, new legislation came out last month, which is going to affect the business.
Or perhaps there's a new piece of legislation or regulation coming out this year that you need to be prepared for.
Also, if you work in things like media, especially books, for example publishing or film, books come out, films come out in the cinema.
The other context where you may want to use that phrasal verb is if you work in the world of tenders and bids.
For example, the government releases a tender.
The tender comes out.
Notice here the technical point, which is really important.
Something comes out.
It's not the government comes out the tender.
The tender comes out.
If we want to pop the government in there, we need to use a slightly different verb.
The government releases the tender.
The government puts out the tender or the tender expires. comes out.
I remember actually, when I was working in the UK, that there was one bid or tender that came out, and it came out really last minute.
It was like two months before the service was supposed to start.
Something had happened before.
They'd had to go out to tender again.
And everybody was working manically to try and pull together a bid.
That was quite a stressful time.
But again, the tender came out.
It was released.
The final phrasal verb that I want to add to this list of phrasal verbs with come that have no relevance or connection to each other is come up to.
Remember our little phrasal verb throuples?
Three things always together.
This is in the world of physical movement.
Have you ever been into the office and you know you get your coffee?
Just going to schedule in five minutes, just going to sit down and chill, and then all of a sudden somebody comes up to your desk, they come up to you.
And they ask you a question or they ask you for your help with something.
And of course you don't mind, because that's the sort of person you are and you want to help people and whatever.
But you know, those five minutes that you scheduled in are now gone.
People will likely come up to you all the time when you're in the office.
And I think that's sometimes why people like to have a bit of a hybrid, right?
Especially as a senior manager.
You can go into the office collaborate, work with people, but then you get a bit of time at home without distractions, without people coming up to you.
So come up to is when somebody approaches you, and you're probably going to use it most of all in that type of situation.
John came up to me and asked me a question.
Sarah came up to me and she wanted to know if I'm going to the meeting tomorrow, for example.
So that was a little whirlwind through some very common business phrasal verbs, just to wrap up very quickly and to summarize, to come up with ideas generation.
If something comes up, it happens, it was unexpected, positive, neutral, negative.
If something comes out, it means that it was released.
New legislation came out last week.
If somebody comes up to you, it means they physically approach you and maybe they come up to you to ask a question, or maybe they come up to you to ask for advice, for example.
Moving on.
Second point.
This is just a beautiful piece of vocabulary that I really want you to know.
And here we're in the context of delegating actions.
And the phrase I want to train you on is to take the lead on something.
If you have a team member, let's imagine the onboarding process.
This is inspiration from my client who was wanting to delegate this out to somebody in their team because they're doing a lot of stuff at the moment.
It's very time consuming.
They need to delegate out.
You could just ask that person, could you do the onboarding process?
Could you take over the onboarding process?
Okay, great.
That's talking, putting the focus on replacing.
You're going to do it now, not me.
Absolutely fine.
But what about Anna?
Would you be able to take the lead on that?
I just love this one.
It sounds more strategic.
The nuance is more on ownership and leadership.
You've got the word lead in there.
So somehow that question feels more motivational.
Just as a note here as well, we're going to be using this for things that are bigger in scope or ongoing responsibility.
For example, I'm not going to say, could you take the lead on calling the client back?
No, that's just something small.
It's every day.
It's like, could you call the client back?
That's all we need.
Keep it simple.
But if it's a project, a bigger piece of work, something like the onboarding process, where it's a whole process, you want them to manage absolutely appropriate.
Would you like to take the lead on this?
That's even more of an invitation.
Could you take the lead on this?
Or even, I really need you to take the lead on this.
You're the best person in the team.
However you want to sell it, of course.
Last but not least, final point.
This is around pronunciation.
I had a session last week with a client.
We've been looking at a lot of pronunciation, really breaking down some of the sounds that they're finding difficult.
And they said this thing that I thought a lot of you could relate to.
They were like.
You know, there's just this one word that I actually have to use quite a lot, but I'm so scared to say it because I just don't think that I'm saying it right.
It's really difficult.
I never get the flow right, et cetera, et cetera.
That word was rationale.
R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-E.
Quite a common word that could come up in a business context, especially if you are talking about your decisions and the rationale behind your decisions.
So maybe you've been a bit intimidated by this word.
We've all got words like this, by the way.
So you are certainly not alone in this case.
We're going to take some inspiration from Pronunciation with Emma.
She's been on the podcast before.
She's an absolute expert in pronunciation.
Highly recommend her videos and content.
What she always says is if you have a problem with a word, you need to break it down into the different syllables.
So I'm going to break it down here.
We've got ra.
That's the first syllable. not ray, ra, short a sound.
Then we move into the second syllable, ration, ration.
This is an unstressed, weak schwa sound, so it's not ration, Ration, ration.
We've got that SH sound there as well.
Ration, ration.
Let's just start with that.
Then we're going to add the last syllable, which is now.
Rationale, rationale.
Where is the stress?
This is important if you want to say the word naturally.
The stress is on the final syllable, which means that we need to make those other syllables a little bit weaker.
And I want you to think about the first syllables, I think this helps, as if they're one word.
So let's think about it as Russia. rationale, rationale, rationale.
What is the rationale behind the decision?
Well, my rationale behind the decision is that we should just do it because I think it's a really good idea.
Wouldn't that be lovely?
Even though exceptionally unlikely.
So to wrap up, those are the three things that came up in recent client meetings.
I hope that helps.
A bit of a dense, chunky section there on phrasal verbs, but I hope that that gives you a bit more confidence with what those phrasal verbs are, the meanings and how you can use them.
It's useful for speaking, but also for understanding as well, which is really, really important.
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Thank you as always for squeezing in Confident Business English around your busy week.
I hope it helped you feel even just a little bit more confident.
Look forward to seeing you again next week.
Take care.
See you soon.
Bye-bye.
