I'm sure that you already know words like profitable, efficient and strategic.
But today I want to show you some really simple combinations that can instantly make your communication sound more persuasive and more executive.
And of course, help you feel more confident.
Let's crack on.
Hello and welcome back to Confident Business English.
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My name is Anna.
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So let's imagine a situation.
I'm sure you've had this.
You're in a meeting.
Perhaps you're presenting the results.
You may even be proposing a new idea or giving a recommendation.
You're using adjectives, profitable, important, difficult, efficient.
Something seems to land a little bit flat.
You don't get the reaction that you're always looking for.
The other people in the room don't seem to sense the importance of what you're talking about, the urgency or even the scale of the problem.
As a senior manager, you're always analyzing things, evaluating things, and you're giving people your recommendations and opinions.
But if the language that you're using doesn't match, for example, the scale of the problem or even the opportunity.
You could end up in a situation where, number one you find it hard to get people behind your projects because they don't understand how important they are.
And secondly, that you might find that things you feel should be approved and that they're a no brainer.
Don't because again, people don't understand and they can't hear from you.
What is the opportunity that is on the table and why should we do it?
The way that we're going to do that is through something really simple, and I don't want you to turn off here, but it's with adverbs.
This is the thing.
Adverbs can have a big impact on the way that you sound, rather than fancy expressions and phrases, which are great too.
These are going to be things that you can come back to time and time again.
So let's dive straight in.
We're going to be having three categories of adverbs today that come up all the time in leadership communication.
The first one is intensity.
The second one is comparison.
And the third one is completion.
Let's start with the first one, intensity.
There are three here that are your absolute classics.
The first one we're going to go to that I know you know already, which is very.
You might think I'm a little bit silly for saying this, but honestly people don't even use very to quantify things.
If you just say it's a profitable account, just by adding it's a very profitable account, you're giving me more of a picture of the opportunity.
I know it seems straightforward and basic but trust me, this is one of the most common pieces of feedback I give to people when they're trying to be persuasive.
The next two I find that people use less often, and that's extremely and incredibly.
Notice how the stress is on the second syllable.
Extremely has three syllables.
Stress on the second.
Extremely.
Think about it like a little triangle.
That's quite nice for three syllable words when the stress is on the second syllable.
Extremely.
Then incredibly has four syllables, but still we keep that stress on the second.
Incredibly.
Sometimes I describe it to my clients like you're coming down the stairs, right?
Incredibly.
You go up and then you come down.
These work wonderfully with positive and negative adjectives.
This account is going to be incredibly profitable.
This idea is going to be incredibly valuable for the business.
Equally, on the other hand, we could use it with something negative.
If you have a process, you could say I really don't think we should do this because it's going to be incredibly time consuming.
If you work in project management, you might say that implementing something is incredibly challenging.
Now let's throw another one into the mix for intensity, but this one is a little bit different and I want to introduce you to highly
You probably already know this, but there's one really important point about how to use this, and that's that it's used with positive adjectives.
Highly profitable. highly competitive, highly resilient, highly strategic.
This is a highly sustainable business model.
It doesn't fit as well, although I would understand you if you said it's highly challenging.
It's just not exactly a good fit.
It's like bright pink and bright red.
It's like, OK, you can wear it if you want to.
But, you know, I just they don't really go together very well.
I encourage you then, the next time you're thinking about selling something or trying to get across your idea, see if you can squeeze in one of these adverbs for intensity.
Moving on, we go to comparison.
Let's be honest, a lot of what you're doing is comparing things.
Last year, this year, last quarter, this quarter, what the company was doing three years ago, what it's doing now.
Budgets, suppliers, projects, this is coming up all the time.
The adverbs we're going to have a look at here are significantly, substantially different, considerably and noticeably.
These ones are a little bit tricky to pronounce.
I'll give you that, but we'll run through them now.
And the structure here that I want you to think about is the adverb with more or less and then an adjective.
For example, you could say if we talk about clients or accounts, This account is significantly more profitable than it was last year.
There's quite a few moving parts there, but that's how you need to set it up.
Imagine that you're reviewing some different options and you might say option A is considerably more efficient.
If you're looking at the cost of different things, you could say that this is noticeably more expensive or noticeably less risky, if you want to go for the less risky option, which generally is the case.
Not always, but generally.
Once you know that pattern, you can roll it out across other adjectives.
Let's take another example.
Let's look at considerably.
Again, that stress is on the second syllable.
Considerably.
So imagine you go up the stairs and then you come back down.
Considerably.
This new process is considerably more efficient.
We're extremely pleased with the results.
If you're considering in IT, looking at a different type of platform, you may say that this platform is significantly again we've got that stress on the second syllable significantly go up the stairs and then come down more scalable.
Adverb, more or less, plus the adjective.
It's significantly more scalable.
It's significantly better.
Of course, we could use a short adjective as well.
It's significantly cheaper.
Note here, and I should have mentioned this before because I was talking about long adjectives, but the structure would be significantly plus the comparative if it was a shorter verb.
For example, significantly better, significantly cheaper.
The team is doing significantly worse than last year.
That would be a shame, but sometimes these kings can change. happen.
Let's have a look at the final category here and we're going to go with completion and we're going to look at two here which are in the same family.
They're kind of cousins but they're not exactly the same.
The first one we're going to have a look at is completely.
I know this is nothing new to you.
It's nothing revolutionary.
But still, as I was saying before, I don't actually notice a lot of people using this adverb and sometimes people don't always use it correctly.
We often use completely when we want to talk about something being total, leaving no exceptions.
For example, it could be, we are completely aware of the risks.
The system is completely integrated into the organization, 100% completion.
The process has been completely redesigned.
The issue has been completely resolved.
Now, if we go to the cousin, let's have a look at fully.
This is really common when we're talking about commitment engagement understanding alignment, even support.
The board fully supports this project and we are fully committed to seeing it through.
If you see something through, it means you do it regardless of whether it's difficult or not.
And that's absolutely the case in a lot of work contexts, right?
There's difficult projects, difficult situations.
And you have to see them through.
It's definitely an advanced phrasal verb, so don't worry too much about that one.
But just to give you something to think about something new.
The stakeholders have been fully informed and we fully understand the risks on the table.
I fully appreciate your concerns.
However, we're going to go ahead anyway.
This is always nice, right?
When people give you feedback, they raise their concerns and that's great.
And you fully understand them.
You fully appreciate that people may not like it, but we have to see it through anyway.
Those are your categories for today.
And just very quickly, I want to go over a few things to make sure that you avoid some of the most common technical corrections.
For example, the first one is Use highly with positive, not negative adjectives.
Saying something like highly difficult or highly problematic is absolutely understandable, but it's a much better fit if you use something like incredibly problematic or extremely difficult.
The second thing that's really important here is make sure that you're not using a comparative adverb like significantly as an intensifier.
I hear some people say something like This is significantly profitable, but it would need to fit in a comparative structure.
What are we comparing it to?
This option is significantly more profitable, or you could say significantly better, if it's a short adjective.
There has to be a comparison.
It's not an intensifier.
Does that make sense?
Finally, and just helping you sound as natural as possible, at times people might say things like we're completely committed, we're completely aligned, whereas it might sound a little bit more natural to use fully committed, fully aligned.
But honestly, we are nitpicking a little bit there.
And this is the thing.
The bottom line is, if you make some mistakes with these adverbs, it's not going to be the end of the world, because normally from the context I can understand what you're saying.
But this is a great opportunity for you to help boost your arguments, to help you express more accurately what is the opportunity or what is the risk and hopefully actually get people responding to you a little bit better.
To wrap up then, here is your practical challenge.
As always, the idea with this podcast is that you listen to it.
And yes, that's great.
But I would like you to try to choose one phrase that you've heard today, or come up with a phrase using one of the structures that you can actually use in a meeting, a presentation, even if it's in an email conversation.
Every time you have to recall that, retrieve it and put it into practice.
You're going to be on your way to using that more automatically as part of your language.
Alright, let's leave it there for today then.
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Thank you, as always, for squeezing in the time to get your training on Confident Business English and I'll see you same time, same place, next week.
Bye-bye.
