Welcome back to Confident Business English.
I'm your host, Anna.
I'm a Neural Language Coach and I work with senior professionals from all around the world.
In this episode.
I'm starting a new format where I bring in other experts and have real conversations about confidence, communication and the realities of working in English.
These are unscripted, honest discussions based on real experiences.
In this first episode, I'm joined by Jolie Pullen.
We actually sat down face to face here in Madrid and had a great conversation about confidence at work.
You'll hear how one of our clients went from feeling absolutely terrified to presenting her own book in New York, why micro challenges are so effective and what actually helps people build confidence in real situations.
I've split up our conversation into shorter episodes to make it a little easier to listen to.
So this is part one.
I hope you enjoy it.
All right, everyone, we have here today Jolie.
You would like to perhaps introduce yourself and tell us a little bit maybe about how we know each other, because we met through LinkedIn.
We met through LinkedIn.
How all great relationships are nowadays in 2020.
And now we are actually here together in person and we are going to have a chat today about confidence, our experiences, helping people with their confidence, and also our own personal experiences as well, which should be, I hope, interesting for you, listening wherever you are.
So do you want to start with maybe tell us a little bit about who you are?
Yeah, absolutely.
So my name is Jolie.
I am the co-founder of an English Academy, an online English Academy called Savvy English.
And we are now, after four and a half years in business, an amazing community of 2000 students, which is amazing.
Yes, incredible.
And a big part of what we do is work with international companies to help their teams feel more confident communicating in English in the real world.
So I think I know a bit about your audience already.
So I think a lot about what we talk about today will be really useful for them.
Absolutely.
And I mean, such an incredible success as well with your business.
So congratulations for that.
Absolutely.
You've got tons of experience.
I'm sure you've heard all of the struggles and problems that people have around this.
So maybe we will just dive straight in and start talking about it.
Some people that have had big struggles with their confidence that you've worked with and how you have helped them overcome it.
What worked well?
Exactly.
What did you do with them?
So please feel free to jump right in.
Tell us about someone you've worked with.
Yeah great, okay.
So i want to to introduce you and your audience first of all to one of my uh clients, marta.
Okay so, um marta.
In january 2025, so just over a year ago, she came to me and she said you know the classics, my English is horrible.
I need to use it this year.
But what if I don't understand questions?
I'm terrified of all those kind of spontaneous situations.
And this woman is hugely successful in her own right.
She is a founder, an activist, an author.
She's the president of a huge association of women in Valencia.
She's, she's used to presenting on the stages.
Um, but when it came to obviously speaking in English, she was terrified.
She felt small and actually something interesting there for future conversation.
I think a lot of it was due to the fact that her identity in English didn't match her identity in Spanish.
So there was a lot beneath the surface there to deal with.
But in any case she came to me because she really lacked confidence to use her English in the real world.
And 2025 was going to be a really big year.
She had lots of challenges.
Things like presenting her book in New York, which is a huge, amazing challenge.
And presenting online and in person to her international team.
So there were like hundreds of people across 22 different countries, you know, and she had to present to them.
The marketing campaigns and things like this in English.
So big challenges last year.
And obviously she had those fears and those doubts.
So we had to work on her confidence.
Now, technically, like grammar wise, she was probably a B2 level.
So she had the ability to speak.
She had the skills, but she lacked the confidence to use those skills.
So that's what really we really needed to work on on together.
So the issue wasn't language, it was.
It was her confidence to use her skills under pressure.
I think sorry to jump in there, because I we talked about this just before we started recording and I think it's really important to say that.
I think Jolie and I both agree that Well actually, you used a really nice way of thinking about it that there are kind of two groups and that often both of us see the group where the person is absolutely competent in our view.
We can see that they can communicate, but they just do not communicate.
They just do not have the confidence or they don't believe in themselves, that they also have that ability.
And just so you know, listening there, that is such a common scenario.
So if you feel like that, then this is something that we see all the time.
And you said something really interesting, Jodie.
You said it's much more difficult to work with people like that because the roots are so deep.
Yeah, exactly.
It's harder to make the transformation.
So, on the other hand, if you're dealing with someone who's the opposite, who has little competence, let's say, because their ability is lower, their level is lower, but they have all the confidence in the world, then that is often easier to teach because you're teaching them those technical skills and you're enhancing the language.
Whereas, on the other hand, If somebody has competence, has a good intermediate level but lacks confidence, what you're dealing with there is trying to unpick things that are beneath the surface.
You're dealing with potential trauma there.
Yeah.
Or I don't know, memories of scary situations that they can't let go and that's affecting their confidence.
So it's harder to transform someone who's kind of falls under that bracket.
Yeah, it's more difficult to get them to think or to help them and guide them because, of course, it's the person that makes that decision.
I think that's very clear in coaching, which is what you do as well.
You don't tell the person what to do.
You don't tell them what to think, but you guide them and you give them different ways of looking at the situation.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're right.
These things run so deep.
And it's also personality as well.
Some people have different personalities, but the Not the same as confident, but we'll get to that.
Anyway, tell us more about MARTA.
Yeah, absolutely.
So what we needed to do was shift the focus.
So not focus on what you would normally focus on with an English teacher.
Like, okay, let's correct your grammar.
Let's make sure you're using the right preposition here.
Let's enhance your vocabulary, et cetera.
We needed to shift the focus and concentrate on okay, how do we improve your confidence and how do we improve your confidence quickly so you can deal with these situations in the real world.
And in my view, I've studied confidence a lot over the past year or so.
It's kind of become a bit of an obsession of mine.
Yeah, confidence comes from basically accumulating more and more evidence and proof that you can cope with the situation.
And it's not necessarily evidence that you can cope with the situation well.
It's just that you can do the thing that feels scary and survive.
It's literally that.
And the more that you do that and the more that you repeat it, the more you accumulate evidence and feel stronger and stronger and safer and safer in those situations.
And you make unfamiliar situations more familiar, which kind of converts into confidence over time.
So that's what we needed to do.
We needed to focus on gathering evidence and proof in the real world that she could handle it, So this is what we did.
We introduced micro-challenges outside of the classroom.
We did a couple inside the classroom too, but the majority were outside of the classroom because we needed to challenge her in the real world.
So this started small, things like sending WhatsApp voice messages.
And then, once that became natural and she got used to the sound of her own voice in English, sending those voice messages in public and making sure those people around you can hear you speaking.
You're starting to lose that fear of embarrassment.
Then when you get quite confident doing that, you take it up a level.
One of my favorite things I asked her to do was, okay, right, I think we're ready for you.
Then we have voice message on the high speed train from Venezia to Madrid which, as we know, is like a really intense environment.
You've got everyone on that carriage is a professional because they're commuting to the capital.
Yeah.
And it's quiet.
So everyone can hear you.
And that's really scary.
And she did it.
So yeah.
And this idea of challenges as well is something that they talk about a lot actually, sort of in a therapeutic environment as well.
But in order to move yourself forward, you need a challenge, which is It stretches you just enough so that you feel that yes, I could do it, but it is still something that you have to push yourself to do.
Absolutely.
But not too much.
If you take too big a jump, for example, if Marta, if you had said okay Marta, tomorrow you have to Present on the page.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Then you're probably going to have regression and you're going to go backwards because it's too big a jump.
So I love this idea of the micro challenges and building up every time.
Little steps, little steps.
One of my favorite expressions in English is that baby steps.
Yes, because it's baby steps.
You can't go from total silence to keynote speaker.
It's like one tiny step at a time.
And that's so important what you say, because if you push your client or push yourself too much too soon, your nervous system will shut down.
Yes, and we'll go.
Yeah no no, I'm freaking out, I can't deal with that.
Yeah right, you have to incremental challenges, you know, and that's what works so well.
And then after that, it was things like okay, i want you to approach your english-speaking colleague, who i know you have, who is from england but lives in spain.
I want you to approach him the next time you're at an event together and ask him something really colloquial like oh hey mick, can i just, can i grab you for a sec?
Something like that.
Challenge yourself to say the thing that you wouldn't normally say in English in that environment, you know.
And she did it.
And now she speaks Tim all the time in English.
They've switched.
And then lots of other things, you know?
So she went to New York.
So it was again challenging her to use certain expressions that maybe she wouldn't do if it was just herself that she had to answer to, but because she had me as her coach, offering that element of accountability and that motivation to say look, here's the expression.
I know you understand it because we use it all the time in class.
So go out there and and use it and then report back to me.
And she was so excited by it.
She was like totally the amount of times that I've walked around New York and left a shop and said have a good one to people on the way out.
And now she's like all the time like have a good.
And then you, that's when, like the confidence starts and you start to realize, oh my god, I can do this.
Yeah, and we did that for about six months incremental, baby step challenges, gathering proof, evidence that I can do this, I can handle situations and I can have fun with it.
And then that's what started to change, because she was viewing these situations less in like a fearful way and more in like I'm kind of hungry for the next one.
Yeah, I'm excited like oh, what's the next thing exactly I can challenge my myself to do?
I often find this with with clients and also with in my personal life, as well as this idea of momentum.
It's like once you get started and I think sometimes I would say also as well if, If you are a person that hasn't had a lot of practice in a specific task that you have to do in English, of course you're not going to feel confident because you don't have the evidence yet, right?
So your brain is thinking, what have I done before that's similar?
Was I successful or not?
So if you don't have a lot of that evidence...
It's normal to not feel confident.
And there is a step, I think, that's like courage, and courage in my eyes, is different to confidence, where it's like sometimes you have to do something that you don't have much experience in or you don't feel confident with.
You just have to do it despite the fact that it's scary.
When it comes to that initial courage, when you haven't got any proof and you can't look back and say OK, what evidence have I got in my past to prove that I can do this?
My biggest piece of advice is act before your brain gets in the way.
And you can do that by setting yourself these challenges or working with a coach who sets you these challenges.
Make the commitment to yourself.
Put them in your calendar, for example, like every day at 11 o'clock you have the reminder five minutes.
Okay, leave a comment on linkedin in english and don't use chat gpt to check if your grammar is correct, because that's another example of how you can expose yourself to the pressure of potentially embarrassing yourself, or you know making a mistake, but just feeling the fear and doing it anyway, which is Another one of my favorite books, actually.
Yeah.
Okay.
Feel the fear and do it anyway, because it basically talks about that.
Like the fear might not ever go away.
It might get easier.
But the point is just feel it and do it.
It's not there to stop you.
It's just...
And that reminds me of something that I think we've spoken about before as well, which was and this I heard in a therapeutic context too which is it's not as you build your confidence and you.
You build your self-belief.
It's not necessarily that the fear is any smaller.
Like it's always going to be intimidating walking into a room of a hundred people who potentially speak a different language than you and giving a presentation.
It's more that you develop the skills that you feel that you can do it more.
Exactly.
And how do you do that?
How do you gain that confidence?
Through accumulating evidence that you can survive a situation.
Even if the situation is bad, you still survived it.
Right.
And if they're good, obviously it's better, because then you get the feedback and you start to build the confidence, because you think, oh my God, actually I can do this.
But either way, it's exactly that.
It's feeling the fear, knowing that maybe it won't ever go away, but that's fine.
I'm just, I'm perfectly capable of dealing with it anyway.
A while ago, I saw a definition of confidence that I really, really like.
So in English... have the word confidence that comes from the root verb confide.
Okay.
Which is a synonym basically of the verb to trust.
So ultimately confidence means to trust yourself.
And that comes back to what we were just talking about there that essentially confidence is having the trust in yourself that no matter the outcome because I cannot predict the future and there might be circumstances that I can't control no matter the outcome, I will be okay.
But coming back to what we were saying before, just to end Marta's particular case obviously her evolution came from exposing herself to more and more discomfort, uncomfortable situations.
That then kind of converted itself into almost like a bit of a game and she was seeking those moments of discomfort because she knew that on the other side of those that was where the growth was.
So I suppose a question for your audience is think about where in in their lives could they welcome or invite discomfort in?
Where can I invite a little bit of discomfort into my life so that I can start to grow my confidence?
And congratulations, Marta.
Sorry, I should have said that first of all.
It's true.
By the way, she did present her book.
She did present it, okay.
And yeah, and she in September presented in front of 100 people from 23 different countries in English.
And then last week or the week before she did the same again for a new marketing campaign this year so and sent me the video.
She recorded it slyly while she was doing it, but she was elated after you know, so it became something that actually brought her joy.
And I think that's another last thing when we're going on.
Lots of tangents here, but lots of really important stuff and messages for your audience that something that can feel so scary and uncomfortable can actually convert into something that you enjoy.
So by keeping yourself safe because of the fear You're actually, even though you feel like you're doing yourself a favor, you're potentially depriving yourself of not only growth, but moments that you can enjoy.
So I'm sure that there are a lot of things that you can take away from what Jolie said today.
So Jolie, remind people where they can find you.
Yeah.
So you can find me on LinkedIn.
My name is Jolie.
It's J-O-E-L-Y.
Jolie Rebecca Pullen on LinkedIn.
If you do decide to send me a follow or connection request, send me a message as well.
Yeah.
Hi, I was listening to you through the Confident Business podcast with Anna, so I know how you found me.
And then Savvy English Official on Instagram is our instagram name.
And yeah, our new courses if anyone is interested as well, one-to-one courses are always available um, but we offer 12 week, 12 week coaching every every three months, so our next courses will start again beginning of eight.
Let's leave that there for today, then.
I really hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jolie.
If you did get a lot from that episode, don't forget to like, follow and subscribe wherever you are.
And I'll be back next week for another episode of Confident Business English.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
