"My English Isn't Good Enough"

"My English is not my strength."

I have heard versions of this from PhD students across different institutions.

It always made me curious.

These are people working with highly complex ideas. They can analyse difficult problems, conduct research and discuss their work in depth.

Yet when it comes to presenting, some believe their English is what holds them back.

So I started wondering:

Is English really the problem?

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Here, the room didn't need better English. It needed something else entirely.

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I Started Watching the Audience

The opportunity to work closely with physics scientists, accompanying them to international conferences, gave me an unusual chance to think about this question.

I sat in on dozens of talks, from early-career researchers to scientists considered legendary in their fields.

And I started noticing something.

The presentations that were easiest to follow did not necessarily use the most sophisticated English. Some speakers used surprisingly simple language to explain extremely complex science.

What they did well was something else.

They made their thinking easy to follow.

So I started watching more carefully. When did the audience pay attention? When did they get lost? What made them curious?

Over time, a few simple patterns kept appearing. I eventually realised they belonged to three areas:

Structure. Language. Human behaviour.

Together, I call them Presentation Logic.

Here's the simple version, before the detail: you don't need better English. You can become a better speaker by focusing on three things — how clearly your ideas are structured, which words you choose to guide the listener, and whether you give people a reason to keep paying attention.

Someone could reasonably ask whether this is just general presentation skill — the kind any public-speaking coach teaches, unrelated to language background at all. It's related, but not the same thing. Native speakers make these same mistakes constantly. What's different for non-native speakers is what they blame when it goes wrong — English, instead of the actual gap.

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1. Structure Logic

How do I make my thinking easy to follow?

One screen, one clear logic. A slide can have a graph, an image, and some text — but they should all help the audience understand the same thing. Don't let one screen do two different jobs. If it does, the audience has to decide what to focus on instead of following you.

The kindergarten-step principle. Not because the audience needs basic information — because when the information is already complex, the path through it needs to be very clear. If understanding D requires A, B, and C, don't jump from A to D because B and C feel obvious to you. You already know the whole story. They don't. Build the steps:

A → B → C → D

Recap the journey before the result. Sometimes the audience has followed a long process — several experiments, stages, decisions, or pieces of data. By the time the result appears, they've forgotten part of the journey. So before showing the result, bring the path back, briefly:

We started here → we found this → that led us here.

Then: "So what did we find?" → RESULT. This isn't teaching the process again. It's helping the audience see the whole path just before the result arrives.

Richard Mayer's research on multimedia learning, including his segmenting principle, backs this up in simple terms: breaking complex information into clear pieces, and showing how they connect, helps people understand it better.

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2. Language Logic

How do I captivate an audience's attention?

Listening to international scientific talks also changed how I think about language. Complex thinking does not always require complicated English. Precision matters — but sophisticated vocabulary and sophisticated thinking are not the same thing.

Choose the verb deliberately. I started paying close attention to one small part of language: the verb. I discovered something with a much bigger effect than I expected — the right verb can genuinely captivate an audience, if it's used the right way.

Before an important point, I ask myself what I want the audience to do in their mind — picture something (imagine), or hold two things side by side (compare). Once I know the answer, captivating speakers do something specific with that word: they put the verb at the very beginning of the sentence, like a command, guiding the room before the information even arrives.

"Imagine standing on a beam of light."

"Compare this result to the one before it."

In the opposite case, if you bury the verb — "Walking into this room, I want you to imagine..." — the room receives all the information first, with nowhere to put it yet. The instruction arrives too late to do its job.

If the verb has to sit mid-sentence, there's still a way to save it: slow down and emphasize the verb itself, right where it falls. The room won't get the guidance first, but a clear enough stress on the word still gives it a moment to register before you move on.

Deliver the verb like a command. Choosing the right verb isn't enough on its own. How you deliver it matters just as much.

Put it on its own. Say the verb, pause, then continue — not folded into the rest of the sentence at normal speed.

"I want you to... imagine... standing on a beam of light."

Emphasize it. Slow down on that one word, stress it clearly, then let a beat of silence pass before you continue. The room needs that space to actually do what the verb is asking — not just hear it.

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3. Human Behaviour Logic

How do I break through and earn the audience's heart?

The audience is going to judge you. That's their job, and there's no avoiding it.

But judgment doesn't have to end where it starts. There's a way to turn it — from evaluation into likability, and sometimes, into the beginning of real collaboration.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned working across industries is this: people value honesty, everywhere. Not politeness. Not polish. Honesty.

Ask the question before you answer it. One thing I started doing differently was thinking about the question the audience might naturally ask next — then asking it myself, out loud.

Instead of "Now I will show you the next result," I might ask: "So what happened?" Or: "If this explanation is correct, what should happen next?"

Something changes when I do this. The audience isn't simply waiting for another slide. They're thinking. They've made a prediction. They want to know whether they're right.

Let humor happen. A question that creates recognition — "I've done that" — often creates a small laugh along with it. That laugh does something a correct answer never could. It brings the whole room's attention back to the same place, together, for a moment.

Be honest about what you don't know yet. Sometimes I don't have the answer. I say that plainly: "This is the part we haven't resolved yet." The effect is larger than it should be for something so simple — the audience stops watching me present a finished answer, and starts thinking about the problem with me instead.

This matches research on active learning by Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer: people learn better when they think, predict, or explain something themselves — not just receive it.

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Back to "My English Isn't Good Enough"

This brings me back to those conversations with PhD students.

If someone's English genuinely limits their ability to communicate accurately, developing their language will help. But language proficiency and presentation effectiveness are not the same thing.

This isn't only a lesson for non-native English speakers. It applies whenever something complex in your head needs to become clear in someone else's.

This became one of the reasons I built Global Citizens Skills™ — not to teach people better English, but to help them see clearly what's actually being read in the room, whether that's a presentation, an interview, or a decision made without asking permission.

The clearer someone's thinking becomes, the more I started noticing something else. How a person presents an idea is often the same way they present a decision to someone with more authority than them. That's a different kind of clarity — and it's the next thing I began paying attention to.

If you've ever blamed your English for a presentation, an interview answer, or a meeting that didn't land — it's worth asking the other question first. I'd be glad to talk it through.