Speak confident English in meetings, interviews and presentations

Almost every professional I coach arrives with the same complaint, phrased slightly differently each time: in my own language I am articulate, and in English I am not. They are not beginners. They read technical documents without difficulty, they write competent emails, they have passed exams. What defeats them is the live, unforgiving moment: the meeting where the point has to be made now, the interview question that arrives from an unexpected angle, the presentation where a stumble costs authority.

This gap between competence and expression is expensive. It is also widely misdiagnosed. People assume they need more vocabulary or better grammar, and so they buy a textbook, or an app, and grind away at material that was never the problem. The actual problem is usually some combination of three things: hesitation under pressure, uncertainty about register — how formal to be, and with whom — and pronunciation that is intelligible but effortful for the listener, which makes colleagues subtly less patient than they should be.

What we actually do in lessons

We rehearse the situations you actually face. If you have a weekly management meeting, we run it. If you are interviewing next month, we do the interview, repeatedly, until your answers arrive without you having to assemble them mid-sentence. If you present to clients, you present to me, and I tell you exactly where a listener's attention slips and why.

Your written English gets the same attention. We work through the emails, reports and messages that have to be right the first time, and I tell you what a native reader notices and what they let pass. Spoken or written, the aim is that your English costs the other person no effort.

Why me

I hold a Cambridge CELTA, a BA and an MSc in psychology, and I was educated at Winchester College, often regarded as the finest school in the country. I have taught English one-to-one for over five years, largely to adults with demanding jobs.

Before this I spent the better part of a year as a writing specialist for DataAnnotation, training frontier AI models in written English, work that turned on catching the error a machine cannot see in itself, which is seldom the obvious one. I have also consulted on writing where the outcome carried weight: a feature published in The Times magazine, and a successful Global Talent visa application for a US politician and author, overseen from first draft to submission. High-stakes English produced under time pressure is the material I handle daily. It is also the material you would be bringing to me.

That work left me with a precise sense of where these models fall short. If you draft your emails and reports with AI, as most professionals now do, it will hand you English that reads smoothly and lands wrongly: the register a shade off, the idiom borrowed from the wrong side of the Atlantic, the courtesy that arrives as curtness. I can show you how to catch it, and how to use the tool without sounding like it.

The psychology earns its keep. A great deal of professional English coaching is really about diagnosis — hearing precisely which small thing is costing you credibility, which is rarely the thing the student thinks it is — and about confidence, which can be trained like any other skill. My students tend to say the same thing at the end: that they have stopped dreading the meeting.