By Olga Smith

We have been teaching accent reduction and public speaking on our courses and individually for more than 25 years and have noticed that there was one thing in common among all of our students - they are all high achievers: PhDs, diplomats, barristers, CEOs, MDs of large corporations and even celebrities. Here are some more of our students’ frustrations associated with their accents:
”I am a PhD, but people speak to me in pidgin English because of my accent”.
”I want to get rid of my Cockney accent because I work as a lawyer and my accent doesn’t sound appropriate in court”.
”I do not have a social life because people cannot understand my Turkish accent”.

One of our recent students confessed that despite the fact that she was the most knowledgeable in her finance team, her salary was very low because of her speech. She paid for her accent reduction lessons but avoided working on her speech for over 2 years, and now she has to chair very important project meetings. She is in utter panic and told us that she regrets not having accent reduction lessons and speech training earlier.

I was always interested in how to become lucky. I heard things like this: “luck is believing in luck”, “luck is being at the right place at the right time”. I have developed my own formula that really works best: prepare in advance for your lucky chances. If you want to be able to grasp your lucky chance, get ready for it and make sure your speech doesn’t hold you back but is your asset that opens doors to wonderful opportunities.

By Olga Smith

3 months is a perfect time to achieve this goal. Here is how you do it efficiently:

Speak every day for 10–30 minutes preferably to native speakers of English, or non-native speakers with good English. This will help you to overcome the barrier to speak. Don’t think about the grammar when speaking, think of the free flow of your speech.
Listen to an audiobook several times. When you listen to the book for the first time, you just get the main ideas; the second time write down words you don’t know; the third time and repeat a small section at a time after the audiobook. This way you will also learn new vocabulary. I like the books in the series Get Rid of your Accent as they help to learn new words and expressions quickly and with the correct pronunciation.
Write a few sentences about yourself, choose topics that you talk most about: your name, education, work, study, hobbies and interest. Write down a list of your professional vocabulary and practice it out loud. Then record yourself, listen to your recording and make a note of your mistakes. Correct them and then Record yourself again. Do these recording exercises for each topic.
After you have mastered the pronunciation of your most commonly used vocabulary, think about sentence stress and use of pauses in the correct places with the apps Fluent English Speech and 4Ps, Power, Pitch, Pace, Pause. The content of these apps are in the book Get Rid of your Accent Part Two, Advanced Level
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