Showing empathy in English doesn't exclude showing your strength. When people see you as "cold" and "blunt", and you know you're not.

Rosa is a strong woman who has learned independence better than anything else in life. She leads a big team. She has a good career. She wants a promotion in a global company. So, she comes to me to improve her English.?

The feedback she gets from her higher-ups is that she's "too strong" and could show a little more empathy. Rosa doesn't understand the problem. She knows that she's very empathetic, especially with her loved ones. Slowly, she realizes that she can show empathy ONLY in her first language and only if she has developed a very intimate connection with someone over the years. She doesn't show empathy at work; she reserves it for the people she loves. She separates "love" and "work", "want" and "should".

She thinks she needs to improve her flow and melody because English has more melody. If she adds more melody, people will hear her good intentions.?

She is trying… but people give her the same feedback - “you’re too strong”, “too tough”, “too ambitious”, “you want the promotion too much”.

She is confused.?

She feels like people are asking her to give up her power and be less… be smaller.

It’s easy to take such feedback as a request to show up as someone weaker.

She wants to learn to show her empathy, but she doesn’t want to give up the strong leader in her. The society we live in doesn’t know both. It knows either a cold-hearted aggressive bitch, or a soft, feminine stay-at-home wife. Funny enough, both archetypes are the archetypes of unhappy, unfulfilled women. A housewife wants a career; a big boss wants a strong man’s shoulder to rely on.?

Rosa starts questioning the feedback she is receiving. As she practices, she learns that there is a way to be empathetic AND have a strong, driving force. There is a way to be a leader without having to give up her womanhood and her natural sensitivity. She still doesn’t know how to express this side of her in a foreign language when all she ever did at work was PERFORM. That was the only requirement.?

We start with softening her words. She learns to connect the words with her breath, rather than with abrupt pauses. We take care of the vowels.?

We learn to self-correct quickly and without guilt. The self-correction routine works magic in only 2 days if done correctly.?

We learn the language of feeling and emotion in English so that she has the words for her experiences. She realizes she has never learned that vocabulary.?

She learns to listen before she defends herself. We often act weird in a foreign language. We prefer to keep quiet because we don’t want to be “too much”. We take up space, we take too long time to express our thoughts, and we make mistakes… Because we have little to no tolerance for our learning selves, we are terrified by the idea that we’re making other people wait while we’re sifting through all the English words we know, desperately looking for the right ones….

Slowly but surely, she learns the power of a pause.

It’s okay to say nothing.?

It’s okay to not know what you’re going? to say next …. for 3 or even 5 seconds.?

She doesn’t always have to fill up space with more words and then blame herself for the mistakes she shouldn’t have made.

To show empathy in English, you need to get better at feeling EVERYTHING. You need to have words for the feelings and emotions you experience and see others experience. You need to create room for other people’s feelings and perspectives in a conversation, instead of hurrying to fill every pause with more words. You need to learn to appreciate the pause, which often works as an invitation for others to speak and share. You need to learn how feelings and emotions sound in English. You will be surprised than even though emotions and human needs are universal across cultures, they are expressed differently in every language. Intonations, metaphors, imagery, pitch, volume, context - everything might be different from what you know.?

This is what must be practiced. 1) Knowing the truth of where you are emotionally in every moment of time. 2) Communicating what you know in the way that native speakers of English understand. Not your mom, Not your husband. Not your best friend. Not your therapist, who speaks the same language as you. But the people who need to hear what you have to say. The people who are ready to receive all that you have to give.

The essence of my work is to help people build better relationships in English, including a very important relationship with their second language identity.