September starts in August: prepare your communication before the important meetings begin.
September has a way of arriving all at once. One week you’re still in summer mode. The next, the calendar is filling with important meetings, presentations to senior leadership, international projects, client conversations, and decisions that have been waiting since July.
If some of those situations will happen in English, August is a good time to ask a practical question: Which conversations do you already know you need to handle well?
Prepare your communication in English before the pressure arrives
Most important professional communication situations aren’t complete surprises. You may not know exactly what will happen in the room, but you usually know where the pressure points are going to be.
Perhaps you’re presenting a new proposal to senior leadership. You’re taking on a larger international role. An important project is restarting in September. You’re meeting stakeholders from several countries. Or there’s a conversation you’ve been postponing that you know will need to happen.
Start preparing well before the week of the meeting.
The earlier you identify the situations that matter, the more time you have to work on the communication itself, not only the content.
Start with the situations already on your calendar
Look at September before September begins.
Which meetings, presentations or conversations have greater visibility or consequences than your normal day-to-day communication?
They might include:
- A presentation to senior leadership or a board
- A project kickoff with an international team
- An important client meeting
- A presentation of results, recommendations or a new strategy
- A meeting where you need to defend a proposal
- A difficult conversation with a colleague, direct report or stakeholder
- A new leadership responsibility that requires you to communicate more frequently in English
- A conference, panel or other high-visibility event
Once you’ve identified those moments, preparation becomes much more specific.
From there, focus on the specific situation: the meeting, the message, the audience and the outcome you want.
Know what you need your audience to understand
Before rehearsing your delivery, clarify the communication objective.
What do you need people to understand by the end of the meeting or presentation? What decision needs to be made? What is the most important message you want them to remember?
When the subject is complex, especially in a second language, it’s easy to prepare too much information. That can make the message harder to deliver and harder for other people to follow.
Try reducing the communication to a few essentials:
- What is my main message?
- What does this audience already know?
- What do they actually need from me?
- Where am I likely to lose them?
- What decision, response or action am I asking for?
Clarity before the meeting gives you something solid to return to when the conversation becomes more spontaneous.
Rehearse the parts where the pressure is likely to increase
Reading through your notes silently is very different from saying the message aloud.
The moment you hear yourself speaking, you begin to notice things that aren’t obvious on the page. A sentence may be too long. An explanation may be difficult to follow. A transition may feel awkward. You may discover that the opening you’ve written doesn’t sound natural when you actually say it.
This is particularly important when you’re communicating in English under professional pressure.
Practice the opening
The first minute matters because it establishes your direction and gives you time to settle into the communication.
Know exactly how you want to begin. I recommend memorizing and rehearsing your opening so you can start with confidence and establish your direction from the first moment. Do the same with your closing.
Find the difficult parts before the meeting
Don’t spend all your rehearsal time practicing the sections you already deliver comfortably.
Look for the moments where you’re more likely to hesitate:
- Explaining a complex idea concisely
- Moving from one part of a presentation to another
- Disagreeing with someone more senior
- Defending a recommendation
- Interrupting appropriately when you need to contribute
- Responding when someone challenges your assumptions
- Bringing a discussion back to the main point
Those are the places where rehearsal can make the greatest difference.
Prepare for the conversation around the presentation
A presentation rarely ends with the final slide.
Often the more demanding communication begins afterward, when somebody asks an unexpected question, challenges a conclusion, changes the subject or asks you to explain something you hadn’t planned to discuss.
You can’t prepare every question. You can prepare for the kinds of pressure you’re likely to encounter.
Think about:
- What are people most likely to challenge?
- Which part of my recommendation may create resistance?
- What information might senior leadership ask me to justify?
- Where could I be asked for more detail?
- Which question would I least like to receive?
Practicing those moments helps you become more comfortable organizing your thoughts while you’re speaking rather than depending entirely on a prepared script.
For a deeper look at this particular challenge, see How to Answer Questions in English Under Pressure Without Going Blank.
Rehearse the message, not just the slides
If you’re presenting, knowing your slides isn’t the same as knowing how you’re going to communicate the message.
You may have spent hours improving the deck while spending very little time practicing what you’ll actually say.
Rehearse with the real presentation.
Notice where you rush. Listen for places where your voice becomes flatter or less certain. Check whether you’re emphasizing the ideas that matter most. Pay attention to whether you’re explaining the slide or communicating with the people in the room.
Record yourself as part of your preparation. Video lets you see what other people see and hear what they hear, rather than relying only on how the presentation felt from inside your own head.
Prepare to participate, not only to present
Some of the most important professional communication happens in meetings where you aren’t the presenter.
Perhaps you need to contribute more actively with senior colleagues. You need to make your point before the conversation moves on. You need to disagree diplomatically. Or you need to explain a complex issue without having five minutes to organize your thoughts first.
Before an important meeting, think about the contribution you want to make.
- What are the two or three points you may need to raise?
- Where might you need to intervene?
- What questions do you want to ask?
- What position may you need to defend?
You can’t script a live conversation, but you can enter it with greater clarity about what you want to contribute.
Use the weeks before an important meeting to practice the real thing
If you already know that an important presentation, leadership meeting or international project is approaching, you can work directly on that situation with your coach.
Bring the presentation, the slides, the key messages, the challenges and the questions you’re concerned about being asked. Then rehearse the situation together.
You can work on the structure of the message, how you’re explaining complex ideas, your voice and pacing, the moments where you lose clarity, how you respond to questions, and what happens when you have to move away from the prepared material.
The objective is to prepare for the real situation before you have to handle it under pressure.
For professionals who find that their usual authority or presence changes when they move into another language, How to Develop Executive Presence in a Second Language explores that challenge in more depth.
September starts in August
The beginning of September can feel abrupt because everything seems to restart at once.
But many of the important communication moments coming in September are already visible now.
Look at the calendar. Identify the meetings, presentations and conversations where you have something significant at stake. Decide which ones deserve more than last-minute preparation.
Then start working on the communication before the pressure arrives.
If you have an important professional situation coming up in English or Spanish and want to prepare it with focused, practical support, Tanya G. Johnson offers bilingual communication coaching in Barcelona and online, working directly with the meetings, presentations and professional situations you actually need to handle.
You can also read more about Bilingual Coaching for International Professionals in Barcelona and how this work applies to international professional environments.
