PRland

J’adore la vision de Seth Godin (mon maître) des conférences et de leur capacité à atteindre leurs objectifs… Mon passage préféré (ad lib) : les faits (bullets points) ne changent pas les comportements, seules les émotions (histoires et impulsions irrationnelles) le font. Je fais court, je dois me lever tôt pour animer une conférence demain et il faut que je trouve d’ici là une idée pour injecter de l’émotion dans ma présentation. J’ai pensé à un extrait de "la petite maison dans la prairie", vous savez, l’épisode où la petite Mary Ingalls devient aveugle, ça c’était plein d’émotion, non ? Bon OK je cherche encore.

Back from a 3 days intensive European training session called "Advanced Management Programme", I’ve learnt so many fundamental rules and reminded such a huge number of forgotten basics that I’d need to create a dedicated blog to expose them all (I may think of doing that at least to make sure I’ll never forget any of them again). Nevertheless, as a key learning, I have to put at the top of my list an unexpected lesson.

Even if organised in Switzerland (French side), the whole training was clearly Anglo-Saxon oriented :

• The 2 (amazing) teachers and guests invited were coming from the US
• 2/3 of the audience was made of English-native or -workers people (lucky they are)
• Most of the case studies were inspired by UK and US based real story

The key learning is : the challenge of business/meetings in English for non-English people like me is not to be able to speak a perfect academic English not even to simply understand and be understood by the other participants, it is just a question of what it takes in terms of energy. A question of how that energy captured by the language makes you loose key strengths : fast-thinking, precision, capacities to be synthetic and analytic, to react in time. To be clear, my level of English is somehow acceptable for a wide range of activities but is far too low to get any chance to be perceived as a smart guy in a such challenging context. You know what : I definitely hate the idea ! Yet, that did not avoid me to learn a lot, may be as much as my English colleagues, it just took me more time and energy…

Why did that occur to me this time more than ever before ? Probably because the level of the training was really high and based on an ongoing interaction which requested the audience to be on a “turn-on” mode all the time. In addition, it is for sure more frustrating to miss a part of a speech when you feel, know, understand how brilliant it is but don’t get immediately all the benefits because of stupid language barriers. Considering the space taken by Anglo-Saxon people not only during the sessions but after, late in the night, when all other people were running to bed totally exhausted, it seems obvious that the language plays a role far beyond the visible aspects.

I can speak in English (with mistakes but who cares ? take this note as a test), the experience helped me to understand what "fluent in English" really means. That is what is now at the top of my "needs list" for my personal/professional development, whatever it takes.