Do you feel uncomfortable when you need to speak English in real situations? Lots of English learners feel a huge sense of embarrassment and fear when speaking in English.  Maybe it’s because they need to talk in front of their boss, or it might be because they think everyone is going to focus on any errors they make (which actually isn’t going to happen!). Fear is often irrational and it’s no different when it comes to the fear of speaking English.  The good news is that there are various techniques that can be used to overcome fear and turn you into a confident and successful English speaker. In this episode I share 8 specific tips to help English learners overcome their fears.  Have a listen and try them out for yourself! Please let me know what you think in the comments section below. All the best! Paul Here is the full transcript: In this episode, I’m going to be talking about how to overcome the fear of speaking in English. Hi there. I’m Paul Urwin, and welcome to The Business English Community Podcast, where the world of business meets the English language. We discuss culture, strategies, techniques, vocabulary, grammar, and much, much more. Find out more at businessenglishcommunity.com. Welcome to episode four. I am your host, Paul Urwin, and if you are an intermediate or advanced speaker of English looking to take your business English to the next level, well, you’ve come to the right place. This is the podcast for you. Before we get started, I just wanted to invite you to check out our YouTube channel. We’ve got some amazing videos on there, and a new video every week, so you can check the link out from our website, or simply enter “Business English Community” into YouTube. So, today I’m going to be talking about how to overcome the fear of speaking in English, but first, our business word of the week, and that is margin. That’s M-A-R-G-I-N. Now, there are a number of different definitions of margin, especially within investment and accounting, but really, a margin is a sort of difference between one set of figures and another, and so I’m going to focus on one of the simpler definitions today, and that is profit margin. Profit margin is, very simply, sales minus expenses divided by sales. Let me give you an example. If a company has sales of $150,000, and that same company has expenses of $100,000, then the profit margin would be 150,000 minus 100,000, which gives us $50,000, and then divide that by the sales, which were, of course, 150,000. That gives us a profit margin of 33%. But at its simplest, a margin is simply a difference between two sets of figures, normally expressed in terms of a percentage. So you might hear someone say something like, “Well, we have a 10% margin on this product,” or, “We have 20% profit margin on this particular service,” so normally a percentage difference, and that’s this week’s business word of the week, margin. Okay, well now I’m going to move on to today’s main topic, which is all about overcoming the fear of speaking English. Many non-native speakers have this fear, so if you feel afraid in certain situations, if you have lots of nerves when it comes to talking in English, then the first thing I would say is that you are definitely not alone, and in this podcast, I’m going to help you to overcome those fears or give you some techniques which you can employ in order to overcome those fears. But really, it is very, very common. Many non-native speakers have this fear of failure, or this fear of their boss, or that someone is somehow going to find out that they are only an intermediate speaker of English, and that something terrible is going to happen. Well, as we’re going to see in this episode, there is nothing really to be afraid of. So how do we actually overcome this fear? I think there are a number of different techniques that you