Confidence is so important when it comes to learning and speaking English.  In this episode, I share a few of my tried-and-testing techniques for improve your confidence levels. Try them out and let me know what you think! All the best! Paul Here is the full transcript: How to improve your confidence levels 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. Hi there, I’m Paul Urwin, and welcome to episode 16 of the Business English Community podcast. I hope everything is going really, really well with you. I hope you’re moving your projects forward, and well, I hope you’re improving your business English and I hope this podcast in some way is helping you to get towards those goals. Today I wanted to talk about confidence levels and how really improving your confidence can really help you to get, achieve those goals and how having a lack of confidence is really holding you back. I’ll be talking about that in just a second. First of all, I have a really special request. It’d be really grateful if you could help me with this. And it is as follows. If you like the Business English Community podcast, please take a minute to go onto iTunes and give us a review. It’s really, really important for us to have iTunes reviews because it helps to get the message out further, it helps us to really share the podcast and attract more people and share our information with more people around the globe. So I’d be really, really grateful if you could just take a minute to go onto iTunes and leave us a review. Right, well, let’s get started with how to improve your confidence levels. Okay, well I should probably start out by talking about whom this episode is for, and it’s for you if you have a lack of confidence in certain areas within the English language. If you have a lack of confidence when you’re speaking in front of your boss, if you have a lack of confidence when you’re giving a presentation in English or when you’re writing something in English, if you have that sort of nagging feeling on the inside that someone’s watching you and that you’re just doing something wrong and someone is going to tap you on the shoulder and say, “Hey, what are you doing,” if you have that kind of feeling when you’re managing issues or when you’re communicating in the English language, then this is definitely the episode for you because I’m going to help you really try and improve your levels of confidence and as a result of that, as a direct result of that improve your levels of business English. The first thing I wanted to say is it’s really important to understand that a lack of confidence in English is only going to hold you back, it’s definitely not going to help you in any way at all. This is not something that is okay to have. It’s not something that is good to have. It’s something that really we need to address. If you lack confidence it will stop you from taking action. It will stop you from reaching your goals. It will also affect you. It’s not really going to affect other people. This is you. This is your English. This is your career. This is your life that this lack of confidence is going to affect. Many people seem to accept that it’s okay to have a lack of confidence when speaking English or communicating in English, and well to a certain point I can understand that. If it’s not your native language, then of course you’re going to have a slight or certain lack of confidence. But I don’t agree that it’s acceptable to maintain that lack of confidence for any period of time. I think you should be focused on improving your confidence levels, on getting better, on m