Nervous in English? You speed up.

Nervous in English?
You don’t slow down.
You speed up, as if you’re trying to outrun your own sentence.

It happens to me too, just in my second language. Ask anyone who’s heard me answer a surprise question in German in front of a large audience (forty-five seconds, several new words invented, none of them real).

Here’s the strange part. Going faster doesn’t make you sound more fluent. It just removes the pauses that would have made you sound calm.

Slowing down isn’t a weakness. It’s giving your sentence room breathe, instead of throwing it and hoping.

Quick win: Next time you feel yourself speeding up, take one breath before the sentence starts, not halfway through it. One sentence, one breath, no sprint.