My clients often think their accent is the problem. They're often missing the bigger picture.

What affects how you're perceived at work isn't whether your accent is noticeable. What matters is how much effort your listener has to put in to process your message. It's an easy thing to blame, since an accent is often the first difference people notice about how someone speaks, and it feels like the obvious explanation.

Where that effort actually goes

When listening takes effort, the mental resources your listener normally uses to understand your ideas get redirected to processing your words instead. Their brains are working harder. And when people work harder to understand you, they remember less, feel more frustrated, and rate you as less credible, even if they understood every word.

This lines up with how speech researchers describe it too. Listening effort and how clearly someone is understood are treated as two separate things in the research, since two speakers can both be fully understood and still cost their listener very different amounts of mental energy to get there.

What I actually see in an assessment call

This is something I see regularly in my initial assessment call. A client who is intelligible, understood "well enough," but whose speaking habits create enough friction that their listener is partly occupied just keeping up. That friction is the real cost to the end impact. Not necessarily the accent itself.

This means accent work isn't always the right answer. Sometimes the two genuinely overlap. But treating every case as an accent problem means spending months on the wrong target while the actual friction, maybe pacing, maybe a specific sound pattern, maybe where stress falls in a sentence, goes untouched.

Why familiar listeners aren't the whole picture

A familiar team adapts. Colleagues who've worked alongside you for a while stop noticing patterns they used to trip over, the same way you stop noticing a clock ticking in a room you sit in every day. But that adaptation takes repeated exposure, and it doesn't help in the moments that matter most.

The highest-stakes situations are always new audiences: job interviews, presentations to people who haven't heard you before, client-facing roles where the first impression is the only one you get. There's no runway to adapt to you in a thirty minute interview.

Getting specific about where the friction actually is

Before we work on anything, I need to know exactly where friction happens and why it's there. At heart, my work can actually get quite technical. I analyze the acoustics of speech sound, cognitive load, and the bits and pieces that make up how we talk and how we're perceived. That's a different kind of work than a generic accent reduction course, because two people with the exact same accent can have completely different sources of friction. I love getting the chance to talk about it.

Have you ever gotten a comment about your speaking style that you'd like analyzed?