Online English Coaching for Advanced Professionals

Your story

You already speak English – and you understand it when it is spoken to you – but you feel that you are not as effective in English as you are in your native language.

Native speakers have an advantage over you in a professional setting. You can’t persuade or negotiate with the same finesse.

If you have to deal with a searching question or an unexpected interruption, you suddenly can’t find the words to respond … and that’s frustrating.

You want to be the same sharp, fluent and effective person in English as you are when using the language you grew up with. You want to be yourself in this second language.

I can help with that.

Whether you are an advanced learner or already a near-native user of English, I can help with that. It’s what I do.

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How I can help

You in English

There is no one correct way of saying anything. Once you are beyond the intermediate stage of learning, you have to find yourself in the language.

If you have the sensation that you are a different person in English, I understand how that feels (personally, I never escaped that sensation in French), and we’ll fix it by discovering how you sound in English. Not some standardised “perfect” English, but the authentic sound of you in this other language.

I’ve been there myself

The breadth of my professional background and varied career allows me to imagine you in your professional role and to engage in a realistic interaction, whether you are buying or selling a company, pitching an idea, addressing a conference hall or a board meeting, presenting an academic paper, or leading a sprint retrospective. Because I have done all of these things myself.

If you want to improve your English for use in one of these contexts, wouldn’t it be a good idea to find a teacher who has done that themselves?

What we’ll do

In a series of one-hour online sessions, we will enrich your active vocabulary and develop your unique tone of voice in English. We will address the question: which of the endless number of different ways of saying something is your way?

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach for this – everyone has different needs – but I make extensive use of AI tools to develop materials tailored to your learning objectives and professional interests. The sessions are scheduled to fit your diary, with flexibility where necessary, and they are priced to allow me the time to prepare unique material for each session.

My story

I am Dutch now, but I was born and raised in England, and I lived much of my adult life in Africa – Zimbabwe, Eswatini and Kenya – before settling in Amsterdam in 2008.

I taught English for several years at the renowned Dutch language institute Regina Coeli (the nuns of Vught), where I worked with leaders across multiple domains: cabinet ministers, diplomats and other senior civil servants, members of the judiciary and armed forces, senior executives across all sectors of the economy, entrepreneurs and investors.

I had already experienced the Regina Coeli method as a course member, having been to Vught to learn Dutch myself. I am now a near-native speaker of the language.

Outside language teaching, I have been a journalist, a university lecturer, a PhD candidate, a first-generation internet entrepreneur, a C-level corporate executive, a start-up seed investor, an interim manager, a member of various company and supervisory boards, and also a childcare worker. There’s more detail on my LinkedIn profile.

I first taught English professionally in my early twenties, to Shona-speaking teenagers during two years at a rural high school in Zimbabwe. Although I taught and coached again after that, I didn’t teach English again until 2022, when I started giving online language lessons to people fleeing war in Ukraine.

I found I enjoyed it, took a teaching qualification, and haven’t looked back since.

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