Expert In Helping Non-Native English Speakers ‒ Exclusive Interview With Sarah Henderson-Sharon

Sarah Henderson-Sharon is an expert in helping non-native English speakers overcome Second Language Anxiety: the fear, shame, and anxiety they experience when speaking English. A teacher with 17 years of experience, Sarah became aware of the damaging impact of Second Language Anxiety four years ago. Since then, Sarah has dedicated herself to helping her clients understand and move beyond their fears so that they can use English with confidence. She is the founder of Think Positive English where she offers 1-2-1 programs and a community speaking club empowering members to improve their spoken English.

Sarah Henderson-Sharon, Language Anxiety Coach

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

I live in the south of England by the sea and near a beautiful little city called Brighton. Before I moved here, I spent a long time in Asia, about ten years in total, where I travelled extensively and taught English as a Foreign Language to pay for my travels. My happiest time was the three ½ years I spent living in China. I taught English at a university in the week and at the weekend, I went to study tai chi in a village called Chen Jia Gou. This is the birthplace of tai chi and I loved it there. Actually, I still miss it, even though it’s now seven years since I left. While I was in China, I taught myself Mandarin, made lots of friends and adopted a little street dog called Moli. Moli came back to England with me and is now a happy and much loved pet. Her name means ‘jasmine’ in Chinese, though actually, Moli the dog is much more stinky than jasmine the flower!

What kind of audience do you target your business towards?

I target female professionals who need English for their work but who struggle with a negative mindset and many limiting beliefs about themselves and their linguistic abilities. This group actually tends to have very advanced and proficient language abilities, but they don’t see it that way! Instead, they are convinced that their English is terrible and that this is somehow their fault. They compare themselves to native speakers and always see themselves as being weaker or less sophisticated than them. There’s a lot of anxiety, fear and shame in this group of people and common traits include being obsessed over their mistakes, having very negative self-talk and being unrealistic about what they can achieve in a given timeframe.

What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?

At the moment, I have two objectives. The first is to build the world’s best online English speaking school. There is a big problem with affordability for one-to-one tuition so, for example, if you come from a lower-income country it can be hard to access high-quality English tuition, particularly from a native speaker because the difference in the cost of living is so big. A group programme can change this and make good tuition affordable for more people. I’ve already started this with my Think Positive Speaking Club. This gives people the opportunity to come together to practise speaking English online in a safe and supportive atmosphere. The emphasis is very much on being positive and looking for the good things in what people say and how they say it.

Also, I want to develop a corporate programme whereby I would work with companies and organisations to help them combat linguistic prejudice in the workplace. There’s an increasing awareness, I think, that the more diverse a company is, the stronger it becomes. While I do think that the word ‘diversity’ can be bandied about and can at times lose its significance, I also think that there is a deeper strength in plurality than in homogeny.

When we think of diversity, we might think of gender or racial diversity, or about having people with disabilities in the workplace, but there is also linguistic prejudice to be considered. This basically is when people experience stigmatisation on account of their accent or linguistic abilities, and as more and more companies become global in reach with a real international workforce, this is becoming a bigger issue. If you have a meeting where there is a mix of English native and non-native speakers, linguistic prejudice, whether real or perceived, could lead to those non-native speakers lacking the confidence to speak out and have their ideas heard. And this then has a knock-on effect on the organisation as it doesn’t get to hear everyone’s opinions, some of which are probably brilliant, which can in turn affect the financial strength of the company.

Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?

This is a difficult question! The individual person who has inspired me the most would have to be my tai chi master in China, Shifu Chen Zhao Sen. Actually, he’s a tai chi grandmaster of a particular branch of Chen style tai chi and he’s an incredibly amazing person. I think the reason why I found him so inspirational, aside from the fact the he is an awesome martial artist, is that he leaves it up to you how much work and commitment you are prepared to put in. There would be some students at his school who were fairly relaxed, shall we say, about their training and that was fine. I was one of those who worked really hard so I always got a little more teaching from Shifu than some of the others. And I think the lesson there is that it’s up to each individual how much effort they choose to invest in their learning or in themselves, no-one from the outside can, or should, push people to do things they don’t want to. And that’s influenced me a lot, I think. When I’m with a client, I really don’t tend to push them to do things, I leave it very much up to them and do my best to support them on their path. Some students don’t like this, of course, and want to work with a teacher who will be very strict. To my mind, though, this actually removes or limits the independence of the client and makes them reliant on me, which I don’t want. I want for my clients to become independent and able to make their own decisions.

If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?

To be honest, I would struggle to limit myself to one thing! There are so many things in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) industry that I would change if I could! But the biggest thing would be to treat the staff with dignity and respect and to pay them a wage that allows them to live. I had a colleague in the UK who was a highly experienced teacher but she couldn’t afford to rent a small flat. That’s not okay! Also, the schools in the UK operate on ‘zero hours contracts’ so there’s no stability in terms of hours. I used to call it ‘disposable cup syndrome’ as the teachers could literally lose their jobs with no notice at all. This is not a respectful way to treat people and if I was in a position to change one thing, I would change that.

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