What Accent Should I Choose?

I get this question a lot. And its a prefectly sensible question to ask. What accent should you go for

You are on a plane, and the stewardess asks you what you would like to drink. 

How do you say water?

You might think I’m pulling your leg, but I am writing this at the airport just after getting of a flight. Even though I have 10,000+ hours of speaking English under my belt, this simple task of ordering water from a stewardess is my arch nemesis.

It’s as if for a moment, my pitch-perfect pronunciation shuts itself off, I forget which accent I’m supposed to use, and I am left mumbling incomprehensible nonsense as I attempt to order something as simple as a bottle of water.

I want you to think about your identity as a traveller. Because when you’re sitting at home talking to your family, you’re playing a familiar role. When you were sitting in a classroom as a kid, you were playing a familiar role. When you go to your office for the 8 hours of labour, you are yet again playing a familiar role.

While there are other accents to choose from, including your own native language’s accent, for the sake of simplicity, I want us to focus on the two most common and widely sought-after accents in the world:

I want you to memorise this for life:

More speech encourages better speech, and more thinking encourages more thinking. 

Would you rather be a yapper or an overthinker?

Because you sure as hell can’t be both at the same time.

You are trapped in a cycle of thinking, and it’s the main reason your pronunciation and accent end up lagging behind. When I work with coaching clients we focus on breaking down those nasty filler words and non-words mentioned in prior chapters of this book.

What my clients all have in common is that they keep overthinking their word selection despite not having a big vocabulary to pick from. What you end up doing is jumping in and out of your mental library of words, and trying to figure out if anything new has popped up.

It’s like coming home to an empty fridge, closing it, then opening it again to see if something new spawned.

The more time you spend in your head, the less your muscles will be working. The more time you waste on overthinking, the worse you will become at speaking.

And I don’t think you’re reading this book because you don’t know how to think. Remember:

Our speaking impacts our thoughts far quicker than our thoughts can impact our speech.