Overcome the Psychological Challenges of Foreign Language Speaking and Always Perform Spanish at the Peak of Your Abilities

Do your language speaking abilities collapse in key moments? Have you ever been speaking fluently to a group, and then a new person enters the room and you watch your knowledge of that language disintegrate before your eyes?

Do you find that you speak quite well with some people, but quite badly with others?

Does your mind ever freeze, like a computer with too many programs running, when trying to communicate a complex thought in your second language?

Does vocabulary that you know you know sometimes go missing? You attempt to retrieve a word from your memory but all you find there is the word in your native language.

These are common problems, but to help you with them most language teachers and coaches only offer clichés:

“Just relax.”

“It’s okay to make mistakes.”

“Everybody gets nervous.”

I don’t offer clichés. With insights from linguistics, performance psychology and mindfulness, I offer a coaching service that both helps you understand what’s happening in your mind when you suffer with these problems, and gives you the strategies with which you take back control.

Then you can depend on your foreign language speaking abilities regardless of the pressure of the situation in which you’re using them.

If that sounds like something you’d like, DM me.

And/or, read my Substack newsletter, The Performing Mind ( in which I write about these topics).

All the best, Cathal.


P.S. I offer this service because this wildly fluctuating language speaking ability is a problem I’ve suffered with in both Spanish and Swedish. And as a English teacher, I could see that this was the problem so many of my students were suffering with too. “I can speak great with you” they would say, “but when I’m speaking in a big meeting it’s a different story.”

And so, to solve my problem and theirs, I dived into the research on performance psychology and the cognitive experience of foreign language speaking and on the way I realised many things about the importance of mindfulness for all of life’s performances.

What surprised me was that, if you’re curious and open-minded, these are surprisingly easy problems to solve. If you’re not curious and open-minded, then, I’m sorry to say, but this is probably not the coaching service for you.