Drew Sisera - Communication Skills Coaching

One of the biggest misconceptions about English pronunciation is that letters always represent the same sound. Sadly, they don’t.

In this session, we explored several words ending in S. At first glance, they all look similar, but the final sound changes depending on the sounds around it. Lays, lies, laws, and lose all end with a voiced Z sound, while less and loose end with an unvoiced S sound.

What makes this particularly interesting is that English pronunciation is often governed by patterns rather than individual letters. The spelling stays the same, but the sound changes because of the surrounding phonetic environment. Once learners begin recognizing those patterns, pronunciation becomes much more predictable and far less dependent on memorizing individual words.

This idea is closely related to how our brains learn categories. Rather than storing every pronunciation independently, we naturally begin grouping similar sound patterns together. As those categories become stronger, producing new words becomes more automatic because we’re no longer relying on isolated memories, but on systems instead

That’s why I spend much less time asking clients to simply repeat words and much more time helping them notice the relationships between them. The goal isn’t to memorize thousands of pronunciations. It’s to understand the patterns that generated them in the first place.

One of the communication skills I don’t think gets talked about enough is recognizing when someone is beginning to disengage from a conversation.

Most people respond by doing the exact opposite of what’s needed. They add more detail, they explain further, they introduce another story, another example, or another reason why their point is important. Unfortunately though, every additional sentence often pushes the listener even further away.

In a recent session, my client and I discussed summarizing as great strategy to use.

If I notice someone’s attention beginning to drift, I’ll pause and briefly recap my main idea before moving the conversation back toward them. Sometimes I’ll say something like, “All in all…” or “In summary…” and then condense everything I’ve been talking about into a single sentence before asking a question.

From a communication perspective, this does two things:

First, it reduces the cognitive load on the listener by helping organize the information they’ve just received.

Second, it shifts the conversation back into a two-way interaction. Instead of continuing to transmit information, you’re inviting the other person to participate again.

One of the ideas that shapes my coaching is that great communicators aren’t just aware of what they’re saying, but that they’re constantly paying attention to the person listening.

As I tell my clients, communication is never just about delivering a message. It’s about continuously adapting to the person receiving it.

One of the most rewarding moments in the sessions I have with my clients is when they become capable of analyzing their own communication skills.

In this session, we listened to recordings taken roughly six months apart and compared them together. Before I shared my observations, I asked my client what THEY thought had improved. Without any help, they immediately identified two major changes: fewer filler words and a much clearer communication style.

For me, that moment was much more meaningful than the improvements themselves.

One of the goals of my work isn't simply to help clients communicate more effectively. It's to help them develop the awareness to recognize why and how they're improving; to develop the metacognitive skills required to reflect on and evaluate your performance independently. The more accurately someone can monitor their own communication, the less they become dependent on external feedback over time.

Something else we discussed was the relationship between speed and clarity. Many learners assume fluency means speaking as quickly as possible. I tend to think about it differently. Communication exists on two dimensions (and arguably more): speed and accuracy. Early in our work together, my client's speech was relatively fast, but maintaining that pace came at the expense of clarity. Over the past several months, we've intentionally slowed things down, allowing the grammar, pronunciation, and organization of ideas to become more deliberate and consistent.

Our goal isn't to speak at maximum speed. Even native speakers pause, restart, search for words, and reorganize their thoughts. The goal is to move gradually toward the point where both clarity and speed coexist naturally. That's the trajectory we're aiming for.

One of the biggest misconceptions about pronunciation is that every new word has to be learned from scratch.

In this session, my client was unsure how to pronounce the word "practice". Instead of saying the word for her and asking her to repeat it, I broke it into smaller pieces using words she already knew how to pronounce. We worked through "per", then "at", then "act", gradually rebuilding the pronunciation one familiar sound at a time.

What makes this approach particularly interesting is that it shifts the task from memorization to pattern recognition. Rather than treating every unfamiliar word as a completely new problem, we’re teaching the brain to reuse knowledge it already possesses. Now, learning becomes less about acquiring hundreds of isolated pronunciations and more about recognizing how familiar sound patterns combine in new ways.

Our brains don’t naturally organize knowledge as disconnected pieces of information. They build networks. The stronger and more interconnected those networks become, the easier it is to retrieve and apply that knowledge in new situations.

That’s why I rarely ask clients to simply repeat a difficult word over and over again.

Instead, I try to help them discover that much of the pronunciation they’re searching for is already there. They just haven’t learned how to connect the pieces yet.

One of the most interesting moments in language learning is when a learner discovers they knew the answer before they consciously realized it.

In this session, my client wrote the sentence, “I want to know what I would sound as a native speaker.” Rather than me correcting it for him, I challenged him to read the sentence out loud, quickly and naturally. Almost immediately, he stopped and said, “I want to know what I would sound LIKE…”

The missing word wasn’t found through grammar rules. It was found through intuition.

One of the ideas that shapes my coaching is that language knowledge exists on multiple levels. Sometimes we can explicitly explain a grammar rule. Other times, we simply know that something sounds right because we’ve heard similar patterns hundreds or even thousands of times before. In psycholinguistics, this distinction is often described as the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Both are valuable, but they operate in very different ways.

That’s one of the reasons I encourage my clients to read their writing out loud before they "submit" it to me. Speaking forces the brain to process language differently than silent reading. Awkward phrasing, missing words, and unnatural sentence patterns often become much easier to notice when your ears are involved in the process.

So at the end of the day, my goal isn’t just to teach grammar, but rather to help my clients build enough awareness that they begin trusting the language system they’re already developing inside their own minds.

One of my clients recently asked me how I personally learn new vocabulary, and this was interesting because it's something I’m actively experimenting with myself, but not because I want to sound more intelligent, but because I want to express my ideas with greater precision. The interesting part is that I’ve found memorization to be one of the least effective strategies for me.

Instead, I try to connect new words to my own life.

Throughout the day, I’ll intentionally stop whatever I’m doing and ask myself a simple question: Can I use one of the new words I’m learning to describe what I’m seeing, thinking, or experiencing right now? Sometimes the answer is no, but sometimes it’s obvious. Most importantly, every successful connection makes that word feel a little less like something I studied and a little more like something I "own".

This idea aligns closely with what cognitive psychologists call elaborative encoding. Information tends to become more memorable when it’s connected to existing experiences, emotions, or knowledge rather than stored as an isolated fact. The richer those connections become, the easier the information is to retrieve later.

That’s why I encourage my clients to stop treating vocabulary as a list of definitions to memorize. Instead, I want them to build a relationship with each word.

Words become truly useful when they stop living on a flashcard and start becoming part of the way you think about your own life.

One of my clients recently shared something that genuinely made my day.

She told me she’d started applying some of the strategies we’d been working on in our sessions. A little while later, she sent some work to her manager.

His response? No comments (like she used to get).

At first, that might not sound particularly exciting. But for her, it was a significant moment. Previously, her manager would regularly point out issues with her writing and communication. This time, there was nothing to correct.

What makes this especially meaningful is that success in communication often isn’t measured by what people say, but also measured by what they no longer need to say.

As communication becomes clearer, misunderstandings become less frequent. Corrections become less necessary, conversations become smoother, and the friction that once existed gradually disappears, often so subtly that you don’t even notice it’s happening.

One of the things I’ve observed over years of coaching is that speaking and writing tend to develop together. They’re different skills, but they rely on many of the same underlying processes: organizing ideas, choosing precise words, monitoring your own output, and recognizing when something doesn’t quite communicate your intention.

That’s why so much of my coaching revolves around developing awareness. Not because I want my clients to overthink every sentence they produce, but because awareness eventually becomes intuition. The careful decisions you make consciously today become the natural habits you rely on tomorrow.

One of the biggest misconceptions about fluency is that becoming a faster speaker simply requires speaking faster.

In reality, the opposite is often true.

In this session, I explained to my client that the long-term goal is absolutely to communicate clearly, coherently, and with natural speed. But trying to reach that goal by rushing usually creates the very habits that slow us down, because grammar begins to break down, pronunciation becomes less precise, and ideas become more difficult to organize. The brain simply can’t keep up.

One of the principles that shapes my coaching philosophy is that accuracy should come before speed. From a cognitive perspective, your brain is trying to coordinate vocabulary retrieval, grammar, pronunciation, sentence structure, and meaning simultaneously. For bilingual speakers, that process is even more demanding because multiple language systems are active at once. Slowing down gives the brain enough time to strengthen those connections until they become increasingly automatic.

That’s why I encourage my clients to treat our sessions as a safe place to experiment. I want them to try new vocabulary, build longer sentences, make mistakes, receive feedback, and explore the language without feeling pressured to perform. The objective isn’t perfection. It’s deliberate practice.

Only when a skill becomes consistently accurate do we increase the speed. If accuracy disappears, we slow back down and continue refining the movement. The process isn’t linear, but it is reliable.

It’s remarkably similar to learning an instrument. No musician begins by playing at full tempo. They slow the music down until every movement is controlled, and only then do they gradually increase the pace.

Communication develops in much the same way.

Speed isn’t something you chase. It’s something that emerges when accuracy has had enough time to become an automatic process...a default.

One of the biggest challenges in English pronunciation isn’t producing new sounds, but actually realizing that you already know many of them.

In this session, my client pronounced pause more like pose. The issue wasn’t the consonants. It was the vowel in the middle.

Rather than simply correcting the word, I connected it to something she already knew how to pronounce: Australia.

Both words share the same vowel sound, though with a slightly different duration

One of the ideas that shapes my coaching is that learning becomes much easier when we connect new information to existing knowledge. In cognitive psychology, this is often described as a process of building networks rather than isolated facts. The more connections we create in meaningful ways, the easier information becomes to retrieve later.

That’s why I rarely teach pronunciation as a collection of individual words. Instead, I’m always looking for patterns my clients already have in their minds, then using those patterns as bridges to something new.

One of the communication habits I encourage clients to develop is becoming comfortable with not having an immediate answer.

When someone asks a challenging question, many people feel pressure to respond instantly. They begin speaking before they’ve fully organized their thoughts, which often leads to filler words, scattered ideas, or answers they later wish they had phrased differently.

If you're in this situation, there are effective strategies, with one being to compliment the question.

“That’s a really interesting question" or “That’s a great question.”

Then think.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the compliment serves multiple purposes at once: It acknowledges the other person, builds rapport, creates a moment of connection, and gives you permission to slow down without making the silence feel uncomfortable.

Communication researchers have long recognized that conversation isn’t only about exchanging information. It’s also about managing relationships, and every interaction contains both a task component (the information being discussed) and a relational component (how people feel while discussing it).

A thoughtful pause after acknowledging someone’s question can actually strengthen both!

Many people view pauses as evidence that they’re struggling, and while it can indicate that under certain circumstances, if it's done strategically well, it becomes evidence that someone is taking the conversation seriously enough to think before they speak.

I often tell my clients that sometimes the most intelligent response begins with a moment of silence.