Hi floydlip

My first observation is that your written English is excellent, and considerably better than many native English speakers, so you certainly have no issues in that area. And English is a language with very flexible rules of grammar. (Technically I shouldn’t have started the previous sentence with “and”, but you will see it in top-quality newspapers.) But I understand that speaking a language is very different – I have the same issue with German – and when you are a perfectionist it can be paralysing, as you say.

Another good thing is that you are living in London, which must have by far the highest proportion of non-native English speakers of any English-speaking city, and is (in my experience) the most tolerant city on Earth. So if there is one city in the world where you don’t need to feel concerned or embarrassed about your ability to speak English, it is London.

So there should be nothing about your ability, or others’ interpretation of your ability, that is holding you back – just your own perfectionism. As a fellow sufferer, I know how difficult this can be.

There have been many times in my life when I have been paralysed by perfectionism – where I have failed to take action because I wasn’t ready to do it perfectly, whilst others less capable than me went on and succeeded. I have largely overcome this problem now, but it has been a struggle, and it never leaves completely – I will re-read this post 6 times before I hit “Submit”. I think it arises from a feeling that any criticism of my work is a criticism of me as a human being. So if someone doesn’t like what I do, it feels as if they don’t like who I am. That is nonsense of course, but the feeling remains.

The fact that you have successfully completed the first year of a law degree shows that you can conquer this problem. As a perfectionist, I am sure that you wrote and re-wrote your papers many times, and checked them constantly. But at some point, you had to hand them in – you had to accept that it was good enough. Did you get 100% for every paper you submitted? Probably not. But it was good enough, wasn’t it? And by submitting your work, you were able to find out the areas you need to work on to improve.

You just need to apply the same principle to your spoken English. Whenever you speak to another person, it is like submitting a paper for your studies. Will it be perfect? Probably not. But it will almost certainly be good enough to get you what you want. And any areas of difficulty and confusion are not something to be embarrassed by, but a learning opportunity.

The way I conquered my issues with perfectionism was simply to dive in and start doing things. It was very painful at first – the criticism still hurt – but I quickly realised that only a few things were being criticised, and I was actually achieving far more than I had ever realised I was capable of. By focusing on the 80% I was getting right, I could tolerate the 20% I was getting wrong. And I realised that getting 20% wrong was actually less embarrassing than trying to explain why the other 80% hadn’t been done.

So the solution I recommend is – just do it. You will find that you will rarely make a mistake, and if you do, no-one cares because they still understand you anyway. If someone corrects you, they are trying to help, not criticise. If I tried to speak to you in Polish, I am sure you would try to help me – you wouldn’t treat me as stupid for trying. London is full of people who can’t speak English as well as you can – and some of them were born in the city!

Powodzenia!