Insights & guides
A CEO sends a company-wide email that reads like a text to a friend. Casual greeting, first names, a joke, maybe an emoji. It feels warm, approachable, almost egalitarian. And yet the CEO is still the CEO, the decision they are about to announce is still final, and nothing about the actual power in the room has changed. Only the tone has.
Researchers studying how language reflects and reproduces power have a name for this shift, and understanding it changes how you read almost every piece of casual-sounding authority you encounter, including your own.
A field of study broadly known as critical discourse analysis starts from a simple but far-reaching premise: language does not just describe social reality, it actively shapes it. Every wording choice, every shift in tone, every decision about what to state directly and what to leave implicit, does real work in either reinforcing or softening the power relationships between speaker and audience.
This is not a claim that language is manipulative in some sinister sense. It is a claim that language is never fully neutral, and that noticing the choices being made, in your own communication as much as anyone else's, reveals something real about how authority is actually operating in a given moment.
One well-documented pattern is what researchers call conversationalization, the tendency for institutional, political, and corporate language to adopt the style of ordinary, informal conversation. A now-famous example is advertising's shift toward direct, personal address, lines like “Did YOU get YOUR card?” that speak to an individual customer as though in a one-on-one exchange, rather than addressing a faceless mass audience.
The same shift shows up constantly in leadership communication. A formal memo becomes a chatty Slack message. A rigid quarterly address becomes a casual, first-name-basis video update. This can be, and often is, a genuine improvement in how approachable and human an organization feels. But it is worth being clear-eyed about what it does not change: the underlying power asymmetry between the person speaking and the audience listening is exactly the same as it was in the formal memo. Only the surface has become more conversational.
This cuts in two directions worth paying attention to. First, as a listener or reader: a warm, informal tone from someone with authority over you is not evidence that the relationship is now equal, and treating it as such, dropping your guard entirely, mistaking friendliness for the absence of a power gap, can lead to miscalibrated expectations about how much influence you actually have in the exchange.
Second, and more usefully, as a communicator: conversational, informal language is a genuinely powerful tool for building rapport and making expertise feel accessible rather than distant. Used deliberately, it works. Used unconsciously, without noticing what it is quietly signalling, it can also create a strange mismatch, warmth in tone paired with an unchanged, sometimes considerable, gap in actual authority, a mismatch an audience often senses even when they cannot name it.
Before adopting a more casual register in an important piece of communication, whether a leadership update, a client email, or a presentation, it is worth asking directly what the tone is meant to do. Building genuine trust and accessibility is a legitimate, valuable goal. Using informality to soften or obscure a decision the audience has no real say in is a different goal entirely, and audiences tend to notice the difference eventually, even when they cannot immediately articulate why something felt slightly off.
Because a casual tone was never wrong to use. It simply deserves to be a deliberate choice, not something that quietly happens to your communication without your noticing what it is signalling underneath.
Concepts referenced: critical discourse analysis, and the concept of conversationalization in institutional and political discourse, as surveyed in Blommaert and Bulcaen's review of the field.
Communication Audit
Many professionals receive feedback on their technical performance, but very few receive feedback on how they communicate under pressure.
The Communication Audit is a personalised assessment designed to identify the communication habits that strengthen, or unintentionally weaken, your executive presence. Together we evaluate areas such as persuasive communication, executive language, presentation structure, confidence, cross-cultural communication and overall credibility, and you receive practical recommendations to help you communicate with greater influence.
About the Communication Audit15–30 minutes. English or German. Online worldwide.
Short answers to what most people want to know before booking.
Each engagement has a starting price, agreed with you before any work begins.
What moves the price is how much work happens outside the live sessions. Every engagement can also be booked in a lighter form, which costs less.
Rehearsal only. We use the call to practise material you have already written. No document review, research or written feedback beforehand.
Sessions only. For the Intensive and the Partnership, we work live in the sessions, without document review or preparation between them.
The full versions include the work I do between sessions: reviewing your draft, researching your audience, refining the structure, and written feedback. We agree the exact price in the free consultation, once I know what you actually need.
That depends on which engagement, and most of all on how much time there is before the moment you are preparing for.
Communication Audit. A week before your deadline is ideal. That leaves comfortable time to review your material, send the report, and rehearse before you deliver it.
Presentation Intensive. Two to three weeks works best, so the sessions can be spaced out properly rather than compressed at the last minute.
Communication Partnership. This one is ongoing, month to month. Most of the value builds over several months rather than in a single cycle.
If your timing is tighter than this, do get in touch anyway. It is often still possible.
Most people are more ready for this than they think.
You will get the most from the work if you can already hold a conversation in English, because we focus on how you use the language rather than teaching it from the beginning.
If your English is solid but not yet fluent, the Communication Partnership is often the best fit. It gives us time to build business vocabulary alongside structure, delivery and confidence, rather than preparing for a single event.
If you are not sure where you stand, the free consultation will make that clear very quickly, and you are most welcome to book one.
Not quite, though the two are easily confused.
I do not teach English from the ground up. Instead, we work on how you use the English you already have when it counts: how a presentation is structured, how a recommendation is made, which words carry authority, and how you handle the questions that follow.
You bring the expertise and the language. My work is making sure both of them land.
Online, over Google Meet. You will receive the link with your booking confirmation, and there is nothing to install.
Yes, and it is a good way to start. If your material is already written and you would simply like to practise delivering it, you can book the session time on its own.
There is no document review, research or written feedback beforehand, so it costs less than a full Audit or Intensive.
For a larger team, or for something more structured than a rehearsal, tell me what you are preparing for and I will come back with a price.
Yes, very happily. If a team is presenting together, or several colleagues are preparing for the same kind of moment, the rehearsal can be run as a group.
It works best with a small group, so that everyone gets real feedback rather than simply a turn to speak. It also tends to work best within one team, since you will be watching each other rehearse.
For a larger team, or for something more structured than a rehearsal, do tell me what you are preparing for and I will come back with a price.
Yes. The booking calendar shows my availability in your time zone as well as mine, so there is never confusion about when we are meeting.
My clients work across Europe, the Americas and beyond, so times outside standard European hours can usually be arranged.
A relaxed conversation of 15 to 30 minutes over Google Meet. It is not a test, and there is no need to prepare perfect English.
The call is there so I can understand what you are working on, rather than to begin the work itself, so we will not be doing any coaching or preparation in it.
I will ask a little about your role, your goals and the challenge in front of you. Towards the end I explain how I could help and answer anything you would like to ask, including about price.
There is no obligation to book afterwards, and the call is free either way. If you would like to get more out of it, there is a short guide on how to prepare.
Not at all. The consultation is simply there if you would like to talk things through before committing, and most people find it useful.
If you already know what you need, you are very welcome to book directly:
Please do say so, and as early as feels right. It is genuinely useful to know.
In most cases it means we are focusing on the wrong thing, and that is mine to put right rather than yours. A change of approach is usually all it takes.
If it still is not working after that, I would far rather tell you honestly than carry on regardless. The Partnership runs month to month with no lock-in, so you are free to stop at the end of any month.
Of course, and many clients are funded by their employer.
I invoice you, and you pass the invoice on to your company. It names the engagement only, so what we actually work on stays between the two of us.
Completely. Nothing you share with me is passed on to anyone else.
Your documents are never shared with anyone else. Protecting your material is central to this work rather than an afterthought.
Very little, because very little is collected. This website has no analytics, no cookies and no tracking of any kind, so reading it leaves no trace with me at all.
What I hold is what you send me: your booking details, our correspondence, and the materials we work on together. None of it is sold or shared for marketing.
The full detail, including how long I keep things and how to ask me to delete them, is in the privacy notice.
The free consultation can be in German or English, whichever feels more comfortable for you.
The coaching itself takes place in English, since English is where you need to perform. If something is easier to explain in German, we switch for a moment and then carry on.
Life happens, and moving a session is never a problem. A message as early as you can manage is all I need.
To move a session to another time in the same week, four hours’ notice is plenty. To cancel, or to move it beyond the current week, twelve hours’ notice.
Inside those windows I do have to charge for the session, simply because the time has already been set aside for you. If something unavoidable comes up, please do just talk to me.
Question not answered here? Email me at nadia@noreva-communications.com