Insights & guides
A client once described the version of themselves that shows up in a board meeting as “not really me.” More composed, more measured, choosing words more carefully than they would with a friend over coffee. They said it almost apologetically, as if performing confidence made the confidence less real.
It does not. There is a name for what they were describing, and understanding it changes how you think about the whole idea of sounding executive.
The sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a series of performances, split between what he called frontstage and backstage behaviour. Frontstage is how a person acts in front of others, shaped to create a particular impression. Backstage is the private space behind that, where the same person behaves more freely, without an audience to manage.
The key point is not that one of these is fake and the other real. Both are genuinely you. A surgeon scrubbed in and calm during an operation, and the same surgeon laughing loudly at a family dinner that evening, are not one authentic person and one performance. They are two legitimate registers, each suited to its own stage.
In face-to-face frontstage settings, behaviour has to be managed in real time, and a great deal of it, facial expression, tone, posture, is difficult to fully control even when you are trying. That is demanding enough in a first language. In a second language, the frontstage performance carries an extra layer: choosing words, managing grammar, and reading the room, all while also managing the impression those words create.
This is very often where the feeling of inauthenticity creeps in. Not because the executive version of someone is false, but because achieving it in a second language takes visible effort, and visible effort can feel, wrongly, like evidence of pretending.
Frontstage and backstage shift again online. Digital communication is selective and often delayed, an email can be drafted, reread, and revised before anyone sees it, which makes the frontstage performance far more controllable than it ever is in a live meeting. This is worth naming directly, because it explains something practical: a professional who writes confident, well-structured English but freezes up delivering the same content live is not experiencing a contradiction. They are simply better resourced for one frontstage than the other, and that gap is entirely trainable.
Different stages also carry different linguistic prestige, the social weight given to a particular way of speaking. Formal, precise, clinical language is often read as credible and authoritative, exactly what a frontstage boardroom moment calls for. The same register in a casual backstage conversation reads as stiff or distant. The reverse is just as costly: casual, relatable language builds warmth and trust in the right setting, but read as underprepared or unserious in the wrong one.
Neither register is superior. The skill is recognising which stage you are on, and matching your register to it deliberately, rather than defaulting to whichever one feels most natural in the moment.
If a client feels like they are “performing” in high-stakes English communication, the answer is not to perform less. It is to recognise that every professional, in every language, manages a frontstage self in exactly these situations, and that doing it well in a second language simply takes more deliberate preparation, not less authenticity.
The goal of coaching, in this frame, is not to make someone into a different person for the boardroom. It is to make the frontstage version of them feel as natural and available as the backstage one already does, so the effort of managing it stops reading, to them or to their audience, as strain.
Because the composed version of you in a boardroom was never a mask. It is simply a stage that asks more of you, and one worth being genuinely ready for.
Concepts referenced: Erving Goffman's frontstage and backstage theory of self-presentation.
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