How to stop freezing in English business calls

If you understand English but freeze when a call starts, you probably don’t need more grammar. You need more speaking reps, a small set of phrases you can say without thinking, and a safe place to rehearse. Shadowing, phrase practice with self-testing, and mock calls with an AI partner cover all three.

I work in international sales, so most of my week happens in English: calls with distributors, emails, trade fair conversations. Knowing English and performing in English are different skills. Here is what I think actually helps, and what the research says.

Why you freeze even though you “know” English

Freezing is not a vocabulary problem first. In a classic 1986 paper, Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope described foreign language anxiety as its own thing, related to but not the same as general communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. They noted that difficulty speaking is probably the most frequently cited concern among learners.

That matches what I believe: in a live call, part of your brain is busy watching yourself. Every sentence you build from scratch costs attention. The fix is to make more of your speaking automatic, so there is less to build under pressure.

Speak more than you study

Many of us learned English through reading, grammar and multiple choice tests. That builds recognition. It does not build the ability to produce a sentence in two seconds while someone waits.

So I’d flip the ratio. If you have 20 minutes a day, spend most of it with your mouth open: reading aloud, shadowing, answering questions out loud, recording yourself. Silent study can stay, but it should not be the main course.

Shadowing: copy real speech, out loud

Shadowing means listening to audio and repeating it almost at the same time, like an echo. It came from interpreter training and has been studied a lot in Japanese EFL classrooms. In a 2019 review in RELC Journal, Yo Hamada summarised research on its effects on listening and on speaking, including pronunciation. His suggestion: beginners use it mainly for listening, and learners at upper-intermediate level or above can use it for speaking. That second group is exactly the “I know English but I freeze” crowd.

How I’d do it:

• Pick one to two minutes of real business speech: a podcast, an interview, a webinar in your field.
• Listen once with the transcript, then shadow without it, three to five times.
• Copy the rhythm and the pauses, not just the words.
• Record one round and listen back once a week.

The British Council’s LearnEnglish site has a business section with podcasts for professionals that work well for this.

Build a phrase bank and test yourself on it

Fluent speakers do not build every sentence word by word. They reuse chunks. A study published in VIAL (Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics) gave one group of adult EFL learners 38 hours of teaching built around these lexical chunks. Judges rated that group higher on overall oral proficiency than a control group, and they used more formulaic sequences.

So write your own phrase bank, around 30 lines you will actually need:

• Opening a call: “Thanks for making the time. Shall we start with a quick update?”
• Buying time: “Good question. Let me think about that for a second.”
• Clarifying: “Just to make sure I understood, you mean…?”
• Disagreeing politely: “I see your point. My concern is…”
• Closing: “So the next steps are… I’ll send a summary by email today.”
• Emails: “Following up on our call…”, “Please find attached…”, “Could you confirm by Friday?”

Then do not just reread the list. Cover the English and say it from a prompt. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that testing yourself on material led to better retention after two days and a week than restudying it, even though restudying felt more effective in the moment. Saying a phrase from memory is a small test. Rereading is not.

Use AI as a rehearsal partner, not a translator

This is where I think AI helps most. It does not get bored, it does not judge you, and you can rehearse the exact call you have tomorrow. If you are new to what these tools can and cannot do, I wrote about how I use AI in export sales.

A simple routine:

1. Tell the assistant the scenario: “You are a distributor in Germany. I’m following up on a price offer. Push back on the price. Keep replies short.”
2. Use voice mode if your tool has one, so you practise speaking, not typing.
3. After the role-play, ask: “List my three most unnatural sentences and give a more natural version.”
4. Add the good versions to your phrase bank.

Two cautions. Do not paste confidential customer information, prices or contracts into a public AI tool. And check anything that sounds too idiomatic with a second source, because AI can be confidently wrong about tone.

A realistic weekly plan

• Daily, 15-20 minutes: 10 minutes shadowing, 5-10 minutes saying phrases from your bank out loud.
• Twice a week: one AI mock call before a real call.
• Weekly: listen to one recording of yourself and pick one thing to fix.

None of this removes nerves completely. I believe the goal is smaller and more useful: when the call starts, the first sentences come out on their own, and that buys you the calm to think.

Sources

• Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety, The Modern Language Journal
• Hamada (2019), Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?, RELC Journal
• Assessing the impact of the Lexical Approach on EFL perceived oral proficiency, VIAL
• Roediger and Karpicke (2006), Test-enhanced learning, Psychological Science (PubMed)
• British Council LearnEnglish: Business English