Martin 

Welcome to The Online Education Podcast, the show where we interview leading creators and educators who are sharing their knowledge and uncover the story behind their success. I’m Martin Gore and today we’ll be talking with our guests, Anna, online educator, entrepreneur and creator of English Like A Native platform with over 1 million subscribers on YouTube. So welcome to the show, Anna.

Anna 

Hi, thank you for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

Martin 

Awesome, so good to have you. Just to kick off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background of English Like A Native of the platform.

Anna 

Wow, it’s quite a big story really. Where do I begin? So my background is essentially as a storyteller, as an actress and performer. I always liked to, what’s the word? I liked to connect with people, but also to leave a mark. I always wanted to move people in some way and for my presence in people’s lives to be meaningful.

and so I pursued acting and during my time acting, I did a lot of training around voice, particularly around pronunciation and accent work. and then I moved into singing. I, I trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London to also feel like I had more control over my voice. Cause when I left drama school, I was getting lots of acting jobs that required singing. So.

I did more voice -based work and had a much deeper understanding of voice and…

I discovered that I had this passion for just understanding the technicalities of voice and understanding production of sounds and how we speak. And I was fascinated with people’s accents. Now, alongside all of my training, I was already teaching. I was teaching face to face, one -to -one, moved into teaching within schools, all sorts of different subjects. But the majority of my teaching was focused around…

communication, storytelling, elocution, confidence in presenting and things like that. And eventually I took my teaching online and this was back in 2015, 2016. But it was kind of by accident that I discovered that you could actually turn teaching online into an actual business.

I had it there as a bit of a resource pool for my face -to -face students to go to. And then I started receiving payments from Google and I was like, other people can access this material too. And Google will pay me for that. That’s interesting. Now I could reach potentially a much greater audience rather than just those people who live within a few miles of my home. And so that’s when I started becoming obsessed with YouTube.

I have multiple YouTube channels, and, and started building the one that became the most popular, and was the biggest success was my English teaching channel, which is English Like A Native. And a few years ago, I took that into doing podcasts because as I said earlier, I’m obsessed with voice. I love voice production. I’ve worked as a professional voiceover artist.

and I just wanted to play more with just audio. And so my podcast actually started as a little bit of a hobby and very quickly became popular. And I always just follow, follow where the universe takes me, whatever seems to work, then I go for that. And so that’s where I am today.

Martin 

That’s cool. And the did it? Did you start with the podcast before the YouTube channel? Or were they sort of both at the same time?

Anna

No, the YouTube, the English Like A Native YouTube channel started in around 2017, I believe. And the podcast, I don’t, I don’t think we’ve even done two years yet. I think we’re coming up to two years in autumn.

Martin 

Okay.

Yeah. And before the English Like A Native YouTube channel, you mentioned you had a couple of other channels there as well. What were the first channels that you, you built?

Anna 

Yeah. So I had a channel, which was just kind of like my own place where I put my acting stuff. and I played around with a bit of logging in the early days. And then my first channel that I did as kind of a professional channel was teaching singing. So it’s called Verbo Vocal and it’s a singing teaching channel. And that is still quite a popular channel. It still gets lots of views and does very well, but I haven’t fed it for a long time because I.

think it’s good to focus on one business at a time. And after that, I started playing with writing children’s music. So we moved into a children’s channel called Bella and Beans, which is another very successful channel. It still gets, I think, like 10 million views a month or something crazy. It’s, it’s a big channel, but since COVID, since the COVID lockdowns, I was unable to…

keep producing and we just haven’t picked it up again because there’s not enough hours in the day.

Martin

Yeah, yeah, hear you on that. And so once you discovered, you know, with English like an 80, for example, that, wow, I can monetize this. this is, yeah, there’s actually revenue coming in from what I’m doing here by just sharing. How did you, what were the iterations after that? Did you start to release a course? Were you just getting ads or sort of like money from the advertisements placed on your site? Or how did that start to build in the early days of the business?

Anna

Yeah. So initially, obviously it was all focused on, on AdSense. AdSense doesn’t pay that much. It still doesn’t, but it was something, you know, I was already working my normal jobs, do my acting work and bits and bobs. So to me, it was like an additional bit of pocket money to do something that I quite enjoyed doing. Once I started to try and take it more seriously,

I discovered sponsorship deals. So I was approached by lots of different companies and I was quite picky about who I decided to partner with because, you know, when you’re building a brand, you have to protect it. You can’t just, as much as you need the income, you can’t just, you know, sully your brand by aligning with maybe companies that aren’t, don’t align with your like ethos and stuff like that. So, I tried to be careful with who I chose to partner with, but.

Sponsorship deals worked very well in the early days, really helped to support the production of the channel. A bit of affiliate marketing as well. So, you know, like with Amazon and things like that, kind of talking about products that I thought would be helpful for the students. And, you know, if they go through and buy something, then getting a little kickback, but that never really.

for my brand and for my audience that never really seemed like a viable option for real revenue. After a few years, I realized that I needed to do something that was more mine, more in my control. I also didn’t like constantly talking about other people’s products. So I created my first online course.

And that was a pronunciation course, because that’s where my real strength is. And I built it myself. I did everything myself, the website, just everything. And I had no idea what I was doing technically. And it was very stressful. I almost didn’t talk about it. It was like this dirty secret I was keeping. I had this course and I wasn’t telling anyone that I had the course because…

I couldn’t control the site. I didn’t know how to secure it. And I was constantly getting hacked. And so it was just a nightmare. So eventually I, I just forgot about it and carried on doing sponsorships. And then I was at a YouTube function and there was a chap there who also taught English on YouTube. And he gave a talk about how you can really monetize online courses.

through leveraging your audience and your YouTube channel. And when he showed me the figures of what they were making with their course, I was blown away. I was like, what? People really make that kind of money with an online course? That’s insane. I would really benefit from a decent income. And so I went home to my partner and I said, this is what I’ve heard about.

And he said, well, let’s sort out the courses then you’ve got a great course. Let’s put it on a site that’s secure, get someone to help us. And so that started the second phase for me is the inspiration from, from a peer. And from there, we went into two years of, of content building for what is now our fluency program. So building a number of courses that will take someone from a kind of lower intermediate level of English through to fluency.

And, I think we haven’t ever really stopped. We’ve built it, but we continue to improve and to change. And, you know, I’ve always been, I’ve always been very connected to my students, to my audience, and we take feedback very seriously. And so we’re constantly in this, this transition of moving towards something that better serves the audience and the students.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. And I’d be curious to hear in your courses now, and as they have been over the over the years, what are a couple of things that have worked really well for you and your students? Because one trend we see is a lot of people buy online courses, but they don’t use them as much as what they could. How have you sort of combated this? How have you?

got your students to stay engaged, to get the most out of the materials that you’ve made for them.

Anna 

Yeah, it’s a really good question and something I did struggle with in the first instance, we’d make the courses and we talked initially in the, well, we talked throughout the courses about interaction, how important interaction is and how they have to come into our community. So I think we started our community element as a Facebook group. Maybe I even had a WhatsApp group at one point, but, and that was a disaster actually, I do remember.

too many people joined and I couldn’t control it. And people were calling all sorts of hours that were just crazy. So we had a Facebook group, but no one was interacting. There was no incentive really, other than me saying, come and talk. There was no real reason for people to come and interact. And therefore there was no urgency for them to come back to the course and to re -engage with the materials. And so I decided that…

I needed to create a reason for them to come together. And the only thing I could think of was to do like exclusive live sessions. and so I started experimenting with different types of live events, whether that just be a hangout kind of session, like, Hey, let’s just get together on zoom at this time and talk, doing specific educational based.

live streams where they could interact live with me and ask questions around the material, doing things like quizzes, so making like fun events. So if it was a face -to -face based educational institution, I would say, well, let’s have a quiz night. You know, let’s get together in the common room after lessons and have a quiz night. Let’s go to the pub on this night. Let’s make it fancy dress. So I was trying to think of ways that you would get together in real life.

And then transition that into an online get together. and slowly, but surely that started to bring people in because they had a set time and day to come and get involved. And then I’d set homework and ask people to, you know, face to face, say, come on, get involved with this. and then I also set up a telegram group to be like an additional layer of. Nudge. Hey guys.

I’ve just set a challenge for today. I want everyone to post a picture based on this topic and describe it. And I’ve already put the post in the community, but no one’s interacting. So I go into Telegram and say, guys, come on. This is my post. This is my response to this challenge. I want you to get involved. You know, so I think just, just experimenting in that way of actually being present and bringing people together.

and then encouraging them to get involved in the actual course material or what we wanted them to do. That was quite a game changer really. And now from playing around that created one of our biggest products, which is the conversation club. So our whole offer now kind of revolves around this live element. So people come together, they join this club so that there’s like…

I don’t know, five or six live events every week run by different members of the team. And we have material prepared and so there’s stuff for them to do beforehand, run the classes, sometimes there’s homework to do after. And then there’s another event that gives feedback on the homework that they’ve done. So they have a reason to get involved and do the homework. Yeah, and it’s just worked really, really well.

Martin

Yeah, you know, that’s really, really cool. It’s, I love the insight there on what would people do, you know, in person and translating that across to the online experience. I think that’s, yeah, for sure a trend that we’ve seen, across, you know, our clients of people need a nudge. As you said, that it’s, it’s, they really, they want to get into the material. They want to learn more of it, but oftentimes I think with the online experience, it is a little bit of that interaction that’s missing. It’s, it’s,

it feels maybe sometimes it’s too much on the individual to motivate themselves to bring themselves forward. And sometimes all it can take is a WhatsApp message that, you know, we’re all spending so much time across these platforms, sometimes just having those little interactions and nudges along the way to bring them back into a live workshop or the course material is genius. I think that’s really, really cool that you’ve done that. And yet,

Anna

And then if they do like comment on a post or do a little bit of homework, it’s showing that someone is there like reading it. So responding to comments and to work that people are posting, even if it’s just a little thumbs up or, hey, great work. It was really nice to read or asking them questions. It makes people feel seen. It makes them feel valued. We always…

I’m reach out to new members and send them like direct messages and be like, Hey, welcome. Let me help on board you. Let me show you around. We’re very available. I know that’s not the same for other creators. It can be overwhelming, but it’s kind of like a cornerstone of what we offer at English Like a Native. It’s supposed to be a very social experience. We want people to feel like they’re supported because we…

We really want them to achieve when they come in. We’ve made a promise that we want to help them reach fluency. And that is genuinely what I want. You know, I’ve added extra classes simply because a student says, I want to join your program, but I’m on the other side of the world and there’s not enough classes for me in my time zone. And I say, okay, join and I’ll add an extra class. You know, we, I really care. And I think sometimes that can be missing that sense of being valued within online communities.

And so we just kind of go above and beyond as much as we can to value our members.

Martin

Absolutely. And it translates for you, right? I mean, if someone comes in and they feel that straight away, that sense of engagement, they’re saying, Hey, wow, there’s a community here. There’s someone looking out for me and nudging me along the way. You know, that’s going to lead to better retention rates. That’s going to lead to better results for them. And it’s, you know, obviously a better result business wise, not just, you know, obviously great for the, the personal success of all the students, but I know that translates from a business sense as well, because you get

customers that stick around for longer that want to buy more of your products. And yeah, that’s, that’s a really, really cool thing. Very curious what community platform are you using? If you’re able to share.

Anna 

Yeah, of course. So we use a community platform called Circle. So, and it’s honestly been one of the best finds when I was first searching for a alternative to Facebook, because, you know, Facebook has its strengths, but generally it can’t be relied upon. And it’s very complicated.

and just poses many problems. So I was looking for something that was reliable, that was user friendly, but also something that would continue to develop. And that’s what Circle does so well. In the time that I’ve been with them, their platform has improved so much. Like when I first joined,

all my courses were hosted on WordPress. We built our courses in an LMS on WordPress, a very laborious process of building, on WordPress. But you know, the courses looked beautiful. They were brilliant and they were fit for purpose. And then we got the community element set up, but we couldn’t really put the courses in there. And over the few years we’ve been with them.

So many things have changed. They’re always listening, just like we always listen to our members. They listen to their members, their creators, and they make changes based on, you know, people’s problems, what people need. And now, because they’ve made changes and introduced course elements within the community, we can now host our courses directly in the community. So it’s like everyone’s in one place. We don’t have to keep sending them back and forth, back and forth.

And they are always very open saying what’s coming up, what changes are on the roadmap so that we can prepare and plan for the next steps of the transformation. And so I think in about three weeks time, we will have finished our course migration and all our courses will live within our community, which is going to be a big, big celebration for us. Cause it’s been a long time in long time coming.

Martin 

Yeah, I’m sure that’s been a journey. Yeah. Well, shout out to Circle. Sounds like they’re doing a really good job. And I’m just curious, is it a free community only or is it only for customers that have bought a product or subscribed?

Anna 

So you can set it up however you want. If you’re thinking of joining Circle, you can set up a free community. You can have tiers. So within your community, you can like just on like on Facebook, you can have groups that are free and public to join. Or you can have, you know, private groups or secret groups. It’s the same with Circle. At the moment, the only way to come into my community on this platform is to be a paying student.

we are potentially going to open up some elements of it as a free community. we’re still not a hundred percent sure that’s what we want to do, but we certainly want to offer some events, some public events within the community. So there will be some things that our public wants. We’ve completed our migration.

Martin 

Nice. And you still have the telegram there as well, or is that a thing of the past? You still have both.

Anna 

Yeah. So Circle has a chat function. There is a chat room within Circle. but it doesn’t pop out, you know, like when you’re on Facebook, you can like have a chat going while you’re browsing and the chat is still there at the bottom of the page. Circle doesn’t have that yet. I believe that they will, change that, but it means that if you want to chat to people there, then you have to specifically go into the chat room and.

That’s not ideal if you’re there to kind of do some pre -reading or to see what’s going on. and so I feel like it’s more tumbleweeds more often than not. So we still have the telegram group because almost everyone’s got telegram. And when you send a message, there’s always someone holding their phone who would then quickly respond, you know, so it’s, it’s something that we hope to take into Circle eventually, but for now it’s still a need to have telegram.

Martin 

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it’s great exposure for you. I mean, you’re in your students’ hands where they’re spending a lot of time. And I know it’s difficult to get people into, even a Facebook group, even all these community platforms, right? Getting them over there is often the hardest part because we’ve seen those community groups where there’s not much activity. And I know a lot of people out there with…

communities and online courses struggle with this aspect. They get people signed up, but getting them engaged in that community, regardless of what platform it is, it’s hard. And sometimes, that’s why I really like the approach you’ve got there of the telegram sort of nudge, come over, hey, we’ve got this workshop, hey, we’ve got this post that we want you to engage on or share, join this challenge or quiz or whatever it is. I think it’s fantastic. That’s a really cool insight for anyone that’s got a…

and community out there, yeah.

Anna

I think it helps also just to have multiple ways to contact people. So we’ve had a number of times where the link hasn’t worked for a live event or the teacher that’s running a live event has suddenly had technical issues moments before going live. Their power has cut or something like that. And so the telegram group works in two ways. It can be the students messaging me and the wider group saying, Hey, I’m having trouble getting into this session today. Does anyone know what’s going on?

And then if a few more people say, yeah, yeah, me too. Then I look at it and go, no, what’s happened. And so I can then jump in to save the day. Or if it’s the other way around, if I know that there’s a technical issue that’s going to affect the students, then I can message them on telegram and say, hey, if you’re thinking of joining today’s session, there’s a bit of an issue, give us five minutes, we’re going to sort it out. And so it’s just a way to have.

You know, it’s like you had the landline and the mobile and it’s just a different way to connect with people so that if there’s a problem with one form of communication, you still have an option, you know, and we also have them on, on our mailing list as well. So we can always send emails if we need to.

Martin 

Yeah, super cool. Get all the touch points set up before and then your bases are all covered. That’s great. Just shifting gears a little bit. Would love to hear a little bit more about your approach as a language teacher. As someone myself who’s tried to learn German, got to sort of close to an A2 level, but struggled and still do struggle with that. And now learning Portuguese since I live here in Lisbon. And…

still stumbling my way through that process as well. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your methodology to language learning and yeah, a little piece of how you approach it.

Anna 

Yeah, absolutely. So I think many people feel like learning language should be like, you know, like you’re at school. You need to learn the rules. You need to learn the grammar rules. You need to learn all the parts and how they all fit together. And you need to sit and study the textbooks and then write them all out again and again and repeat them over and over again. But studies are showing more and more that this form of learning, I mean, it’s not fun for a start.

And it’s not as effective as people once believed. Studies are showing that if you kind of learn by route, if you do what’s the word for it, conscious learning. So when you sit down with a textbook and you say, I am going to learn, I’m going to do some Portuguese today. I’m going to learn some Portuguese. And you sit down and you try to consciously learn something. In the short term, that will work. But after a few weeks, your brain usually has forgotten majority of.

what you learned during that period of conscious learning. Now, the best way to learn and what studies are proving is that acquisition, which is the way we learn when we’re children, acquisition is the most effective way to learn. The problem with us as adults is we’re quite impatient and we want to know that we’re progressing. So we need to see results from the time that we’re spending. And we also don’t like to be in an uncomfortable situation.

So we don’t like not knowing what’s being said. We don’t like making mistakes. We don’t like being in a situation where there’s a conversation going on and we kind of get the gist, but we don’t really know when we think we know what to say, but we don’t know if our tenses are right. Like we just don’t like to feel vulnerable. When children learn language, they don’t have that concept of being vulnerable. My children are still making mistakes on like tenses or like irregular verbs. They…

My son always says, I goad, when I go to school, when I went, when I went, and we correct him so many times, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t get upset or anxious then when he has to say it again in future, he just like, okay, when I went, and then makes the mistake again later, later in the day. What we have to do as adults is treat our learning like,

we do when we’re children, children just absorb. They just spend their time hearing lots, seeing lots of language in context and experiencing it, having a connection to it. You know, they, when they’re hungry and they have this feeling and their parents might sense that they’re hungry because they can tell because they’re grouchy and they know they haven’t eaten for hours and they say, darling, what’s the matter? My tummy hurts. you’re hungry. I’m hungry.

hungry. And they hear that word again and again, I’m hungry. And they start to make this connection. I’m hungry. So as an adult, you need to start also having this connection to language, as well as exposing yourself to the language as much as possible. So making your learning journey meaningful, but also massively ramping up the input. So I speak to students all the time.

They come to me, they join my fluency program and I have a one -to -one call with them. I was like, and I say, tell me what you’re doing already. Do you listen to podcasts? Do you watch anything in English? How often do you speak English on a daily basis? How much do you read and write? Hardly ever. Most of them reply. I don’t do much. I occasionally watch a little bit of YouTube in English. and I’ll do maybe half an hour of study every couple of days, but that’s it.

that is going to be a really slow process. So for you learning Portuguese, I’d recommend that even if you feel like you don’t understand, you need to start listening so much more. You need to start reading so much more because a majority of the learning will happen kind of incidentally. So there’s, there’s times when I’ve like listened to news or, you know, I’m hearing people have a conversation.

And I realized there are words within that conversation or in that news article that I don’t actually know the exact meaning of, but I get the gist. And because I’ve heard that word in that context so many times, I know what type of word it is. I know if it’s a noun or a verb or an adjective, and I know that it’s related to politics because that’s the only context I ever heard it. So it’s something to do with politics or professional environments. And I know it’s negative.

because the context has always shown me that this is a negative thing. And so that’s, so we start to make these associations. Our brains are amazingly clever. They recognize patterns and they can start to put things together. It can start to put things together for us. So we don’t have to consciously learn everything. We just have to expose our brain enough for our brain to start doing a lot of the work.

Obviously, when you first start out, you’re going to have to work a little harder, do a bit more conscious learning, learning some, you know, general vocabulary, but the same stands. If you are watching loads of TV programs, listening to music, you know, really just getting immersed in the language, then you’re going to pick up a lot more than if you’re just doing a one hour class a week and nothing else. You know, so this is our methodology.

Martin 

Yeah. So it’s not a myth. It’s not a myth that the immersion does help. Because I’ve heard that as well. Like, you know, people said, well, you’ve lived in Germany for five years. Why don’t you speak fluent German? Well, I lived in Berlin, which is a, you know, an English hub or international hub, let’s say. Because I always maybe just as an excuse, you know, to say, well,

Yes, the immersion didn’t fully, it helped, but it wasn’t enough to get me, I could have been doing a lot more, absolutely. But you’re saying that immersion is in fact quite helpful.

Anna 

Yeah, but it

So what I find is a lot of my students actually live here in the UK. Many of them have lived in the UK for years and they come to me because they’re not fluent and they’re struggling. And when I, when I dive deeper into their circumstances, it’s normally that they’ve moved here with their family or their partner who speak their native language and they maybe have a job where they’re not interacting that much or they’re only interacting in a very,

narrow topic, if you like, like there’s only a small amount of vocabulary they need for their technical conversations, but outside of that, they don’t know how to have a normal conversation because they never do it. And when they go home, they speak with their family. Some of my students don’t have a job, they’re partner work, so they’re on their own all day at home.

not doing anything, not going anywhere. Their children go to school, have learned to be fluent in English. So their children help to do all the chat when they’re out and about, if they need it. And so despite being here for years, they are still isolated, only using their native language because they’re not allowing themselves to come out of their comfort zone. And it happens everywhere. We find our group, you know, expats all get together. You know, you find it everywhere, little groups.

of people from different parts of the world kind of find each other because it’s easier. They feel like themselves when they can use their own language. But if you, even for a month or so, force yourself to go out and have those conversations, join classes, join clubs and groups and make yourself go out and have the uncomfortable conversations in your broken way.

You’ll learn so much more than if you just hide away and say, well, I’m living in the country. I should know the language, but you’re not going to, if you won’t learn to swim, if you don’t take the armbands off and jump into the pool, you’ve got to do it.

Martin

Yeah. And do you have strategies to help your students overcome that, that discomfort, that, you know, that anxiety that they get, or maybe the fear? Do you have some strategies to help them with that?

Anna 

Yeah. So that’s what our conversation club is all about. So our conversation clubs, all, all are speaking sessions that are revolve around a different topic every day is a different topic. And we always provide them with kind of the setup for the topic. So they have their pre -reading material with audios and vocabulary lists and everything they could need to think about this topic in English.

And then they have their time to prepare and think about how they would answer the questions that we’ll pose in the class. And then they come into a safe environment. So they’re not being judged because they’re with a group of strangers who all feel the same way as they do. Over time, actually, this group of students are no longer strangers to each other. Most of them become very familiar with each other. We even have a couple who are best pals now. They lived in the same country.

They started meeting up and now they’re best buddies and they’re like, if it wasn’t for English Like A Native, we never would have met each other. And so it starts to become just a familiar safe space where people can, you know, be whatever level they’re at and it not be a problem. Many of my students are, you know, high flyers. A lot of them are highly qualified professionals who feel very uncomfortable making themselves.

vulnerable or, you know, not seeming like they’re perfect in their professional environment. So with us, they don’t have to have that. They’re not trying to prove anything to us. We’re not judging them or giving them a hard time. They are well supported. And so that’s the strategy. Basically they have an opportunity should they need it to come and use those sessions to be themselves and get the practice they need. And then obviously besides that, all the resources they need for actually.

taking their language a step further.

Martin 

Yeah, really cool. Yeah, sort of a safe space for them to engage. I like that. I’d have to find, this is good. This is good inspiration for me to also, you know, push a bit harder on the, on my own journey for learning another language. So it’s really cool. I’d be curious to hear, do you have some like success stories in mind of students that sort of pop into mind some, some cool sort of student success stories that you’ve had or that you’d like to share? Yeah.

Anna 

Yeah. Yeah. So my biggest one, we had a chap. Well, this is actually one of the guys who really inspired me to do the full fluency program. So I had a chap who came to me and this is back when I was doing kind of face to face stuff. when I met him, he was like a shell of a man. He had a terrible stutter and, really, and his stutter came from anxiety and he really struggled with life. So his, his mother had not

had recently died and his mother, I think, was kind of his world. He didn’t have a job. He lived with his mother. So her passing was, you know, absolutely devastating for him. He didn’t have a girlfriend despite being, you know, a grown man. He was in his thirties when I met him. So never been romantic with anybody. Didn’t have anything, any work or anything lined up. Didn’t have much in the way of experience because he hadn’t worked for a very long time.

felt like he was unable to communicate so he couldn’t even get through the interview because he couldn’t speak without stuttering. And didn’t have much in the way of friends either. So I was like, how am I going to help this guy? But I really want to help him because he was such a sweet man. And we worked together for quite a long time. Mostly focused on like communication skills.

confidence, again, just giving him a safe space to open up, to be himself, to take his time, to not feel that anxiety that makes us just close down. So when we’re anxious, our brain, we go into a different mode. When we have adrenaline run through our body, we’re set up to fight or flight. We’re set up to use our body to the best of its ability, but our brain goes on to survival mode. That doesn’t help us to.

recall vocabulary or to be our fluent self. And so it was just about providing him a supportive and safe environment to learn and get the practice he needed. And then slowly kind of coax him towards applying for a few jobs, helping him with the kind of cover letter, the CV, that kind of stuff. And then one day we get the great news that he’s got an interview.

but they said, it’s a telephone interview. And I’m like, my goodness me, that’s like even more, you know, scary than a face -to -face interview, doing it on the telephone where you’re, you know, you’re only relying on what you hear and trying to give clear, concise answers. But he did fantastically and he got the job. The job led to him getting friends. And then not long after that, I saw him again and he was engaged.

I was like, well, that’s, you know, you can’t get a bigger transformation than that. I got a man who was broken and by the end of our time together, which in fairness was a good year or so, he’d completely turned his life around. He was a completely different man. He still had an occasional stutter. It was like a bit of a habit, but it wasn’t holding him back. And he was able to enjoy his life. So that was, that’s my biggest success story.

outside of that, we’ve had students who come in at the kind of lower intermediate level with huge anxiety issues, very, hard on themselves, no confidence in their ability. Having studied the language for years and years and years feel like they’re stuck. and there’s one lady who not long ago passed her C2 level in English, which is like the highest level of the CEFR levels.

and then decided actually I’m going to become an English teacher. So she went from, you know, not believing she was ever going to be fluent to now teaching the language herself. And we have a few like that who have gone on to become teachers, even though that wasn’t their original plan. and so I always find that very rewarding.

Martin 

Yeah, that’s amazing. Like really, really cool stories. I mean, as someone that’s lived abroad in a couple of different countries, I understand, you know, it’s really powerful work what you’re doing, because you’re essentially giving someone a toolkit to not only just speak better, but all the doors that that opens for them in terms of the relationships and work and quality of life. Like it’s, it’s fundamental to be able to communicate. And I’ve felt it when, you know, I’ve been limited in the past and

and still feel that in some ways. And just, yeah, that’s why it’s so great to hear those stories of people that it’s not just about being able to speak better, it’s about what it does for you in your entire life. So that’s really, really cool. Just one question on the sort of, cause you’ve now, I know that you’ve had both experiences of you sort of started in person and I believe you maybe still have.

Do you still have some in -person stuff now or it’s all purely online? Okay. So I’d be curious to hear what do you love most about teaching online compared to in -person? I always think that’s a cool insight. Yeah.

Anna 

So the first thing that I’m laughing because the first thing I think about is that I don’t have to clean the house. When I used to teach face to face, when I had, when I was private teaching, like one -to -one, I would have students come to a room in my home. And I always found that very stressful because I felt like I had to tidy the entire, their entire journey through the house, you know, whatever they would possibly see would have to be absolutely pristine because.

I get quite anxious about things like that. And now when I’m teaching online, I don’t need to worry about that. But thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Background is sorted. The rest looks absolute tip. I love teaching online because of how many people you can reach and where they are in the world. Like if, if I didn’t teach online, I wouldn’t be able to reach.

Anna 

many of the people that I really adore helping. So many of my students are so fantastic and I feel like we’re making a real difference in their lives, which is so rewarding for me. I wouldn’t be able to do that if we didn’t have the internet. I love how easy the internet makes things, like creating materials. In the past, it was like…

you know, write things out, print things off, create things that, you know, get your tape players and get your music and record things on your cassette tapes and play them back and have your projectors. And it was so tech heavy. And these days, obviously everything’s much faster and more efficient. And I love the accessibility of the internet. There is something lost though. I, especially when it comes to teaching,

voice, so teaching pronunciation and things like presenting. So doing presenting skills, confidence in presenting and like breathing and projection, that kind of work. You really need to be in a room with someone to fully get, to get a feel for how they’re holding their bodies and how well they’re projecting to see what they’re doing technically with their voice and their breath.

It’s very hard when you can only see like head and shoulders to see whether they’re using their diaphragm. Are they releasing their stomach muscles? Are they holding good posture? So I miss that opportunity to physically be in the room with someone. And when it comes to a group, there’s so many more like games and fun things that you can do when you’re together as a group in person and much harder when you’re on Zoom, you know.

Martin 

Yeah. Have you thought about trying to host any sort of in -person workshops, events? Yeah.

Anna 

I have, and so it might surprise you to hear that I’m a bit of an introvert and I get quite anxious when I do anything that is unfamiliar to me, which is bizarre because I spend most of my life telling people to get out of their comfort zone. But I talk a lot about doing an in -person event. There’s just a lot of…

things to consider, you know, I live in London, so everywhere here is very expensive. So if I were to hold an in -person event, you’ve got to think about where you would do it and how many people you’re going to have. And then do you have to think about accommodation for them? And so there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of admin involved. I would like to do it at some point, but maybe when I can have someone help me, someone who’s good at event planning.

so that I don’t have to take the burden and the stress of planning the event. I can just plan the actual education part rather than the logistical part.

Martin 

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. No, but in any case, what you’re doing now to sort of emulate that in -person experience through the community and everything is really, really cool. So definitely taking some inspiration from that. So as we wrap things up, tell us a little bit about what’s ahead for you and the brand at the moment. What are you working on and what’s on the horizon for you?

Anna

So we are about to do a big change, which probably by the time this is published, we may have already announced, but it might be a reveal. We currently have been selling a lot of our courses independently. So you can buy just the pronunciation course or just a B2 course or the business course.

If somebody wants the whole package at the moment, they join the fluency program and that’s where they’re supported and they have access to everything and they have the speaking classes and everything, but it’s quite an expensive program, which doesn’t suit everybody. I understand if you aren’t living and working in the UK, it’s, it’s, you know, everything here is quite expensive. So I want to make things more accessible. And so we’re going to be moving towards more,

of a membership style fluency program. So we have our conversation club where people can come and just do the live stuff, paying a much smaller monthly price. Or they can have the fluency membership where they pay a smaller monthly membership to have access to the club with the speaking practice, but also to all the courses. So if they only want to do one of the courses, it will only take a couple of months. They only have to pay a couple of months worth of membership.

and then if they want the guided, supported, you know, teacher help level of, of learning, then we’ll still have our premium program, our fluency program that they can get involved with. But it’s just about making things more accessible for all budgets. So we are looking forward to kind of streamlining, cause also for us from a marketing point of view, trying to market 10 different courses.

And trying to figure out how you then nurture someone who’s bought one course, but not others, and then have a different funnel for every single course that we sell. It’s just been a disaster for us on the back end. We, we don’t know what we’re doing. We were just, our heads are spinning with it. And so now we’re only going to have three products on the front end. So it’s, it’s more, it’s simpler for our students or for our potential students coming to see you can do speaking practice.

You can do the courses self -guided, or you can have a full tailored program. It’s much easier for them. It’s much easier for us then to understand what’s happening and where we need to do more work, more marketing. So we’re very excited about streamlining our business.

Martin 

Yeah, no, that’s really cool and exciting. And for sure, understanding it from the customer standpoint, if there’s too many things on the menu, sometimes it’s just gonna leave people fatigued and that they’ll literally not sign up just because of that. Even though there is like signing up to one of them would be the right choice, maybe there’s decision overwhelmed there. So it sounds like, yeah, you’re all over with streamlining and also reducing the price point is…

Where are most of your customers coming from? Are they mostly in the UK or have you like the people that are buying the courses, where are they mostly located?

Anna 

Yeah.

We have quite a lot of people in the UK, but then I say a lot. it’s probably only about 10%. that is our biggest, it’s our biggest percentage. but still it’s only a small percentage of the whole. We have, a growing number of people coming from Japan. So this is why we’re having to add additional classes because our time zones are so different. and that’s because I think the podcast has quite a big listening,

Like there’s big base in Japan for our podcast. I don’t know why, but we’re very excited about it. And then quite a lot of people dotted around Europe. And then, you know, the odd ones here and there, South America, the US, yeah, all over the place, everywhere.

Martin 

Yeah, yeah, really cool. Well, it looks, it sounds like you’re having a far reaching impact all around the world. And that’s, that’s really, really cool. It was great to, yeah, thank you so much for sharing all of that and your story. And for sure, I’ve already got some useful tips I’m gonna be taking with me today. So thank you so much. It was great to have you on the show. If anyone wants to learn more about you and English Like A Native, where should they go?

Anna 

Wherever they normally consume content, you’ll probably find me. So if you just search for English Like A Native or visit the website, englishlikeanative.co.uk and you’ll find me. I’m on every platform going, including podcasts, like there’s every platform.

Martin

Well, that’s a topic for another day as well. How do you manage across all those platforms? But no, really cool. Thank you so much, Hannah. It was great to have you on today. Thanks. Thanks, Hannah. Have a good one. Bye -bye.

Anna

Thank you. Okay. Take care. Bye bye.