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Confidence From Repeated Small Wins

By Anneke MbathaJune 30, 2026Speaking

Stop wasting your money on expensive “mindset coaching” or those generic seminars that promise to transform your soul if you just breathe more deeply. After nineteen years of watching adults freeze up in exam rooms, I can tell you that confidence isn’t a spiritual awakening; it’s a technical skill. Most people think they lack courage,

Its and It’s, Settled

I was sitting in a quiet exam hall last Tuesday, the only sound being the frantic scratching of pens, when I saw it again. A student, clearly brilliant and highly motivated, had just lost a precious half-mark because they couldn’t decide whether to write it’s or its. It’s a small thing, isn’t it? But in

Intelligibility, Not Accent Removal

I’ve sat across from hundreds of brilliant, highly educated professionals who suddenly lose their ability to form a coherent sentence the moment an examiner looks at them. They aren’t struggling with grammar or vocabulary; they are paralyzed by the fear that their voice sounds “wrong.” I am so tired of hearing advice that tells you

Linking Phrases That Are Not Overused

I’ve spent nineteen years staring at stacks of exam papers, and if there is one thing that makes my eyes twitch, it’s the “thesaurus vomit” students use to try and impress examiners. You’ve been told that to score high, you need to sprinkle every fancy transition word you can find into your writing, but let

Starting When You Cannot Start

I’ve sat across from hundreds of exhausted professionals in my classroom, watching them stare at a pristine sheet of paper with a look of pure, unadulterated terror. They’ve all bought the expensive productivity planners and listened to the “flow state” gurus, but none of that helps when you’re staring at a deadline and a void.

Abbreviations You Will Actually Meet

I was sitting in a quiet exam hall last Tuesday, the kind of heavy silence you only find in professional testing centers, when I watched a student stare at a reading comprehension passage as if it were written in ancient hieroglyphs. He wasn’t struggling with the grammar or the complex sentence structures; he was simply

Writing Three Hundred Words a Day

I’ve spent nineteen years watching adult learners stare at blank exam papers with a look of sheer, paralyzed terror. They aren’t failing because they lack vocabulary or because they haven’t read enough literature; they are failing because they are waiting for a “spark” that never comes. Most of the self-help gurus will tell you that

Revising Without Rewriting Everything

I’ve sat across from hundreds of students, watching them stare at a red-inked exam paper with a look of pure, exhausted defeat. They think they need a complex, multi-step psychological system or a fancy new planner to figure out how to act on feedback, but that is a total waste of your time. Most people

Punctuation That Clarifies Meaning

I was sitting in my office last Tuesday, staring at a pile of IELTS essays, when I felt that familiar, sharp ache in my temples. It wasn’t the complexity of the students’ ideas that frustrated me—on the contrary, they were brilliant—it was the chaos of their delivery. I watched another high-achieving professional lose nearly a

Humour in a Second Language

I remember sitting in a quiet exam hall last spring, the only sound being the frantic scratching of pens, when I saw a candidate’s face turn a deep, mortified shade of crimson. He had tried to inject a bit of wit into his formal essay to “show personality,” but instead, he had tripped over a