Sounding different

What an uncomfortable client meeting taught me about credibility, self-improvement, and the way we speak.

July 2002.

“Where are you from?” the client asks, eyes narrowing a little.

Usually, I get this question from someone who has an accent too, who’s genuinely interested. This one lands differently. The tone is hard to describe, but it’s not friendly. Maybe I’m being oversensitive, a habit I’ve refined over my entire life. I don’t love the question even on a good day. I’m proud of my heritage. But my general attitude as a French Canadian immigrant is to blend in at work. I want to shine for my research insights, nothing else.

“Québec, Canada,” I say.

“Ah,” he says, as if this solves a small mystery.

A few minutes later, we’re deep into the presentation.

“So you’re saying we should take profits from this portfolio to make the benefit payments?” he asks, tapping the page.

“Yes,” I say. “Valuations have moved far enough; you can rebalance intelligently rather than take an equal slice from all your portfolios.”

He nods. “That makes sense.”

The rest of the meeting is ordinary. We talk about investment strategy, portfolio reallocation, implementation costs. Nothing else feels off. I’ve gained the client’s confidence.

As we’re walking back to the car after the meeting, I’m quiet. It’s a hot summer day, somewhere in the Midwest. I’m on the road to promote our asset allocation advisory and portfolio reallocation business. I’m wearing a cheap suit made from fabric with the approximate breathability of roofing material, and I’m carrying heavy PowerPoint books.

As usual, I’m with a salesperson. In this case, I’m with my best partner, the Human Piranha on Steroids. The origin of this nickname is explained in The Psychology of Leadership. Let’s just say he swears a lot.

“Let’s f***ing go Seb, we’re going to be late to our next f***ing meeting. And tonight we’re going to Cheesecake Factory. It’s the best f***ing restaurant chain in the world.” He’s in his usual frenetic one-the-road-between-meetings mood. He didn’t pick up on anything unusual about the meeting we just had.

Back in the office, I go to my boss with a request. I work at a great company that invests in its people. I know that when I ask for training, they’ll pay for it.

“I want an accent reduction coach,” I say.

“Absolutely,” my boss says. “Set it up.”

A week later, I learn that formal accent reduction is tedious. I have deeply ingrained speech patterns to fix.

My coach, Elaine, is in her mid-fifties, with gray hair and a gentle demeanor. She’s also a taskmaster. She listens with her head tilted, then writes words on a yellow legal pad. She constantly interrupts me to point out mispronounced words.

“For the word god, stretch the vowel toward gawwd,” she says.

“God,” I say.

“Gawwd.”

“Gawd?”

“Closer.”

She’s pinpointing specific words and asking me to rehearse them several times a day. I start to find her annoying, which is unfair because the entire point of the arrangement is for her to tell me what I’m doing wrong.

I’m about to make an important decision about this whole accent reduction project.

Progress is slow. I tell myself this is like learning to touch-type. You make the effort once, and it pays dividends for the rest of your life.

I’m highly motivated to improve, and for good reason: research shows that we tend to associate accents with lower credibility and lower intelligence. This is unfortunate and only pertains to first impressions.

In one experiment, people heard trivia statements read by native and non-native speakers. The same statements seemed less true when delivered with a foreign accent. The research on perceived intelligence is similar. One recent study found that listeners linked accents with lower perceived confidence and intelligence, which the authors interpreted as listener bias.

This matters for sales. In a classic experiment, American listeners heard the same VCR sales pitch (remember those?) in standard American English and accented English. The standard accent produced higher purchase-intention ratings.

However, an accent can also help when it fits the product. Listeners responded better to French-accented wine ads and German-accented sausage ads than to accent-product mismatches. The listener’s culture, familiarity with the accent, and the stakes of the interaction all matter. Accents create friction in some situations and useful associations in others.

My integrated view is that if you work in sales, client service, media, or any role where persuasion depends on quick trust, it is probably worth working on your accent, especially in markets where a standard accent carries a competence signal. Clearer speech makes it easier for the listener to focus on your ideas instead of the effort required to process your words.

This makes the decision I’m about to make seem misguided.

“I quit,” I tell Accent Coach Elaine.

She looks disappointed, especially since I’ve decided to give up after only two lessons. I have enough work to do with my day job. I tell myself that I’ll get back to accent reduction later.

I never do.

Over the years, my accent resembles an asymptote: getting closer and closer to disappearing, without ever reaching zero.

May 2026.

Once or twice a year, someone still asks me where I’m from. These days, it’s often a European who’s interested in small talk about home countries.

This morning, I asked my 18-year-old son, a native speaker of American English, for an assessment.

“Do you think I still have an accent?”

“A little,” he says. “You definitely overemphasize the As when you’re on TV, like in chAracter.”

“Yeah,” my wife Anne says, smiling. “You and I put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle.”

I’m comfortable with my communication skills. I’m essentially self-taught in English, minus a couple of perfunctory high school classes. Before 2000, I could barely hold a conversation. I did all my schooling in French, through my master’s degree in finance. Since then, I’ve published three books in English.

We may overestimate formal education. Learning something on your own can be inefficient and messy, leaving gaps. That has been true for me in English, programming, and writing. But there is real joy in the process. I like knowing that the work compounds, even when the results are imperfect.

My accent story is part of that same lesson. I thought sounding different was a professional liability to eliminate. Clear speech matters. Credibility matters. But so does the confidence to stop treating every trace of difference as a defect. I still want people to focus on my ideas, and I still work on how I communicate. But I no longer hear my accent as evidence that I’m unfinished.

Perfection is a poor target. Progress is much better, and it keeps life interesting. Sometimes, self-learning produces extraordinary results. Jimmy Hendrix, Dave Grohl, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Vincent van Gogh, all developed their craft without much, if any, formal education or training.

Self-improvement author Brad Stulberg captures the mindset well: “Find joy, satisfaction, and growth in the process and let the results take care of themselves.”

Still, I should probably learn to touch-type.

P.S. The Brad Stulberg quote is here for a reason. Next week, I’m interviewing him about his new bestseller, The Way of Excellence.

Jimmy Hendrix never took formal guitar lessons, nor did he ever learn to read music. Image: David Redfern / Redferns.

Endnotes

Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). “Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096. Foreign-accented speech can reduce perceived truthfulness because listeners may misread processing difficulty as lower credibility.

Abu Guba, M. N., Daoud, S., & Jarbou, S. (2023). “Foreign Accented-Speech and Perceptions of Confidence and Intelligence.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 52, 1093–1113. Listeners link accentedness with perceptions of confidence and intelligence.

Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C., & Fillenbaum, S. (1960). “Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Languages.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1), 44–51; Fuertes, J. N., Gottdiener, W. H., Martin, H., Gilbert, T. C., & Giles, H. (2012). “A meta-analysis of the effects of speakers’ accents on interpersonal evaluations.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 42(1), 120–133. Listeners judge the same or similar speech differently depending on the language variety or accent carrying it.

Tsalikis, J., DeShields, O. W., Jr., & LaTour, M. S. (1991). “The Role of Accent on the Credibility and Effectiveness of the Salesperson.” Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 11(1), 31–41. American listeners rated a standard-American-accented VCR pitch higher than the same pitch delivered in Greek-accented English on credibility, competence, friendliness, and purchase intention.

Hendriks, B., van Meurs, F., & van der Meij, E. (2015). “Does a Foreign Accent Sell? The Effect of Foreign Accents in Radio Commercials for Congruent and Non-Congruent Products.” Multilingua, 34(1), 119–130. Accents can help when they fit the product, such as French-accented wine ads and German-accented sausage ads, while also showing that accent effects depend on context.

Boduch-Grabka, K., & Lev-Ari, S. (2021). “Exposing Individuals to Foreign Accent Increases their Trust in What Nonnative Speakers Say.” Cognitive Science, 45(11), e13064; Clarke, C. M., &

Garrett, M. F. (2004). “Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented English.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(6), 3647–3658. Familiarity and brief exposure can change how listeners process accented speech and can reduce the credibility penalty.