Case Study
Marianna: Being Heard as Herself
Marianna is a dental nurse with the NHS. Slovakian by background, she came to LSW tired of the assumptions people made about where she was from, wanting her voice to reflect her rather than invite a guessing game.
The Challenge
Marianna had grown weary of being categorised the moment she spoke. “Are you Polish?” was a question she heard often, though she’s in fact Slovakian, and people, she felt, automatically judged and placed her before they knew her. Interestingly, it troubled her more socially than professionally, a quiet friction in everyday connection rather than a barrier at work.
Are you Polish?' was one I often heard. People automatically judged and categorised me.
The Solution
Marianna’s taster session brought an unexpected discovery. The picture was being complicated by habits she’d absorbed from those around her, so subtly she hadn’t noticed. “I was steadily acquiring an Essex accent without even realising, and I needed this to be pointed out to me,” she says. Sometimes the most useful thing a coach can do is show you what you can’t yet hear in yourself.
From there, the work was highly tailored to her, with regular feedback shaping her progress session by session. She valued the flexibility of arranging her sessions around her life, and found benefits she hadn’t gone looking for, including a marked improvement to her vocabulary.
The Result
For Marianna, it’s the combination that made the difference: an approach shaped closely around her, and the steady rhythm of feedback that kept her moving forward. The gains reached beyond the accent she came to work on, into a richer vocabulary and a greater ease in expressing herself, so that the way she sounds now reflects the person she is, rather than a background others assumed for her.
I love the flexibility involved in arranging my sessions. It’s the highly-tailored approach, as well as receiving feedback on a regular basis, that really helps.
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