From asking someone else to take the call, to opening it.

Sara had been at the company two years before she ran her first client call. Not because she wasn't ready. She'd been ready for a year. She just kept finding reasons it should be someone else.

"The English was the excuse," she says now. "It was always the excuse." Sara's English, on paper, was fine. She'd studied for fifteen years. She read in English every day. The problem wasn't the language. It was the half-second between thinking and speaking, the gap where she'd already decided it would come out wrong.

The first session with her coach didn't touch grammar. They opened a doc and listed the calls she'd ducked that month. Then the ones she'd actually run, and what made those ones feel safe. By the third session, the doc became a script for the kind of call she kept avoiding.

She ran her first 12-person client kickoff in week eleven. "Halfway through I realised I'd disagreed with the client. In English. Out loud. And then I'd proposed a different timeline. I didn't notice myself doing it. That was the part that shocked me."

She still uses the doc. It's mostly empty now.