Why I Call It a Second Language

For sixteen years, I taught English to adults. Doctors, engineers, and accountants, people who were brilliant in their own language and suddenly found themselves struggling to order coffee or follow a meeting.

I noticed the same pattern again and again. First came a quiet phase, where people understood more than they could say. Then came translation, where every sentence was built in their first language and converted, slowly and effortfully, into the new one. Somewhere in there came a painful feeling many of them named out loud: "I feel less intelligent in English."

They weren't less intelligent. They were mid-acquisition.

Years later, I became a leadership coach, working mostly with people who had been promoted because they were excellent at something else. Skilled clinicians, sharp specialists, the person everyone went to for answers. And I kept hearing a familiar sentence in a new form: "I don't feel good at this."

That's when it clicked. These new leaders weren't failing. They were translating. They were taking situations like a tense conversation, a struggling team member, or a decision with no clear answer, and running them through their first language, the language of expertise, where there's usually a right answer and you're the one who knows it. Leadership doesn't work that way. It has its own grammar, one of questions, trust, ambiguity, and influence over control.

Here's what language learning taught me that I wish every new leader knew: the awkwardness is not evidence that you don't belong. It's evidence that you're learning. Fluency doesn't arrive through information alone. It comes through immersion, practice, mistakes, and eventually a day when you realize you stopped translating.

That's what this space is about. Leadership as a second language: how capable people learn to lead, and more quietly, how they become someone new along the way. Some posts will be short notes like this one. Some will be longer pieces about how our workplaces and institutions help or get in the way. Eventually there'll be conversations with people who have made the shift themselves.

If you're somewhere in the middle of that shift right now, still translating, I'd love to hear from you. What's your "first language," and what's been hardest to leave behind?

— Saeed