Louise Jefferies

speaker

999 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Louise Jefferies’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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English Talk — Speaking up in English at work for introverts with Louise Jefferies · Ep 58 The Hidden Cost of Overthinking at Work with Linda Terry · 27 Jun 2026 podcast

And what I also noticed is the reverse side of that, that Germans know they have a reputation for being direct, and they know that we have this British small talk and politeness, and they way overthink their communication.

And it's very uncomfortable when you translate directly from English to German, the would you mind, could I possibly, these sort of quite, I think in some ways, old-fashioned British phrases.

Two things happen when you translate that into German.

It sounds absolutely horrible.

It's horrendous.

It's toe curling, as we would say in English.

So they're not comfortable saying it, but they feel they're not polite enough in German.

So they're over being over polite, particularly in written communication.

When I read emails for my students, it's so over polite.

And I have to say to them, look, this person you're writing to, it's their job.

You don't have to say, could you possibly?

Please is enough.

So there's this overcompensation that they think they're being rude.

overcompensating that complicates things even more yeah which feeds into what we started with with this mental chatter and the overthinking a situation so just in a short conversation already we can see how easy it is to overthink situations not just from the information but the culture the language

So how about we, let's go into a little bit more detail about this overthinking, which is also a human thing, and how we help our clients with that very topic and maybe how we deal with it ourselves, because you and I, we're both guilty of overthinking.

Exactly.

So the overthinking, or maybe it's not overthinking, maybe it's just the looking back on a conversation.

Because I think if we didn't, then it would be a little bit strange because it would suggest that we don't care.

I think the conversations where you don't look back on are the ones that don't really matter.

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