About Greg
I built The Confident Conversationalist because I know from the inside what it feels like when there is a gap between who you are and who you are able to be in conversation. I have lived that gap — and I have found my way through it. That is what I help people do.
A Stuttering Start
As a child, there was always a gulf between my thoughts and feelings and how I was able to express them.
Sure, I had friends, but I wasn’t very sporty and felt most at home reading, doing art, or losing myself in my imagination.
When it came time to share what I was excited or passionate about with others, or to speak under any kind of pressure, I shut down. Thoughts and words raced through my head, stumbling over one another, unable to find their way out of my mouth in an organised way, stuttering from the start.
This dramatically affected my self-confidence and I dreaded such situations. The problem was not that I was an introvert. Introversion is not a flaw — some of the most compelling conversationalists I know are deeply introverted. The problem was something more specific — a gap between what I was thinking and feeling and what I was able to get out in the moment. That gap is not a personality trait. It is a pattern, and patterns can change.
Eventually, my parents sent me to a speech therapist.
He gave me some simple speech exercises that felt silly at first, but then began to slow down my speech. It worked.
Finding My Voice
Some time after school and university, I decided to take a leap into the unknown. Surprising my friends and family, I went to study speech and drama.
This was frankly life-changing.
I had zero experience in this area, but I loved film, had a vivid imagination and I felt an urgent need to express it.
I was utterly mortified when I first went up on stage.
Like most people encountering themselves on a recording for the first time, I was appalled by the sound of my own voice. That too changed.
With the right encouragement and training from my teachers, I overcame those fears and began to find my voice.
I learned what confidence really means and where it comes from.
I went on to do acting professionally and to teach speech and drama for several years, sharing with others what I’d learned.
Watching someone discover they can hold a room – or simply hold a conversation – without performing, without monitoring themselves, without bracing for silence – that never gets old.
Heading East
After this, I moved to China for a stint of teaching English.
I’d planned on a year, but ended up spending over a decade there teaching, managing a school, and developing countless course materials.
What fascinated me was that despite all the cultural differences, the challenges people face in communicating with confidence are remarkably similar.
Whether I was working with Chinese university students, South African professionals, or people from a dozen other backgrounds, the same patterns appeared: the self-monitoring, the performance anxiety, the gap between who they were in private and who they could be in conversation. The challenge was always more internal than linguistic.
My focus was never just language acquisition. It was helping people stop performing and start actually communicating — in English, in Mandarin, in boardrooms, in casual conversation. The language was different, but the work was the same.
I hold a Trinity DipTESOL diploma and have over a decade of professional experience in teaching, communication coaching, and curriculum development across multiple countries and cultures. Everything I teach is grounded in that experience — not in theory.
If any of this sounds familiar — if you recognise that gap between who you are and who you can be in conversation — that is exactly where we start.
I have been there. I know what it takes to close it. And I would genuinely like to help you do the same.
— Greg
If this resonates – here is where to start.