I recently met with a career counselor who commented that his clients spend about $6,000 on courses to get a job and they still are unemployed because individuals do not realize the importance of accent reduction training. They would rather spend the money on attaining a certificate instead of learning how to retrain the muscles of the mouth.

It doesn’t really matter if you have good skills in your chosen field if you can’t get passed the interview stage. One of the techniques that we assist our clients with is developing good intonation patterns during an interview. In many countries interviews are rather formal, whereas an interview on the West Coast is a little bit more relaxed. I told one client that having an interview in Canada is like having coffee with a friend. You only have one shot at selling yourself, so you want to make sure that in addition to your skills you show that you are an approachable individual.

One way that you can sound friendlier is to adopt good intonation patterns. For example, I had a client who was constantly interrupted whenever he spoke. We found that his typical intonation pattern was to fall at the end of every thought pattern. He came across as being abrupt and almost rude. If he wanted to say “ I am very organized and I am excellent at multi-tasking, his typical intonation pattern was to say I am very organized . I am excellent at multi-tasking. (Imagine saying this with a harsh falling pattern.) With time, he learned to rise and fall half way on the first sentence and fall on the second. After learning this pattern, he mentioned that people seemed to be friendlier and his colleagues seemed to enjoy listening to him speak.