In 1999 I walked into a language school near Notting Hill station to interview for a CELTA course, a teaching qualification for English as a foreign language.

The school ran classes for international students from all over the world, and the woman who interviewed me made it very clear, in the way that certain people in certain positions do, that she didn’t think I was up to it.

There was a placement test as part of the process. Looking back now, having since completed a Master’s degree in applied linguistics, the questions were straightforward. At the time, with no background in language, no teaching experience, and no qualifications in anything remotely related, some of them were genuinely tricky.

She picked up on that quickly. Her manner was dismissive, a little uppity, not particularly kind about it. Her advice was simple: stop here, this probably isn’t for you.

What I Did With That

I stayed quiet. I didn’t argue, didn’t try to convince her, didn’t ask for a second chance. I just listened, absorbed it, and left with a quiet determination that she’d got it wrong.

Stubbornness is probably the honest word for it. But there’s a particular kind of stubbornness that kicks in when someone in authority tells you that you can’t do something, and it doesn’t feel like anger or defiance so much as a very calm decision to go and find out for yourself.

Her dismissiveness wasn’t a reason to stop. It was a green light to prove her wrong.

So I enrolled anyway & got started.

The Course Was Hard

I want to be straight about this because the point isn’t that she was completely wrong about everything. The course was difficult.

I was learning new concepts from scratch, picking up frameworks and terminology I’d never encountered, and at various points during the teaching practice I stood in front of a classroom full of students and felt genuinely nervous in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t done it.

At one point an experienced teacher who was considerably kinder than my interviewer gave me a small piece of advice about body language, about how to carry yourself in front of a room so that the nerves don’t telegraph themselves to the people watching. It helped.

But what helped more was a realisation that quietly shifted something.

The students I was teaching knew far less about English than I did. That sounds obvious written down, but it matters. Teaching doesn’t require you to be the world’s leading expert on a subject. It requires you to know more than the person sitting in front of you, and to communicate that clearly.

Once that clicked, the nervousness started to lose its grip.

What Happened After

I graduated. The woman who told me to stop was nowhere to be seen, and I never crossed paths with her again after that interview. I have no idea where she ended up.

After completing the course I received four job offers. Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Busan, and Nagoya. I chose Nagoya, stayed, and after a few years moved to a company that held contracts with some of the largest organisations in Japan.

• Toyota
• Fujitsu
• Brother

Boards and senior executives who were brilliant, successful, and accomplished in ways I wasn’t, but who needed what I knew. The company trusted me to walk into those rooms & deliver, and I did.

One lesson in particular stays with me. A Toyota board member booked a private session and handed me a speech he was preparing to deliver in Russia. He needed it proofread, polished, and ready. I worked through it with him, we refined it together, and he delivered it. Mikhail Gorbachev was in the audience.

The woman in Notting Hill told me I probably wasn’t cut out for this. A few years later I was helping prepare a speech for a room that contained one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century.

None of that happens if I take her advice.

The Person Who Told You That You Weren’t Ready

Most people have a version of that woman somewhere in their past. A teacher, a manager, an interviewer, sometimes just someone whose opinion carried weight at the wrong moment.

Someone who looked at where you were at the time and told you, with apparent authority, that it probably wasn’t for you.

What they were actually doing was measuring your starting point and mistaking it for your ceiling.

The starting point is real. If you’re new to something, you’re new to it, and there’s no shortcut around that. But new is not the same as incapable, and struggling with something at the beginning is not evidence that you’ll always struggle with it. It’s just evidence that you haven’t done it yet.

The qualification nobody gives you credit for is the one you earn by going anyway, doing the work, and finding out for yourself what you’re actually capable of. That’s the only assessment that means anything.

You don’t need permission from the person who doubted you.

You just need to be a little more stubborn than they expected.

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