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to Anna Wichuen's Business English Podcast. My name is Anna and this podcast is designed especially for Spanish-speaking professionals who want to speak more and speak better. Every week for 20 minutes, I give you my best tips, advice and guidance as an expert business English coach to help you improve your confidence, boost your skills, and so you can have a career that's not limited by English. If you love the podcast, I highly recommend that you sign up to the Anna Wichuen's newsletter, which I send every Friday. This is a lovely, nice, short and sweet summary of all the things I've talked about in the podcast with some translations and examples. So it's a perfect way to consolidate your learning from what you hear in each of the episodes. And the link to sign up is in the description box. Other ways that you can help the podcast include simply telling a friend or a colleague about the podcast somebody else who you think could benefit from this type of content. 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Also, if you want to get a special offer and get early access, you can also join the wait list and I'll send the details for that in the newsletter this week. All the links are below in the description box. Very quickly before we move on, I want to give a shout out to Tone T Zhang. You left a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and you said information is very practical. Need to listen every day. Goodness me. Thank you so much for your review. I'm really glad that you find the podcast useful and practical. That's really what I was always intending with this podcast is that you get something practical that you can actually apply. Not just theory or whatever. You can get that in many different places, but what are some practical things that you can go away after the episode and actually use? Thank you so much again. I really appreciate it, Tone T Zhang. Don't forget to get in touch. Send me a DM or an email and I will send across the free business training for listening. Let's get back to the topic of today. And the thing is, you may feel nervous when you ask a question, but we have a really nice saying in English, which is there's no harm in asking. You might think it's a stupid question. You might think, am I asking them about something they've already explained? And now it looks like I haven't understood what they were talking about. And so now I just look like I look stupid. As I mentioned in the introduction, there's also that phrase, no question, it's a stupid question. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. However, I have to say, I'm sure that I've asked a lot of stupid questions in my lifetime. So we're going to say, yes, no question is a stupid question. And absolutely, if you don't feel clear about something, then you should feel that you are able to ask that question. It's not on you. If you haven't necessarily understood, it's a two way thing. It's 50-50. If you need them to clarify something, you should go ahead and do it. Obviously, today I have 20 minutes with you to talk about this topic. And there's lots of different questions that come up on a day to day basis of work. Maybe you need information. You're asking somebody to do something. It's a request. You're objecting to something you're inquiring. You're getting to the bottom of what is going on. There's a lot of different questions. Of course, today I'm going to focus on a few specific categories that I've seen come up that people are not as comfortable with. I think there are also some really good ground rules to have in place, which I mentioned to my clients when we're practicing questions. The most important thing I think that you can do is always prep your questions in advance. If you have time, of course, sometimes you're thinking on the spot and sometimes it's a little bit of improvisation. But if you have time, always think about the questions you want to ask in advance. That's always going to help you. You can also, if you feel a little bit anxious or a little bit nervous about asking a question, you can give yourself a bit of a safety net by adding a phrase at the beginning of what you want to say and I'll talk a little bit more about that later.