The freeze
It is not your French.
It is the phone.
No face to read. No pause to lean into. Poor audio. The other person speaks first, fast, and from a script you have never seen. Even French people have bad calls. The freeze you feel is the situation, not a verdict on the years you have spent learning.
of advanced learners in our last survey rated making phone calls in French as very difficult.
Who it is for
You live in France. You have studied French for years, possibly decades. You read it well enough. In person you usually muddle through. On the phone you go quiet, or you do not pick up at all.
This is not a beginner course. There is no grammar revision. The gap we work on is the one between what you know and what comes out of your mouth when someone you cannot see asks you a question you were not expecting.
The week, day by day
A short video.
A short email.
A real action.
Monday to Friday. About twenty minutes a day, plus the call itself. The structure is scaffolding, not a syllabus. The point is reps, not rules.
- 00Day
Name the call
On the day you join, a short welcome video and email from Alex. You rate two things on a one to five scale: making a phone call in French, and getting what you need from the call. Then you post in the group: which tier you are joining at, and the specific call you have been putting off.
- 01Day
Why the phone is different
Alex explains why the phone is the hardest situation in French, and why that has very little to do with your French. No visual cues, no pause signal, poor audio, and the other person speaks first. The freeze is a pattern, not a verdict. Your action today is small: name the call out loud in the group, and commit to it.
- 02Day
The preparation system
Two tools from the Unfreeze Method. A four line pre-call script that takes about five minutes to write. And an opening that works for every call, in three sentences: salutation, name, reason. You fill in the worksheet for your actual call, not a hypothetical one, and post it back to the group.
- 03Day
When it goes wrong
What to do when the call goes off script. How to ask for repetition without losing your nerve. How to confirm what you just heard before hanging up. How to exit gracefully and ask for an SMS to confirm. Today is the day most people in the Vert tier make their first real call.
- 04Day
Reps over rules
A deliberate slack day. If you have not made the call yet, this is your day, with no shame attached. If you have, there is a stretch prompt waiting for you. The principle of the whole week, said plainly here: however you get the call done, it counts.
- 05Day
Live group debrief with Alex
One live group session, not a recording. Before and after stress scores side by side. People share what happened, what didn't, what surprised them. Alex responds to real attempts across all four tiers. We close with what a longer programme looks like, if you want one.
Live with Alex
Four tiers
You pick the
size of your dare.
On Day 0 you choose a tier. You can move between them at any point, and most people do. Inside the group you will see people at every level posting wins. That is the design. A first message left on a French voicemail is the same kind of victory as a resolved billing dispute, because both were avoided yesterday.
For someone who rarely or never makes calls in French. The goal for the week is one first real call, end to end.
For someone who makes calls but cannot quite steer them. Usually survives, rarely gets exactly what they came for.
For someone who is functional on calls but feels capped. Handles the everyday, freezes on anything bureaucratic.
For someone who knows exactly what they are avoiding. Going past surviving the call to being themselves on it.
What students say
I rang the vet and the doctor by phone in the same week. Before this I would have driven to both and made the appointment in person.
Amanda · Be Yourself in French, Cohort 1
Derek resolved a billing dispute with his boiler company by phone, without nerves or stress. The same Derek woke up from surgery a few months later speaking French to the nurse before he realised he was doing it.
Derek
Abi handled back to back phone calls with URSSAF and the Centre des Finances Publiques in one afternoon. Both were resolved. Six months earlier she would have written letters.
Abi
These wins come from students inside Be Yourself in French, our eight week programme. Five days will not give you all of this. What it will give you is one real call, made, and a different sense of what is possible.
A note on courses
You have bought a French course before.
Probably more than one. You may have finished them, you may not have. This is not another one of those. There is no app to keep a streak on. There are no levels to grind through.
What this offers, and what a course mostly cannot, is external pressure. A fixed start date. A small group moving through the week with you. A specific dare. And someone, at the end of the week, who knows whether you made the call.