On board

On board

Today’s phrase is “on board.” The local residents of Iztacalco are now on board with the project to create Simpsons murals in the neighborhood. That means they are now in agreement , and they now support, the initiative to paint the murals. You say someone is “on board” if you have convinced that person to agree with you or to support you.

If you ever need to convince someone to support your ideas, you need to get that person on board. Let’s say you want to take a vacation to the beach, but your girlfriend or boyfriend gets bored just at the pool or on the beach. How are you going to get him or her on board? Well, you can offer to go to a beach destination that also has a lot of other fun things to do at night. That might be enough to get your partner on board. But he or she might need a little more before getting on board with the trip to the beach: you might have to offer to let your partner choose the vacation destination after that.

This is a phrase you can use at work a lot. At my job, I work with a lot of small teams , and it’s important to have everyone on board with the same strategy to do a project. Nobody wants to be on a team at work if one person disagrees with the approach or the strategy. If not everyone is on board, then the team won’t function well . If someone is trying to convince you of an idea, and you agree, you can say, “I can get on board with that.”

That’s all for today’s episode. Once more, a big welcome to all the new listeners who are joining us from Japan. I’ve been so excited to see how many people from Japan have discovered the program on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. By the way , you can make sure you never miss an episode by clicking “Follow” in Spotify or “Subscribe” if you listen in a more traditional podcast app.

Thanks to all of you for listening and being part of the Plain English community. JR and I will be back with a new episode on Thursday.