> ...putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral. Ever since I was a child

> ...putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral. Ever since I was a child, others have observed that I speak in a remarkably Broadcast English accent (it was usually described as "you have no accent at all", or "you sound just like the news reporters"). That "neutral American accent" you are after is called General American English, and is still an evolving area [1]. The West Coast lends some of its artifacts to this neutral accent, but General American English is an ambiguous kind of a prestige accent that stands relatively apart from its constituent regional accents. In daily work however, I determined in my use cases that careful enunciation and appropriate vocabulary for my audience (especially for public speaking) count for far more to obtain engagement and active involvement than my accent. The enunciation part required careful, conscious effort in everyday settings before it could take root as a habit in my consulting work, and led to noticeable sales engagement improvement; I wasn't well-off enough at the time to afford a speech coach. Ironically, I'm horrible at understanding thick accents myself, currently training myself to get better at that skill by listening to YouTube videos and engaging my coworkers with thick accents over audio chats instead of text chats. It takes a tremendous amount of my attention to parse thick accents, while others seem to take them in stride. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English