Whether it's shyness or "introvertedness" (I'm not sure that's even a word but you know what I mean), most of us hesitate when we have to speak up in a meeting, give a presentation, or any initiate any sort of public conversation. Obviously among friends, and with close colleagues, it's not an issue but unlike extroverts who thrive in the energy they receive from speaking in public, most introverts will either avoid it or take it on but with an amount of trepidation, which is often proportional to how important the meeting is or how senior the attendees are. 

But there is one action that you can take to help lower the level of trepidation. I learnt this from the CFO of the Banking Business Unit of my organisation. She's used it in her career and as a deep introvert, it's the one tactic she consistently follows that helps her get to where she is today. When you combine the action of focusing on your breathing, which I wrote about in my previous blog, with this action, it will form a combo effect that significantly helps to reduce the barrier you feel to when your brain is telling you to open your mouth but your fear is keeping it tightly shut. Are you ready for it?

OK. Here it is. The action to take to help you speak up in meetings is to: 

Say something at the outset!

I've been to enough meetings in my career across multiple organisations to know that no meeting, no matter how formal, how important, or how long, dives right into the heart of difficult matters at the outset. The first few agenda items are often general discussion topics that aren't high stakes. In my organisation, the first 5 minutes is often spent doing what's called a "check in". Each person around the room is asked how they are feeling or whether there are there things that are priorities in their mind. 

With no high stakes agenda items being discussed, this is the part of the meeting where the audience is most relaxed and open engaging with you even if you're not familiar to them. No matter how silly your comment may be, people won't pay too much attention to it, and given the more relaxed atmosphere, attendees may even laugh (albeit politely) at any silly jokes that you put forward. 

But saying something at the outset is not about the other people in the meeting. 

Saying something at the outset of a meeting is all about what it does for you!

When you open your mouth and say that initial sentence or make that first point in a meeting, in your mind, you've just stepped over that invisible barrier that you would've come up against later on in the meeting. But as the atmosphere is more relaxed, that barrier is easier to break through. But importantly, once your broken through that first mental barrier, the next barrier you face (still in the same meeting) will be significantly smaller. The barrier will never go away (just like fear never goes away) but each time you speak in a meeting, the barrier gets smaller. Why do it at the outset? Because the first time that barrier comes up in a meeting, it will feel huge and difficult to get through. So use the relatively more relaxed atmosphere at the outset to give you the best chance of charging through it. 

Imagine if you didn't take advantage of saying something at the outset. When the formal or more serious agenda items get discussed and you have an awesome point you want to make, what do you think happens in your brain? It is now overwhelmed with having to think through all the possible permutations of your point (and most likely, it'll argue with itself why it's not a significant point), think through how all the people in the meeting are going to perceive you, try to control your breathing so that you don't faint when you eventually try to make your point, and when it's done all of the above, it now needs to try to break through this huge mental barrier to speaking up. What do you think happens at this point? More likely than not, it all just gets too difficult and your brain convinces you that your point isn't important and you sink back into your chair. From this point on, no other point you think of feels as important and you end up saying nothing in the meeting. You walk away feeling down and of little value. 

We've said it many times. Improving yourself is about taking one small action at a time. Some actions help to push you out of your comfort zone, while other actions help to reduce the mental barriers you have in your head. In this case, if you combine your focus on breathing and just saying something at the outset of a meeting where the atmosphere is more relaxed, you'll feel a lot less pressure and resistance to speaking up when it really counts to put your best foot forward.

So to put it into context of Dale Carnegie's quote above. Before you dive into the water, saying something at the outset of a meeting, is like taking a dip in the shallow end of the pool. Once you're comfortable, you can progress to the deeper end. Before you know it, you're doing laps and you wonder what your initial fear was all about.

If you do these two actions at work, you can walk away from most meetings knowing that you've contributed and hopefully added some value. Now isn't that something worth feeling over and over again. 

Blog photo by Jeff Sheldon on Unsplash.