I Stopped Asking for Permission to Have Opinions and the Room Noticed

I had been in market research in Nashville for five years and had developed, in a way I was largely not conscious of, a consistent style of presenting my views that I can only describe as pre-defeated.

I would say what I thought and simultaneously undermine it - beginning with phrases that signalled tentativeness before I had said anything tentative, ending with acknowledgments that other views were equally valid before anyone had offered a competing view. The effect was not what I intended. I intended humility and collaborative openness.

What I produced was a presentation of my ideas that invited the room to discount them before engaging with them, which the room duly did. At 28, a consultant who had been brought in to observe team dynamics gave me feedback that was specific and that I had not been prepared for: she said that my ideas were consistently among the strongest in the room and that my presentation of them was consistently reducing their impact before anyone else had the chance to.

She asked me to pay attention, in the following week, to the difference between my internal confidence in a position and the external presentation of it. The gap she had observed was large. I spent a week noticing it and then made a deliberate change: I stated my positions without the pre-softening.

Not with aggression or false certainty - with the same degree of confidence I actually had, stated at its actual level rather than reduced. The response in the room was almost immediate. People engaged with what I said differently.

In the absence of the signal that I was inviting them to discount it, they processed it without the discount. My ideas had not changed. Their reception had changed entirely because I had changed how I offered them.