If you struggle with how to speak up in meetings as an introvert, the problem probably isn't what you think it is. It isn't shyness, a quiet personality, or a lack of confidence. The real cause is fear of judgment, and it's far more common than most people admit, especially among technical professionals who have plenty to say but stay quiet anyway.

Silence feels safe. But silence isn't neutral. When you consistently hold back in meetings, people fill that quiet with their own assumptions about what you know, what you think, and how much you have to contribute. Over time, silence becomes your brand, and that is not a brand that moves careers forward.

In this episode, I share four concrete techniques you can use starting in your very next meeting. I walk you through the one sentence rule, why speaking up early dramatically changes how often you contribute, how to lower the bar so that participation feels accessible rather than high-stakes, and how to prepare in advance so you never leave a meeting with your best ideas still in your head.

I also reframe what introversion actually means, because introversion is about where you get your energy, not how much you have to say. Speaking up at work is a skill you can build regardless of where you fall on that spectrum.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

How do I get better at speaking up in meetings when I'm an introvert? That's a question I hear constantly from the engineers and technical leaders that I train. And here's what I tell them. The problem probably isn't what you think it is.

Most people think that the problem with not speaking up in meetings is shyness or a lack of confidence or not being a natural talker. That's not it at all. That is not the cause. The cause of not speaking up is fear of judgment, avoiding the judgment of others.

You're staying quiet because some part of you believes that silence is safe. If you don't say anything, you can't be evaluated negatively. But silence isn't neutral. Silence has a different kind of judgment attached to it.

You just never hear about it. Now, let me share a little bit about this because I know it personally. I know this from personal experience. When I was a newer technical manager, I struggled with this exact thing.

Now, I wasn't necessarily an introvert, although I did tend to be shy and I always do, even still today, take kind of a long time to warm up when I'm with a group of new people. Now, I stayed quiet in meetings when I was a new technical manager more than I should have. It wasn't until later that I realized what I was actually avoiding. What I was avoiding was being judged by other people.

Like if I said something and they didn't think I was smart, or if I said something and they'd already tried that in the past, any of those flavors of things, I was afraid of their judgment. Now, once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. And what I see happening more often than not is that people aren't shy or quiet or insecure about, you know, their personality or anything like that, especially technical people. Technical people are opinionated.

They have strong felt opinions. They have deep subject matter expertise that usually backs up what it is they're going to say. And again, this is where judgment gets really sneaky and slips in. Now, I often hear people say, well, I'm an introvert, so I just don't speak up that much in meetings.

But again, I don't think it's introversion or extroversion that's underneath all of this. Speaking up at work as an introvert is absolutely something you can do. Fear of judgment at work is more often than not what people are experiencing when they don't speak up. Now, yes, the more you speak up, the more reps you put in, the more confident you will get.

But it's really more than that. It's more about you will transcend that fear of judgment by speaking up more. And, you know, yeah, somebody's going to judge you. They absolutely will.

But again, there's a different kind of judgment that's going on in place if you don't say anything at all. They're going to then judge that you don't have anything to contribute, which quite frankly is probably worse than saying something that somebody might object to. You might say something and you might be wrong. Now, there is a humility in being wrong, that you can then capitalize on and, you know, show your humanity to the group if you actually say something and you're wrong.

Now, we really do need to look underneath the hood here, though, and look at what the actual cost of staying quiet is. Because if you're not speaking up in meetings, and if you, you know, you might say something like, well, I just freeze up when I'm about to speak, or I completely overthink things. Well, those things might be true. But the actual cost of staying quiet in meetings is that you fade into the background professionally.

And people don't then look to you to be an opinion leader. They don't look to you to be somebody with subject matter expertise that they're going to use to make decisions on. And people will fill the silence of you, your own silence with their own assumptions about you. And that judgment is likely to have more lasting negative career repercussions than if you actually spoke up and said something and you were wrong occasionally.

And over time, silence becomes your brand. And that is not good for your career at all. So you need to be able to take the risk to speak up, to say the thing that might be judged negatively or that you might be wrong about. But it is better to be speaking up and having an opinion and having a contribution than being thought that you don't have anything to contribute whatsoever.

Now, you might be that person who says, you know, by the time I think of something to say, the conversation has already moved on. Or I feel invisible in meetings. Or extroverts dominate the conversation. So if you're saying things like that, again, there may be a kernel of truth to any and all of that.

But I want to make sure that you have some tactical moves to make so that you're not coming out of your next meeting saying, yeah, I had some things to say, but the conversation moved too fast. Or, you know, I get my best ideas in the shower or while driving. And I, you know, if you're that person who ruminates or perseverates about all the things that you could have said in the meeting but didn't, then this next tactical advice is absolutely for you. So once you accept this idea that judgment is unavoidable, you're going to get judged.

And you are getting judged whether you say something or don't say something. And that if you realize that not saying something is, you know, worse than actually saying something and being wrong, you can now stop having the conversation in your head and start to join the conversation that's happening at the table. Because that's the conversation that you need to be in. Again, you might be an overthinker.

I am totally an overthinker. I've done a podcast episode about being an overthinker. We'll link that one up in the show notes if you need to go listen to that. But I want to give you four concrete techniques that you can use to get in the game and get out of your head, the conversation that's in your head and into the conversation that's happening around the meeting room table.

Okay. So four concrete techniques, you can use any of them. You can use all of them. I will be giving you a throwdown challenge at the end of this episode to use at least one of them in your next meeting.

So the first one is the one sentence rule. Commit to saying at least one thing in each meeting. Now it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to happen.

Okay. So the one sentence rule is you're going to contribute at least one time in each meeting. And in fact, if you're not contributing at least one time in each meeting, I would question why are you even in that meeting? And again, I've done lots of episodes on meetings and how we spend too much time in meetings, in organizations.

And we, I mean, heck, we have meetings about meetings. So if you're in a meeting, it should be because you have a contribution to make. And again, it should ideally be more than one sentence, but at least one sentence. Okay.

Number two. So the next concrete technique is to speak up early. Okay. So go, go in early.

I don't mean go to the meeting early. I mean, speak up early. The longer you wait, the louder your internal critic is going to get. Now I want you to say something within the first 10 minutes of a meeting, like presuming it's an hour long meeting, say something within the first 10 minutes.

When you speak early, you're more inclined to speak more often. Think of it. Imagine you're in a meeting and maybe it's on Teams, maybe it's on Zoom, maybe it's face-to-face. And if you are, let's say 45 minutes, 50 minutes into an hour long meeting and you haven't spoken up yet, your internal inertia is going to take over and you are much less likely to go to the trouble of taking yourself off mute if you're on Teams or Zoom or sticking your neck out and saying something if you're in a face-to-face meeting.

Inertia will take over and you won't say anything if you let it go that long. So your concrete tactic number two is to speak up early because the longer you wait, the louder your internal critic gets and the more inertia is going to take over. All right. Tactical idea number three is just lowering the bar.

Okay. It doesn't have to be a pithy, profound thing that you say that is the contribution that is going to solve the next product development life cycle issue that the company is having. No, no, no, no, no. Do not put the stakes that high for yourself.

Lower the bar way down. A question counts. Agreeing with somebody counts. Adding just one new idea or furthering somebody else's idea counts.

Okay. So we want to lower the bar because once you get in the game and get comfortable with taking turns in the conversation, now you are no longer that introvert who doesn't speak up in meetings. Okay. You can be introverted all you like.

In fact, just a quick point of clarification here. Being an introvert does not mean that you talk a lot or talk a little. Introversion and extroversion are where you get your energy from. Extroverts get their energy from other people.

Introverts get their energy from alone time and restoring their energy that way. So that's what introversion and extroversion means in the first place. So there is no excuse to being an introvert who gets their energy restored by being alone. There's no excuse for not participating in meetings because you happen to get your energy restored by being alone.

Okay. Extroverts may get their energy restored by speaking up more in meetings. But again, that has nothing to do with what you're going to do. You're going to speak up because you have a contribution or a question, or you're going to deepen or further somebody else's idea.

So again, step three here is, or your third concrete idea here is lowering the bar. These are not necessarily steps you take in order, but your third idea is lowering the bar. Ask a question, agree with someone, build on somebody else's idea. And then the fourth concrete thing that you can do to speak up in meetings is to prepare in advance.

So if you've seen the agenda and you know what various parts of the meetings are going, various parts of the meeting are going to look like, you can plan in advance what your contribution might be. Now, if you're going to do this, I want you to take this on in a fairly robust way because you want to come in with a handful of things that you might say. Because if you've planned one thing to say and somebody else in the meeting offers that idea up before you, then you might likely sit there and be like so devastated because somebody took your idea, somebody said your idea before you got a chance to say it. So, or, you know, if that happens, you could just jump in on that.

And again, using that lowering the bar, you could say, I was just about to say that. And in fact, and then you want to build on it. Okay. But if you come in with like three ideas of things, place, you know, places in the meeting where you might contribute, then you're much more likely to get your idea out there and get your idea in play without somebody coming up with it first.

Or, you know, it might be that you get into the meeting and you hear what ideas other people are having and you realize like, oh yeah, that actually wasn't a very good idea. So I'm not going to share that one. But you look down at your notes and you've got a couple of other places that you could insert yourself to share ideas or further the conversation on a different meeting agenda item perhaps. Okay.

Now this is going to eliminate the excuse that you have. By the time I think of something to say, the conversation has already moved on or I feel invisible in meetings. Okay. We don't want to use that kind of language.

That is not empowering language. That is not career advancing language. So what I want you to do is again, you're going to go back through these four. I'll quickly recap them for you.

So again, once you have accepted the idea that you have a fear of judgment of other people, that they're going to, you know, judge you for the things you say in meetings, but that the judgment of you being silent is worse for your career than speaking up and potentially being wrong. Now you're going to move on to these four concrete techniques. One of them is the one sentence rule. Challenge yourself to commit to saying at least one sentence per meeting.

Go in early. That is speak up early. The longer you wait, the louder your internal critic gets. Number three, lower the bar.

Ask a question, build on somebody else's idea, agree with somebody else. You know, these are easy ones to, you know, to take on. Okay. And then number four, prepare in advance so that you are ready to speak up and ready to take something on in the meeting so that you are not going to be quiet for that whole meeting.

All right. So again, pick one of those techniques this week and I want you to pair it with an exact meeting. When are you going to use it? So before that meeting starts, write down one thing you want to say or write down the idea that you're going to speak up within the first 10 minutes of the meeting, speak up early, agree with somebody.

I mean, there's lots of ways. And again, once you get into the cadence of participating in meetings, it becomes easier because you are no longer in your head judging yourself for or, you know, living in the fear of judgment. Instead, you're getting out there, getting on the court, you're getting out of the conversation in your head and you're getting into the conversation of that meeting where you can contribute and you can move your career forward by being a player. Because the goal here is not to become an introvert or an extrovert.

The goal is not to get over your introversion. Okay. That's not even a thing. Okay.

The goal is to stop having silence speak for you and to speak for yourself. Okay. My friends, again, I want you to take this on, pick one meeting this week. If you are somebody who does not speak up or who circles back after the meeting is over with all of your brilliant ideas, I want you to pick one meeting this week, start small, try one of these four techniques, get it out there, get in the game.

All right, my friends, I will catch you here next week on the Working Conversations podcast. Be well.

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