How to Speak in Meetings with Confidence
We're covering how to speak in meetings with confidence. Follow me on Linkedin: Brenden Kumarasamy
1. Speaking up in meetings means you believe in your point of view enough to speak up (0:50).
The 1st real step in speaking up means first having the conviction that what you have to say is important, so how do we build that within ourselves? There are many layers here, so let’s start with something easy like a work related setting. There’s definitely meetings that won’t transform the very company you’re apart of, but by clearly outlining the negative consequences of you not speaking up like loss of revenues or reputation, it becomes more of a responsibility to say something. This is especially true for my impact driven people who want to make a change happen, wasting your time by going in the wrong direction is not going to help you succeed in what you want to do. Once you understand the importance of you speaking up to help everyone else and what you’re trying to achieve, now it becomes much easier to say what we have to say in a meeting with our teams.
Once you have that conviction, the next thought process that needs to come up is structuring those thoughts in a way that everyone in the room understands what you’re saying. Coming up with a simple outline and bullet points that you can practice with someone else can help you navigate that too so that people don’t ask too many questions and are very clear in what you’re sharing with them. This is how to speak in meetings with confidence.
2. You need to spend time understanding the people in the room before speaking in it (2:30).
Meetings always depend on the people in it. Simple, but heavily misunderstood. If you’re having dinner with your family or friends, you can probably speak up as you see fit since you know them quite well and they trust your input and opinion. But, in a board meeting or work meeting or really a place where you don’t know as many people, it’s much more challenging to speak your mind when you don’t properly understand the risks at hand. So, whenever I’m in a meeting that I know very little people in, I spend most of it just listening to what others are saying and writing down ideas I know will add value to the conversation, but never say them until the meeting’s over if there’s too many talking heads. Then, I find someone that already trusts me who was there and share the ideas with them so that they push them for me and my credibility.
Overtime, what tends to happen, so long as you add value whether it’s directly in the meeting or outside of it, people will start to trust you and you’ll play a much bigger role in any future conversation. The key here is really to spend time understanding everyone else’s personality and play around that accordingly. This is how to speak in meetings with confidence.
3. Understanding the outcomes of each meeting provides guidance in how to execute them (4:22).
What are you trying to get out of this meeting? Once again, simple, yet heavily misunderstood. There’s a VERY big difference between trying to make a difference in the meeting you’re in and trying to get a promotion or political favor. Either works, you just need to make sure you’re aligned. There’s some meetings I do that’s just to gain favor so I might just not speak my mind to get what I want, but there’s also many cases where people are genuinely looking for my help and assistance to achieve something and I hammer them with the truth so that they can move forward.
You’re always shapeshifting from meeting to meeting, since the role that you play will always change based on those outcomes. This is how to speak in meetings with confidence.
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Special thanks to Maison Laporem for letting me use the space.
https://maisonleporem.com/