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Meetings Are the Worst—Here’s How to Get Your Voice Heard Anyway
Nine tweaks that will make meetings less painful and more productive.
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We’ve spent the last decade training leaders across industries to access their most compelling presence and powerful voices wherever they need to use them. While we spend a lot of time with our clients on classic public speaking scenarios like panels and keynotes, the reality of daily communication for most of the people we work with is . . . meetings.
Endless. Back-to-back. Sometimes with a veritable minefield of ego and subtext to navigate, all while you figure out how to voice your ideas through interruptions and contribute your thoughts before the NASCAR-paced conversation moves onto the next topic.
Yes, meetings can be frustrating, but they’re not going anywhere! So let’s find the opportunities: to make your mark, solve problems, build relationships, and establish your leadership.
Here are some crucial mental shifts and best practices to increase your probability of success.
Deal with Discomfort
Is this meeting making you feel anxious? Angry? Checked out? These are all states of nervous system activation—part of our primal drive for survival, and something every human on this planet experiences.
Step one: De-shame your body’s completely normal physiological reaction to stress. We promise that no one else is nearly as aware of your shaking hands or flushed face as you are, especially if you can simply acknowledge those reactions as only PART of the story of the moment.
Step two: Check in with your breath! Chances are, if you’re feeling activated, you’ve stopped breathing. And . . . forget about trying to get a “belly breath” in this moment. We know, you’ve probably heard this advice a lot. But a stressed body does not want to release your soft bits to potential predators. Instead, exhale first to give yourself space for a full breath, then, remembering that you’re a three-dimensional human with sides and a back, allow your lungs to expand in ALL directions. Your ribcage is designed to swing away from your spine as you inhale. It’s the easiest, most efficient, and most calming way to breathe, and you can see the whole process in this beautifully animated video.
(And check out this M Dash article from 2018 for additional tips on taking physical space!)
Check Your Perspective
Stress influences not only our physical response, but also our perception. An activated nervous system is on high alert for danger, so it reads neutral stimuli—neutral voices, faces, body language, tone, and words—as negative. In other words, this lens of danger can turn your boss’s RBF into a sign you’re about to be fired.
Accepting our lack of objectivity in these moments can be hard for those of us who pride ourselves on how well we read the room, but ultimately, curiosity serves us better than judgment. Curiosity allows us room to pivot, move on quickly from perceived missteps, and keep pursuing our goal.
Speaking of which, nervous system activation often happens when we’re not clear about that goal, so…
Get Specific
We get it—nobody has enough time to fully prepare for every meeting. But ask yourself a few crucial questions beforehand.
The most important: What’s this meeting about? And what’s this meeting really about? Often, in work meetings, there’s the stated goal, and then there’s the subtext of what people really want, think, and feel. Use both your logical and empathetic brains here. No need to catastrophize, but it’s helpful to think about how to navigate any anticipated challenges as part of your prep.
Take Action
If you want to be seen as a leader and make an impact, general “professional presence” will never be as useful to you as clarity and specificity.
Before your meeting, ask yourself this: What’s my role; what’s my goal? What am I actually DOING in this meeting? And who am I called to be in order to accomplish that goal?
Here’s the best part — no one else needs to know what your role and goal are! It can be your delicious secret. Would it help you to walk into this meeting with the internal guise of Glamorous Lady Detective, here to solve the mystery of this client’s reluctance to give us clear parameters and lead everyone to the dazzling solution? What about Idea Surgeon, skillfully slicing through the BS? Or Intrepid Tour Guide, navigating us through the maze of complexity, sharing context, and pointing out what’s important along the way?
A lot more fun than “inform everyone of last quarter’s numbers,” right? What if being taken seriously doesn’t require us to be Deadly Serious?
Organize Your Thoughts
Do you worry about rambling or talking too much? The skill of concision is HUGELY coveted among the people we work with.
The “too many words” issue comes from a few places. You may be the kind of communicator who speaks in order to coalesce your thoughts, which isn’t a bad thing, but isn’t always welcome or appropriate. You may be trying to create and edit simultaneously, which is like trying to hit the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time.
Perhaps most commonly, you may be in “prove yourself” mode. This is a real danger zone, because this is when we want to tell them everything we know. It’s the idea that we succeed by answering every question before it’s been asked and anticipating every objection before they even have it. But we don’t prove our knowledge or expertise by the volume of information we share. We demonstrate it by curating that information for our audience.
Here are a few ways to do that organization on the fly:
– What’s the ONE thing / the FIRST thing you want to share? — We know: Choosing just one nugget of information can feel impossible, but keeping your answer this tight doesn’t mean that you can’t say anything else. It means you spark the beginning of a conversation, where you can then follow the audience’s curiosity and show your expertise by answering questions when they have them.
– What are the THREE things you want to share? This is a quick and convenient way to organize a lot of information. For some reason, human beings love hearing information in threes.
– What do I know NOW? This keeps you out of panic mode when you may not know all of the answer. We can almost guarantee that you know something!
– What / So What / Now What? — We love this tool from our friend and client Selena Rezvani. State the facts, tell us what they mean for us, then recommend a next action.
Say More
Many of our clients have been told to speak up more in meetings.
Some believe if they just had the “right words” it would be easy peasy, but it’s more complicated than that — especially in poorly facilitated meetings, and especially if you feel like you’re competing with louder, faster, or more senior voices in the room. And for our quieter or more introverted clients, after hundreds of meetings listening to others drone on, many decide they don’t want to contribute to the mess . . . and opt out.
Jumping in just to jump in doesn’t really benefit us OR the meeting. Stop wasting your time and energy looking for a perfect place to speak just to check the box of “I spoke.” Instead, activate your curiosity. Stay present and committed to your role and goal. And focus on your strengths! What if doing what you do naturally—listening—helps you come up with that 10,000-foot view no one else sees?
Grab the Mic
Whether you’ve been interrupted and need to reclaim the floor, or you need to jump into the fray, we’ve got you! For all you elder millennials and Elle Woods fans, this is the Vital Voice Training “Bend and Snap” —our three-step solution to grabbing the attention of the room.
1. Gather the attention of the room visually. (This requires that we turn on our camera in virtual meetings.) We need to make a purposeful physical move to draw the eye — in the theater world, we call this pulling focus. This can be as simple as raising your hand or shifting your posture in your chair.
2. WHILE you make that physical move, take a full inhale.
3. On the exhale, start with a transitional phrase, THEN proceed with your core content. This helps us to finish that act of gathering attention before we get to the good stuff. The example we often use is, “I’d like to jump in on that.”
Most importantly? You must fully commit to all three steps! If you inhale then freeze and hesitate, if you start to speak but stop yourself, you’ll pour lighter fluid on the fire of your nervous system. This takes practice, but it’s incredibly effective.
Shift Your Story
Is the struggle to get heard in meetings making you doubt yourself? Not being listened to can make us feel like we’re doing something wrong, that people don’t like or respect us, or even that we lack what it takes to be a leader. Taking the blame can have the counterintuitive effect of making us feel more in control; however, it’s definitely not helping us succeed.
Try replacing the voice of your inner critic with some simple positive mantras:
I’m in the room, therefore I belong in the room.
Today, I’m the expert.
My ideas are an offer, not an ask for attention.
Everything’s an experiment.
My voice matters.
Zoom Out
All of these solutions focus on what you can do as an individual, but the reality is that many meeting problems are organization-level issues.
What could you do to shift meeting culture? Purposely pass the mic to a quieter colleague (“I know Juliana has looked into this issue…”)? Advocate for — or lead — better facilitation or clearer objectives? Institute introvert-friendly practices, like giving everyone a moment to write down ideas before taking answers to a question? You may have more power than you realize!
We’d love to help, on both an individual and organizational level! Sign up for a discovery call here, and tell us about your communication and public speaking goals for yourself or your team.
