One-on-one, or with friends, I can speak freely. Put me in a large, unfamiliar room with senior people in it, and sometimes the ideas do not come out the way I need them to.
It took me until my late thirties to see this clearly. It has taken longer to understand what it is, and what to do about it.
It is wiring, not a flaw
Elite sprinters rehearse the start by imagining the gun, over and over. The reason is simple. The default response to a sudden loud bang is not a launch. It is a freeze.
Rehearsal removes the surprise. The gun stops being a threat and becomes a cue.
The same reflex fires at work. A hostile question. Your numbers challenged while your screen is shared. A room full of people more senior than you. The result is the familiar blank, where you lose access to material you knew cold an hour earlier.
Once I saw it this way, the first conclusion was clear. This is human wiring. I can prepare for it. I cannot ignore it away or grow out of it. Treating it as a defect only adds shame to the freeze.
Rehearse the conditions, not the content
My old instinct was to prepare harder. Script the answers. Memorise the numbers.
That turns out to be the wrong target. Scripted answers are brittle. The question always arrives phrased differently, aimed at a different number, or delivered with an edge I did not expect. The moment it leaves the script, I am back to the blank. Worse, I reach for a script that does not fit, and stall a second time.
What rehearsal really buys is familiarity with the conditions. The room, the seniority, the eyes on you, the feeling of being cut off mid-sentence. It is the situation that sets off the alarm, not the specific question. Once the situation is familiar, I keep access to what I already know and can answer live.
So I look for reps in the conditions:
- Speak up in lower-stakes meetings when senior people are present.
- Present out loud, standing, to an empty room or to a colleague willing to interrupt.
- Volunteer for small exposures so the big ones are not new.
When it happens anyway
Some moments cannot be rehearsed. For those I use the breath. A double inhale through the nose, then a long, slow exhale through the mouth. Two cycles. What matters is that the exhale is longer than the inhale.
A 2023 Stanford study found this “cyclic sighing”, done five minutes a day, improved mood more than mindfulness meditation did.
The breath gets my body back. It does not always get me back into the room. For that I needed something else.
The persona is the instrument
The second realization came from talks I was listening to. My work self is a persona. It is a personality I have built and honed for a particular environment and objective. It is not necessarily who I am at my deepest. But it is the instrument I need to get something done.
That gave me permission. A performance can be under-rehearsed without the performer being deficient.
The third piece came at a cocktail event a few years ago, with senior leaders from my own organization and others. I had a suit with me and chose not to wear it. I did not want to look like someone aspiring to senior leadership.
In the room, everyone else was dressed up. I felt insecure, and I felt myself retreating into my shell. That was the signal that I was not fully rehearsed for the moment.
The correction happened in real time. I told myself: I am not here to represent who I truly am. I am here as a technology leader who plans and delivers large initiatives for my organization. I have worked with many of these people. I am a partner to their programs.
That one reframe moved me from feeling out of place to feeling I could own the room. I spoke in front of everyone there.
Why the reframe worked
The trigger had nothing to do with my competence. It was about relative position in a room. Status anxiety runs on comparison, not capability.
The reframe did not argue with the comparison. It changed the question. “Who am I here?” collapses under pressure. “What function do I serve here?” holds.
It also pointed my attention outward. Self-consciousness needs an inward gaze to keep going. Point your attention at the people you are there to help, and the self-monitoring has less to feed on.
What I would do differently
The dress decision was my mistake. I chose the outfit to manage how I would be seen. That is still a status-anxious move, just turned inside out. The room’s judgment was still making the choice for me, only in advance. Wearing the suit costs nothing and removes a variable.
The reframe also came late, after the slide had started. It belongs before the room, not during it.
The longer road
Earlier this year I listened to Graham Weaver’s last lecture at Stanford, “How to Win Without Crushing Your Soul”. He describes three practices: fire the inner coach, pull the nails, and find your voice. I recognised the last five years of my own life in it.
I had worked with coaches and therapists to fire the inner coach. Pulling the nails was harder. Removing old limiting beliefs left a vacuum. It disturbed the mental models and the crutches I had been relying on, without knowing it, to get things done. Things got more chaotic before they got better.
Five years on, I have found some footing. I still stumble. Finding my voice remains the hardest of the three.
The heuristic
Before any high-stakes room, I now write one sentence. Not who I am. What I deliver, and for whom.
If the freeze comes, the breath brings my body back. The sentence brings me back to the room.