Does anyone else struggle to speak up in meetings? I’m a scientist/engineer and I’m usually the only female in the meeting/team. I’ve been frustrated with myself for sitting out conversation where I know more than the rest of the people (all more senior and male) but am too intimidated or unsure to speak up. Any advice on how to find the confidence to speak up more and defend my work?

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I do too. I’m more introverted and usually need more reflection time before I speak which can be tough. Two things that help me are 1. to feel over prepared on the material so I know the content better than anyone else and 2. To think of questions/comments ahead of time. I’m also open to any suggestions though, I’d love to get better myself

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This is a great approach. Always prepare ahead of meetings/take some time to reflect on the agenda and how it relates to anything you have been working on or any future project you will be working on. This helps you in either being able to ask the tough strategic questions or in making sure you are able to have an input/provide feedback or your recommendation

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This is a great advice EY1. I’m a scientist / physicist and actually that’s exactly what helped me with speaking up during the meetings.
That plus frustration that many people who spoke up during those meetings, literally had nothing to say and I thought to myself how can they be an appreciated party at a table when they didn’t add anything new to the conversation. And that’s when I decided that I wanted to contribute to the conversation and not I my be an observer.

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Speaking up in a meeting is like a muscle, you need to exercise it to get better.

Make a commitment to yourself to always say something in the first ten minutes.

Have courage, feel the fear but do it anyway.

It gets easier, I promise.

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I still sometimes sit tight when I could say something, but have become a lot more confident at speaking up over the years. In my first couple of years I would tend to bring up ideas / mention things I wanted to say to my Manager after the meeting. He / she would often say - that’s a great idea / point, why didn’t you say so in the meeting?

After a while I gained confidence that my ideas were actually maybe worth raising, and gradually built up to sharing them during meetings, starting with internal meetings on my specific workstream, then expanding to client meetings / areas that weren’t directly what I was working on.

I asked for tips on how to put forward ideas and raise points as questions, so that they come across as less critical / blunt. I also realised that most of the time, nothing bad happens if you occasionally raise something that people really don’t agree with - someone will argue against your point, you concede / compromise and move on.

Playing devil’s advocate or somehow positioning your point as being from someone else’s perspective can also be a good way of bringing something up that might be controversial (e.g. if I were an engineer at the client hearing this, I would be wanting to know how this would impact my team / safety procedures / how this would work in practice? etc.)

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How can one help team members to feel more comfortable speaking up during a meeting?

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