How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It’s by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you’re not. I’m Melody wilding, bestselling author. Human behavior professor and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let’s put psychology to work for you.  You already know that meetings are the perfect opportunity to showcase your smarts and create credibility that carries over to every other decision that impacts you and your function. It’s where your visibility happens at scale because executives, powerful people, are hearing how you think, how you handle pressure, how you frame problems, the results that you are getting. But right now, I bet you are crashing into your meetings. You are rushing in from another task or another call. You try to sound intelligent, but you just start rambling, and then later, you kick yourself, thinking, “I knew what I meant. I knew what I was trying to say, but I don’t think it came across clearly to anyone else.”

So today, let’s break that cycle. Let’s give you three specific swaps to make, upgrades to what you are saying and doing right now that will make you sound smarter and more strategic in every touch base or presentation you have coming up from here on out. And before you just turn this off, no, this is not going to be about saying bigger words like “aligning synergies” just for the sake of it, because I know if you are listening to this show, you do not wanna be that person. You do not wanna be the one who is just talking to hear themselves talk or to just fill dead air. The best communicators we work with inside of our program, Speak Like a Senior Leader, and our mastermind, Lead From Within, they create a pattern interrupt because everyone is exhausted and sick of calls that go nowhere. So rather than seeing you as posturing or, like, you have to inject yourself and talk over other people, others will be relieved you spoke up because you made the conversation more tangible, valuable, and you moved it forward, and that’s when you create a positive flywheel. People approach you afterwards, and they say, “Hey, can we get separate time to talk about that?” Or, “I’d love your take on that thing you brought up,” or to get you in on this new project. It’s when you get an invite to present your team’s findings next time, which gives you a bigger stage to talk about your outcomes. And again, our most successful, our best clients also know that what we’re going to talk about are not just nice-to-have hacks, that mastering this kind of real-time impression creation and management, it’s becoming the entire game. Because now everyone and their dog has access to Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, you name it. Anyone can sound good when they have time to run things through an AI, although I would really argue that sounding good is the outcome that is relative, because AI is trained on the lowest common denominator communication, which is average at best. It is not going to help you stand out, but I digress.

My point is that the playing field is getting flatter for asynchronous written communication, so your differentiator is what happens when you are in front of people live, you are communicating with them in real time, when there is no time to outsource your thinking. More and more, you will be evaluated on the moments that AI cannot easily rescue you. Those moments are going to factor more heavily into how people assess your judgment, your readiness, your credibility, and your promotability.

So with that, let’s get into three swaps you can make to what you say and what you do to sound smarter and more strategic in every meeting from here on out.

Number one, ask the question no one else is raising. Now, I know that may sound very basic. You already ask questions in meetings, I bet. But the kind of question you ask really matters. At the mid and senior levels, a lot of people get stuck asking things that are technically useful, but are still too tactical. They are asking things like, “But how would that work? Do we even have the system capability for that? Who would own that? What’s the timeline? Have we checked with this other department?” None of those are bad questions. Sometimes they are exactly what need to be asked. But if those are the only kinds of things you bring up, you start to sound like the person who is just there to manage the logistics or just poke holes in the execution. And if you are trying to be seen as ready for more scope, your questions need to show you can think beyond the mechanics.

So the swap here is to ask dot connector questions. And dot connector questions are where you’re linking what is being discussed to something bigger, a company priority, a trend or pattern in the market, data you have seen, your team, a dependency. So you might bring in context that no one else is considering. That may mean referencing something from a previous leadership meeting. You might say, “Last month we said X segment was the priority. How does this plan support that?” It might mean pulling in a trend from another team, like, “Marketing has been seeing a stronger response from bundled offers, so how are we accounting for that in this rollout?” It might mean naming some sort of downstream dependency. So you could ask, “If things change with the product timeline, what does that mean for the sales commitments we already have happening?” Your question should also look to the future, something like, “Well, before we move forward, what would need to be true for this to scale beyond this one team?” Or, “If this pilot works, what would we need in place to support this more broadly?” A great well-placed question can show you are tracking the arc of conversations and developments. You can synthesize, you can intelligently spot conflict, overlap, waste, missed opportunities. You’re forcing the group to think more critically about trade-offs or moving from just managing symptoms to diagnosing root causes

All right, swap number two, the second way to sound smarter and more strategic in meetings is to subtly leverage social proof. And social proof, very simply stated, is the idea that people trust a recommendation more when they can see that others support it. So we’ll talk about how you do that in just a minute. But what a lot of mid and senior level professionals tend to do is they believe they need to make a case entirely on their own merits, and they think, “I need to prove this is a good idea. I need to explain every detail.” So they start overexplaining. They start dumping information on their audience. When you make yourself the only source of credibility, you accidentally make the idea feel more like a personal opinion. Even if the idea is very strong, it can come across like, “Here’s what I think,” rather than, “Here’s what the business and the people within it and outside of it are telling us.

As you rise, people are not only evaluating whether your idea is smart and it’s sound just on the data, the logic of it, they are evaluating whether it has traction. Does it have support? Does it match what customers are asking for? Does it line up with what another function is seeing and what they would be on board with doing? Has someone they trust already validated the direction? Is this just you as one person, your recommendation, or is there a broader push behind it? So this is where social proof comes in, and in everyday life, we see social proof used all the time. It’s why we look at reviews on Amazon, or we feel more confident choosing a restaurant that’s full of people instead of one that’s totally empty. In meetings, social proof works in a more subtle way. It helps people understand that your idea is not just floating out there alone. It’s not just something you came up with. It’s not just you saying, “Believe me, trust me, this will work.” It is connected to real proof from customers, stakeholders, past results. So, for example, instead of saying, “I think we should simplify this certain process”, you might say, “Our patient advisory council raised this twice in the last quarter, and we’re now seeing the same concern show up in post-visit surveys.” Or, “Our largest foundation funder has been asking for stronger outcome data, which tells me this is becoming part of how they’re evaluating future grants.” Now your point does not sound like a personal preference. It sounds like a pattern the organization needs to pay attention to. Or rather than just saying, “I’m recommending we move ahead with this direction”, you might say, “I’ve already spoken with Patty and Jake. They are on board with testing this in a smaller way first. Business development said it would give them a stronger narrative at next month’s conference.” You’re not just tossing an idea out there hoping people agree. You are showing it has support, that you’ve gotten the right inputs, that it is backed by something besides your opinion, which for other people makes it an easier yes.

The last swap to sound smarter and more strategic in meetings, speak to your impact with specificity. I’m willing to bet that you are underselling yourself right now. You probably, you don’t wanna take up that much time, so you try to be quick, or you don’t wanna sound like you’re bragging, so you keep your contributions very generic. “The project is going well. We’re making good progress. The team is busy, and we’re on track. We’re seeing some positive momentum here.” These are fine, but they are very flat, and they’re very forgettable. They also obscure all of the invisible work you’ve been doing behind the scenes. People don’t get any sense of the effort it has taken to keep something moving or the impact it has had. So they start to wonder, does going well mean you’re only one day behind, or are you maybe one month ahead of schedule? Those are two totally different things. Does it mean you prevented a major client issue worth tens of thousands of dollars? Does it mean your team ships something to half the customer base or just one customer? When you are vague, people cannot see or wrap their head around the size, the complexity, the business value of what you are driving and producing. So you may think you are being concise and humble, but it actually gives them no real gauge for how important what you’re doing is, and no real gauge for them to make decisions based off of. Your skip level will have no idea whether this is something worth mentioning to investors. They won’t know whether to bring you in to consult on another million-dollar project that has gone sideways because they can’t tell clearly that you have the chops to operate at that level.

If there’s no specificity behind your update, you also don’t set yourself up well as using it as a justification for more resources. And to be clear, I am not saying you need to sound like you are reading your resume out loud in a meeting. Do not do that. Please do not turn every update into, “As a leader of a multi-phase cross-functional transformation initiative that has impacted 10,231 customers worldwide…” No one wants that. Please don’t do that. All you have to do is give one to two specifics that provide a sense of scale. So instead of saying, “We’re making progress,” it might be, “We’ve cleared about 40% of the pending case reviews in the last month, and now we’re focusing on two steps causing the longest delays.” Or instead of, “This project went well,” “We trained 75 frontline staff across three different sites, and the number of questions has dropped after the first week.” None of that sounds boastful. It’s just clear. You are simply giving people enough information to understand what happened, why it mattered, and what level of complexity you are operating at. So before your next meeting, look at your update and ask yourself, “Where am I being too generic? Where might I be able to add a number, a timeline, a business outcome, a constraint I had to work around?”

So to recap, the three swaps I shared with you today are, number one, ask the question no one else is raising. The dot connector question that brings in outside context and implication, gets everyone thinking beyond just the immediate task. Number two, use social proof. Pull in what customers are saying, what another team is seeing, or who might be already on board. And three, speak to your impact with specificity. No more vague, “It’s going well.” Give people enough detail to understand the scale of what you handled. This is all about making sure the way you communicate matches the caliber of what you’re already delivering, because your opportunities are actively being shaped every single day by the way you present and articulate yourself.

And in my program, Speak Like a Senior Leader, we literally hand you the exact structures, the ones top communicators worldwide have mastered and make look effortless, so you can package your expertise, you can get your ideas across concisely and in a compelling way, even when the pressure is high and the audiences are more powerful and more is on the line. So doors for Speak Like a Senior Leader are not open right now, but you can get on the wait list for the next time enrollment opens at speaklikeaseniorleader.com or just head to the link in the show notes. That way, you will be the first to know when spots are open again. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with someone else who could use it or DM me on LinkedIn. I love to consider these shows a two-way conversation. I want to hear from you. I’m a real human over here, so when I hear what is resonating with you, it helps me create more content to help you. All right. That is all for today. I will catch you in the next episode.

Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review Wherever you are listening, it’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self-assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.