Three Strategies for Effectively Contributing in Meetings
If speaking up in meetings makes you feel anxious and uncomfortable, have no fear! Speaking up is a muscle that can be built if practiced. Don’t let the voices of your colleagues deter you from sharing your perspective while you sit back and observe.
Consider the following strategies to begin the process of effectively contributing in meetings.
Shift your mindset.
If fear is causing you to silence yourself, consider these three approaches to reframing your thought patterns from the Harvard Business Review:
Shift from thinking that your idea is incomplete to reaffirming that your idea could be a building block to something larger.
Shift from feeling like an imposter whose voice is not important to recognizing you are a valuable team member and thus your silence is not good for the team's success.
Shift from feeling anxious about how intelligent you may sound, to understanding that teamwork is about collective intelligence.
Take notes and review notes.
If you are someone that thrives when you have time to be introspective, take time to prepare and review notes ahead of meetings. Sometimes having a thought prepared can be your entryway into a conversation. Through repetition, speaking up will become second nature over time.
Before meetings:
Review previous meeting notes/minutes and prepare a question or a follow up idea to introduce at the start of the next meeting.
Review the upcoming meeting agenda and prepare questions and ideas ahead of time.
Plan to ask questions or present an idea early in the meeting to avoid talking yourself out of the idea as the meeting moves along. Additionally, the "pre-thinking" involved in this process acts as a primer, helping you to continue brainstorming and think creatively during the actual meeting.
During meetings:
Take notes on what your colleagues are saying. Doing so will allow you to make connections between ideas of different colleagues. Offer specific ways that seemingly disparate ideas may coexist in the same space.
Sketch out ideas that you would like to contribute on paper or in a notes app before speaking them aloud in the meeting.
Listen closely to your colleagues.
This allows you to:
Offer specific praise of a colleague's idea.
Ask open-ended questions. You can also ask someone to clarify an idea or provide examples. In order to do this well, you have to really pay close attention to what is being said.
Pay attention to the patterns of thinking and speaking that receive positive feedback and spark additional ideas. Emulate the successful ways in which your colleagues preface their own ideas and build upon others' ideas.