- Meeting anxiety stems from imposter syndrome and affects many professionals.
- Confidence and speaking up are key to career advancement, and not doing so can hold you back.
Anxiety is known for rearing its head at the most inopportune times.
The fight-or-flight response in our bodies, once needed for survival, still exists but manifests in inconvenient, everyday ways.
Meetings are no exception.
Emily Durham, a career coach, content creator, and host of "The Straight Shooter Recruiter" podcast, told Business Insider that countless of her clients have admitted feeling nervous before interviews and public speaking. Many also express feeling the same way before going into a meeting.
Durham said she used to experience the exact same thing.
"I had prescription hand deodorant," she said, explaining she needed it because her palms would be so sweaty walking into a meeting room.
"The barrier isn't your skill, it's not your experience, it's not the examples that you have prepared," she said. "It's the confidence you have showing up and believing that people want to hear what you have to say."
Our own worst critic
Anxiety at work is nothing new, but returning to the office after a long period of working from home may leave some feeling stressed.
For Gen Zers, it's an all too familiar feeling, with nearly half saying they felt anxious and stressed almost all the time in one Deloitte survey last year. Some even have "menu anxiety."
Meeting anxiety can manifest in many different ways, but it often stems from imposter syndrome or similar feelings where you don't believe you deserve to be in the room.
So instead, you shrink or tell yourself, "I should probably be quiet when I'm here," Durham said.
It's a misalignment between how we treat ourselves and how we treat others, she added. While we may chastise ourselves for stumbling over our words or saying the wrong thing, we'd likely never notice such a thing in our peers.
"You have this fundamental belief that you need to prove your worth in order to be well received, and that's not healthy, that's not true," Durham said. "That's a pressure you put on yourself to show up in a certain way."
This particularly affects women and different intersections of identity, Durham said, which can hold them back in their careers. It doesn't tend to be something non-marginalized groups, such as white, cis-gender men, talk about very much, she added.
"They've been conditioned that their voice always matters," she said. "That when they are assertive with opinions, it's rewarded."
In comparison, when Black women speak up, they can be labeled "aggressive" or "angry," she said.
"It doesn't create a space where women of color are comfortable standing in their opinions or asking those questions," Durham said.
Some also have the fear of being seen — more specifically, the fear of being seen failing. It's worrying about saying the wrong thing or asking a question others think is stupid or has an obvious answer.
That means they never get the opportunity to prove themselves wrong.
"Then you're like, I shouldn't have said anything, I'm such an idiot," Durham said. "And you're just reinforcing this cycle that you've created for yourself."
Forming a new habit
Part of breaking out of the negative cycle is realizing that people may not be paying as much attention to you as you think.
Durham said a good start is to give yourself "permission to say the wrong thing" and to "mess up" because you'll soon notice "people aren't paying attention to you as much as they pay attention to themselves."
You should also remember that it's the people who speak up who tend to get further in life, Durham said.
Various studies have found that confidence can be mistaken for intelligence in the workplace, and one Harvard Business School professor even recommends "power poses" that boost those feelings of self-assurance.
Durham said it's a decision to wake up every day and perform being confident until you really feel it.
She said one way to grow that skill is to regularly put yourself in uncomfortable situations and have "little moments of being bold in your day-to-day life."
That could be something as small as walking up to someone on the subway and complimenting their shoes. Or looking up in a meeting room and striking up a conversation with a colleague.
"Even if you stutter, even if you don't say it perfectly how you intended, it's taking you out of your head and into action," Durham said. "You just need to break yourself out of that cycle day by day, even if you just get 1% better at it every day."
Complimenting people can fuel confidence, Durham said, because it makes us feel like we have the authority to make other people feel good.
"That's really nice for our brains," she said.
Severe imposter syndrome and a core belief you don't belong in the room is not something simple hacks can fix — that's when it might be a good idea to see a therapist.
But Durham said those who are simply struggling to make the first move in a meeting should remember they are unlikely to get themselves in trouble.
"You don't need to worry that you're going to say something out of pocket because the person who's saying something out of pocket doesn't need to be told to speak first, think later," she said.
"If you're someone who's in your head, you are not the target audience for that constructive criticism," she added. "So you are inherently not going to say the wrong thing."