How to be more confident in meetings, even when you're the most junior person there

You had something worth saying in your last meeting and you sat on it. Maybe someone else said it ten minutes later and got the credit. There are fixes for that: some happen before the meeting, some during, and some after.

This article collects them: prep methods from executive coaches, in-the-moment moves from a Stanford professor, and habits that pay off over time. Pick one or two to try in your next meeting instead of attempting all of them at once.

The people teaching them do this for a living: Matt Abrahams teaches communication at Stanford's business school, Tara Goldman coaches executives after years as a VP of Product, and Ben Horowitz has spent two decades steadying nervous founders.

Why this matters more than you think

On My First Million, Ben Horowitz described what low confidence actually costs people:

He follows it with a football analogy (30:20): speed on film means nothing if you don't start running when you see the thing. In meetings, that means the observation you sat on until someone else said it. The techniques below are about saying it when you see it.

Before the meeting

Rehearse until the slides are optional

Tara Goldman spent years as a VP of Product before becoming an executive coach. Asked how she got through her first board meeting, her answer wasn't a mindset trick:

Most of what looks like confidence is just preparation. If the stakes are high, over-rehearse on purpose and out loud. Twenty hours before a board meeting bought her a version of the deck she could deliver without slides.

Cast the right voice in the lead role

Goldman also teaches a casting exercise for the inner critic (21:12 in the same episode): you can't delete the imposter voice, but you can lower its volume and take it off stage. Name it, then name the version of you that performs at your best, and consciously give that second character the lead role for today's meeting. It sounds theatrical. It works because it stops you from arguing with the critic and gives you somewhere to point your attention instead.

Fast-forward the dread

Mentalist Oz Pearlman, who performs under pressure for a living, gave Adam Grant a trick for pre-meeting dread: rate your dread from 1 to 10, then set a phone alarm for 24 hours later asking the same question. The 9 you feel the night before is usually a 2 the day after. He calls it fast-forwarding your feelings; Grant labels it anticipatory emotion regulation. Once you've watched a few 9s turn into 2s, the dread itself loses credibility.

Shift your body before you shift your mind

Matt Mochary, the CEO coach behind leaders at OpenAI and Coinbase, teaches that fear gives bad advice because the amygdala is running the show, and you can't think your way out of it. His curriculum prescribes physical resets before high-stakes moments: change location, stand up, go outside, or do two minutes of all-out physical effort. He also has clients write down their fear predictions ("If I speak up, then X happens, and then what?") and check them later. The catastrophes almost never happen, and the written record slowly proves it to you.

During the meeting

Dare to be dull

Matt Abrahams teaches strategic communication at Stanford and hosts Think Fast, Talk Smart. His counterintuitive core advice for meetings:

The insight underneath: most of your anxiety in meetings comes from evaluating yourself while you speak. When you stop trying to give a brilliant answer and just answer, you free up the cognitive resources that make your answer better anyway.

Relabel the adrenaline

Anxiety and excitement are the same physiological state with different labels, and the research Abrahams cites shows the relabel changes how others rate your communication.

The long exhale

His physical technique, useful in the ten seconds before you speak (26:52): exhale longer than you inhale, roughly twice as long. Three counts in, six out. The exhale is what triggers the relaxation response. Nobody in the meeting can tell you're doing it.

Ask the question everyone is afraid to ask

Paige Costello has led product at Asana, Intercom, and Intuit. Her thesis flips what junior people assume about looking confident:

When you try to look bulletproof, people read you as insecure. When you ask what someone meant, you look like the person who doesn't need to bluff. Her most practical tip is even simpler (27:34): if you're in a meeting, be in that meeting. Laptop closed, watching faces, and closing loops with "did I get all of that?" Being fully present is the easiest way to look confident.

For winning over skeptics who do not know your work yet, she shares a formula she picked up from Asana's Anne Raimondi (23:56): trust equals credibility plus reliability plus authenticity, divided by perception of self-interest. The denominator is the part people forget. If people think you are speaking to look good, everything above the line gets discounted.

After the meeting

Audit the tape

Goldman's in-the-moment protocol ends with a post-mortem habit: most of what felt like visible nervousness was invisible.

Compare what you feared happened with what actually happened. This is Mochary's fear journal applied to meetings. Every time you notice that the thing you dreaded didn't happen, the next meeting gets easier.

Name it out loud

Pearlman's other technique works after (or during) the meeting: say the nerves out loud. "I was nervous going into that one, were you?" Naming it costs you nothing and usually gets back a "me too" that recalibrates what you think everyone else is feeling. His point in the conversation with Adam Grant is that hiding the anxiety is what makes it worse.

Track your energy too

One more Mochary tool for the long game: the energy audit. Go through last week's calendar and mark every hour green (gave you energy) or red (drained you). His target is 75 to 80 percent green. Confidence in the big meeting partly depends on whether you walked in from a day of green hours or red ones. If your calendar is mostly red, no breathing technique will carry you.

The protocol on one page