Why you can't speak up in meetings (and what's actually holding you back)
- May 24
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Published 24 May 2026
Most advice about speaking up in meetings tells you to prepare more, slow your breathing, or ask a question. If any of that worked, you would not be reading this.
In a survey I conducted of 2,198 professionals, 89% experienced anxiety in meetings, including people at senior levels across every kind of organisation and role.
Why can't I speak up in meetings?
The fear of speaking in meetings is social. It is the fear of being watched, judged, and evaluated by the people around you. Getting it wrong, losing standing, saying something that comes across badly in front of colleagues who will remember it. That is what the brain is responding to, and it responds to it the same way it responds to physical threat, faster than you can consciously intervene.
The moment tends to follow a pattern. The conversation reaches the point where you could speak up and contribute. Instead, you run an internal check on whether the timing is right, whether the point is good enough, whether the phrasing is ready, and by the time those checks have run and rerun, the moment has passed and the conversation has moved on. In my coaching sessions the pattern comes up constantly. People describe staying quiet and then add: "I knew exactly what I wanted to say."
Should you speak up in meetings?
Speaking up in meetings affects how you are perceived by the people who have influence over your career. Senior leaders do not form their impression of you from a single contribution, however good it is. They form it from repeated exposure, from hearing you across multiple meetings over time. The people who contribute regularly become visible and familiar. The people who stay quiet are simply not thought of when opportunities come up.
Speaking up frequently in every meeting, even briefly, does more for your visibility than sitting in silence until you have something significant to say.
Is it better to stay silent or speak up in the meeting?
For most professionals reading this, the honest answer is that staying silent feels safer, and speaking up feels like a risk. McKinsey research found that only 26% of leaders actively display the behaviours that make people feel safe speaking up in their teams. That figure is not surprising to anyone who has sat in a room with a point forming in their head and said nothing.
The problem is that silence reads differently from the inside than it does from the outside. From the inside it feels considered, cautious, professional. From the outside, particularly to the senior people in the room, it reads as having nothing to contribute. Over time those two things compound each other: the less you speak, the less people expect to hear from you, and the less they expect to hear from you, the harder it feels to break that pattern.
Speaking up in meetings is not about filling silence or proving yourself. It is about making sure the people who have a say in your career have enough of a picture of what you think and how you think to make accurate decisions about you.
Why am I confident one-on-one but go quiet in group meetings?
Feeling less comfortable speaking up in a meeting is what psychologists call evaluation apprehension: the anxiety that comes specifically from being observed and judged. The more people in the meeting, the more intensely the brain registers the social risk, and the more that response crowds out the contribution you were thinking about making.
Two things drive that in a group meeting.
The first is that your contribution is visible to everyone in the room at the same time, which the brain reads as higher exposure than a one-to-one conversation.
The second is who is in the meeting.
Psychological safety research finds that the more senior the people present, the higher the perceived cost of speaking, because the consequences of getting something wrong in front of someone who influences your career feel significantly greater than getting it wrong in front of a peer.
Both factors are present in most group meetings, which is why the same professional who speaks freely one-to-one can find themselves saying nothing twenty minutes later in a team meeting.
Why does my heart race when I try to speak up in meetings?
Your heart speeds up. Your face goes warm. Your voice, when it comes, sounds higher than usual. None of that means something is wrong with you. Your body is reacting to being watched the same way it would react to physical danger, and it does it before you can talk yourself out of it.
The trouble is your body moves faster than your thinking. By the time you notice your heart going, your attention has already left the conversation and turned on yourself. You start tracking how you sound and what your face is doing, and the point you were going to make gets crowded out.
What helps is having something to do with your attention in the moment. I use a three-step version of this in coaching:
Notice: name what is happening, quietly, to yourself. "Heart racing. Attention gone inward." Naming it stops it building.
Stabilise: feet flat on the floor, shoulders down, sitting back in the chair. A small physical reset, enough to settle the body so you can think.
Reconnect: put your attention back on the conversation. Listen to the last thing said and pick it up from there.
Done quietly, the whole thing takes a few seconds, and nobody else in the meeting sees it happen.
Can being quiet in meetings hurt your career?
Yes. The effect of being quiet in meetings is gradual, which is why most professionals do not notice at first. It is when they see less experienced colleagues receive promotions and opportunities that they start to recognise how being quiet in meetings has been holding them back.
In our survey, no one was able to point to a single meeting where things changed. One quiet meeting followed another.
I know from my own experience how frustrating it is to be overlooked for opportunities because of staying quiet in meetings.
Nine out of ten professionals in the survey said what they wanted was more confidence in how they came across at work. They could do the job. Making their competence visible was what they felt they needed to move their career forward.
How to speak up more confidently in meetings
A strategy to help you to speak up more confidently in meetings is to start by committing to one contribution per meeting and saying it in the first ten minutes, before the anxiety has time to build.
Before your next meeting, identify one item on the agenda where you have a relevant view or experience. Prepare a few notes using this three-part structure:
Point — State your point in one sentence. For example: "Based on what I have seen in my work on this, I think we should look more closely at X."
Evidence — Support it with something specific: an example from your own experience, a figure, or an observation from the work.
Result — Say what you think should happen as a result: a decision, a next step, or an area worth exploring further.
When you want to take this further, the Accelerator programme works through this in a structured group format. Andy also works one-to-one with professionals in London and online.
If you're a professional who can't speak up in meetings and would like to know whether 1:1 coaching is right for you, book a free call here.
Frequently asked questions about speaking up in meetings
Why does my heart race when I speak up in meetings?
Your body reacts to being watched the way it reacts to physical danger, faster than you can think your way out of it. The racing heart, the warm face, the voice that comes out higher than usual are all part of that. It settles fastest when you move your attention off yourself and back onto the conversation. It's exposure, not inability.
Why do some people speak up so easily in meetings?
They feel the same anxiety. The difference is that they have spoken in enough situations that anxiety stopped being the deciding factor, and the brain stopped reading those moments as threats. You build that through repetition in the right conditions.
How do I start speaking up in meetings?
Commit to one contribution per meeting, in the first ten minutes, before the anxiety has built into something you feel you need to manage. The pattern shifts before the quality of any single contribution does.
How do I recover when I misspeak in a meeting?
You will feel the error more than anyone else in the meeting does. Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky found that people consistently overestimate how much others notice their mistakes, a phenomenon they named the spotlight effect. Say "Actually, let me correct that" and keep going. Your colleagues have moved on before you have.
How do I handle the fear of being judged in meetings?
The judgement you are imagining is larger than the one in the meeting. The spotlight effect, the cognitive bias Gilovich and Savitsky identified, means you overestimate how closely others are evaluating you. Everyone else in the meeting is managing their own contribution. The fear stays, but knowing it is overstating the risk changes how much authority you give it in the moment.
Can I be taken seriously at work if I rarely speak up in meetings?
In some roles, for a period of time, yes. In most cases, it becomes harder over time. The people who shape how you are perceived form their impressions from who they hear, and if they rarely hear from you, they form an incomplete picture of what you can do.
Nobody calls out your silence in the meeting. It accumulates without comment, which is why most professionals do not recognise what has been happening until it surfaces in a performance review or a conversation about why they were passed over for something they expected.
How can Andy help me speak up more confidently in meetings?
In one-to-one coaching, we work through the specific pattern behind your silence and build a different response to it. Andy works with professionals in London and online, with clients from organisations including the BBC, Deloitte, PwC, and Accenture.
Book a free call here
About Andy O'Sullivan
Andy O'Sullivan is a London-based public speaking coach and five-times bestselling author. He works one-to-one with professionals who struggle to speak up in meetings, go blank under pressure, or avoid situations where they might be put on the spot. His clients include organisations such as the BBC, Deloitte, PwC, and Accenture.
Find out more about Andy
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