Speak Up in Meetings with Quiet Authority for Highly Sensitive Introverts

Welcome to the Introverted Leader, a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your underrated, quiet strengths to get promoted and start earning what you deserve. I’m Greg Weinger. I have over 25 years of leadership experience, and yes, I am an introvert. In this mini-sode, I’m sharing an excerpt from this week’s conversation with Nina Koo. In it, she talks about one of the biggest challenges, many highly sensitive people and introverts face that is speaking up, especially in meetings. What touched me here is how clearly Nina voiced the underlying fears that many of us feel in these situations, especially early on in our careers. For years, she stayed quiet in meetings and developed a low self-esteem about it. At the time, she didn’t understand her sensitivity, and she thought that she would never be able to participate in the way that she wanted. When you don’t speak up, as she points out, people don’t see your value, and you won’t get promoted. Happily, Nina shares what she did to overcome it. Let’s play the clip, and then I’ll follow up with some thoughts. The other thing that’s occurred to me, Greg, was because I didn’t know I was highly sensitive at the time, and this has been a pattern throughout my life. In school, it’s like being in meetings and being too fearful to speak up, to say what I’m noticing. I think at the time I had quite no self-esteem, because I didn’t know I was highly sensitive. I thought there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t do things the way other people could. Because you’re highly sensitive, you sense this. You sense that you’re different, but you don’t know why you’re different. When I was in meetings, I wouldn’t speak up. That’s partly, I think, what held me back, because you can’t progress in a company, you can’t do well. If you’re not willing to share what you’re noticing, and you’re not willing to speak up, and speak up for yourself. I think that really held me back. Yeah, absolutely. It’s the critical thing, which is much more challenging for introverts or highly sensitive people. We’re not naturally sharing and speaking up. We’re not naturally thinking aloud. That is one of those leadership skills that you do need to develop. You’ve got to let all of this brilliant insight in your brain out into the world and share it with people. Yes, absolutely. For me, my journey has been very much one of healing the little T traumas people refer to it as. You know, of being a highly sensitive person in a world that doesn’t value sensitivity. Indevitably, you’re going to be told you’re too sensitive or you’re still thinking about that happened ages ago. And so you start thinking, okay, there’s something wrong with me because I’m not operating in this world the way that everybody else is. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA’s heating up, March Manus is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there’s a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you’ve got to see for yourself. That’s why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it’s about staying connected to my sports. I could follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. And so a lot of it has been this sort of process of uncovering what’s happened and healing and is a process of really understanding my physiology, understanding my blueprint and my user manual, what works for me, what doesn’t work for me, why things haven’t worked for me. And this process of healing and also a big part of that has been learning to own my own voice and value my voice and to be able to speak. Speak up, I used to be terrified, public speaking, you speak, a huge challenge for me. Even speaking in small groups of moms having coffee would be quite a challenge for me. But I went through various programs and mirror linguistic programming myself. I studied that and now I use it in my work. All these tools and techniques and healing processes to be able to get me to the stage where I can actually speak to a large audience and share about the highly-sensitive trait and about my work because we need to be able to speak up in order to make a difference. I love this message. And it’s just inspiring to see this example of an accomplished woman like this who’s embraced her sensitivities, understood her wiring and learned to work with it to the point where she’s very comfortable in her skin out front and doing public speaking, appearing on podcasts like this and coaching other women to do the same. Here are three takeaways if you’re struggling with speaking up. Number one, it all starts with self-awareness. Start by understanding why speaking up has been hard for you. Understand that if you’re quieter or highly sensitive, your nervous system is just different. It’s not wrong. Once you understand your wiring, everything becomes clearer and a lot easier and some of this shame starts to fall away. Number two is self-acceptance. Now that you’re aware of how you’re different, it’s time to start working with it. You don’t need to operate like the fast talkers or the loud voices in the room. When you accept your introversion and your sensitivity fully and without apology, you stop fighting yourself and this creates space for your authentic voice to emerge. Number three, now all you have to do is learn the tools that will give you the confidence to speak up. That confidence doesn’t come from pretending to be extroverted. Comes from having the right grounding techniques, the habits of preparation and structured communication that give you the tools to contribute in ways that feel natural and aligned with who you are. If this content resonated with you, I encourage you to listen to the full conversation with Nina, episode number 38. It goes much deeper into the high sensitivity, resilience, and learning to use your voice in a way that feels powerful and authentic to you. I’m Greg Wanger, encouraging you to lead with quiet confidence. I’ll see you next time.