Maybe You Don’t Need to Speak Up More

I was told more than once that I needed to speak up more.

It was never said unkindly. It came from people who believed in me, who could see my capability and wanted it to be more visible. “You have good ideas. You just need to make them land earlier.” And for a long time I took it seriously. I worked on contributing sooner in meetings, before I’d fully formed my thinking. I practised getting to the point faster. I filled silences I would naturally have left open.

Some of that stretch was useful. I did learn to be clearer, more direct. I don’t regret it.

But I remember sitting in a room once where everyone was moving fast.

A department that had been fragmented for years was finally being centralised — significant, overdue, and with a direct impact on the bottom line. The pressure to get it done quickly was real. The manager had a timeline. The room had momentum. And momentum, in my experience, has a way of making slowness feel like obstruction.

I could feel it — that familiar pull to match the pace of the room. To be seen as someone who moved decisively, who didn’t hold things up, who backed the direction without making it complicated.

But something felt wrong.

Not with the restructure itself. With the speed of it. I could see what the rush was going to cost — the legal exposure, the human process requirements, the sequencing that hadn’t been thought through. The foundations that needed to be in place before anything structural could work properly. None of it dramatic. All of it significant.

So I said something.

Not loudly. Not with the kind of visible confidence I’d been practising. I questioned the timeline. I named the legal and human process considerations. I asked the questions that slowed the room down — which is not, it turns out, the same thing as holding it back.

She listened.

We slowed it down. We worked through the sequencing properly, thought through the impacts, got the order right. The restructure took longer than originally planned. It was also significantly less fraught. The structure that came out of it was stronger because it had been built on foundations that had actually been laid.

I think about that room when I hear the advice to speak up more.

Because what made the difference that day wasn’t volume. It wasn’t speed, or visible confidence, or contributing earlier than felt natural. It was the ability to see what the momentum was covering up — to hold the full shape of something in mind while everyone else was focused on moving through it.

That’s not a habit I developed. It’s how I process. I think in layers. I need to understand the whole shape of something before I step into it. For most of my career I treated that as a shortcoming — something to correct, to compensate for, to manage around so I didn’t appear slow or uncertain or insufficiently decisive.

What I didn’t understand was that the same quality that made me quieter in rooms that were moving fast was the thing that could see what the fast-moving rooms were missing.

The advice to speak up more wasn’t wrong exactly.

It was incomplete.

Before you work harder at being louder, it might be worth asking what your natural timing is already telling you — and whether the room might actually need to hear it.