Verbal Patterns Can Undermine Your Work

A director I worked with last quarter said the same thing in three different sentences during our first session:

“Sorry, I’m rambling.”
“This might not be helpful, but…”
“I know I’m probably wrong here…”

I asked her if I could share a pattern I was noticing.

She nodded.

I told her: in the first 15 minutes of our call, she had apologized seven times. For thinking out loud. For having an opinion. For asking a question.

She got quiet. Then said, “I do this in every meeting.”

Yes. That was the issue we were really there to work on. Not the resume she’d come in to discuss. Not the interview prep she thought she needed.

The pattern of pre-apologizing was undermining her at work, and undermining her in interviews, in a way that no resume edit could fix.

So we worked on it. Not by telling her to stop apologizing as that doesn’t work. By giving her a different opening move.

Every time she felt the apology forming, she was going to swap it for a clean, direct statement. “Here’s my read.” “One thing I want to add.” “Let me think about that for a second.” No discount. No pre-emptive softening. Just the thing she was actually going to say.

She practiced it for three weeks. Reported back that her team had noticed within four days. Her boss had noticed within two weeks.

Then she got the role she’d been hoping would open up for two years.

I’m not saying the language shift got her the promotion. The work she’d been doing for years got her the promotion. The language shift just let people finally see it.

If you’ve been carrying around a verbal pattern that’s been quietly undermining you what would it cost to swap it out for three weeks and see what happens?