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An article · Presence
Why do I sound smaller than I actually am
The gap between what you know and what you sound like is not humility. It is a leak.
You know this material properly. You have done the work, you have the experience, and then you open your mouth and out comes something with a hedge at the front and a question mark at the end. I might be wrong, but. This is probably obvious. Just a thought. You listen to yourself shrinking in real time and you cannot seem to stop doing it, and afterwards you wonder why people treat you as more junior than you are.
This is not humility and it is not a personality that happens to be modest. It is a set of downgrades attached to the front and back of your sentences, and downgrades are curable.
Every hedge is doing a job. It is buying insurance against being wrong in public, and the premium is that the room discounts everything that follows it. Say a sentence plainly and it is assessed on its merits. Put I might be wrong in front of it and you have instructed the listener to weigh it lightly, which they will, obediently, without noticing they were told to. This is the fourth dimension, Presence, and the damage is done entirely by the packaging rather than by the contents.
The cost compounds in a way that is easy to miss. Hedge consistently for a year and the room does not conclude that you are careful. It concludes that you are unsure, and it starts routing decisions around you, and then you have evidence that you are not taken seriously, which makes the hedging feel more necessary rather than less.
The instruction people receive here is to be more assertive, which usually gets interpreted as being louder or more forceful, and that is the wrong direction. Nothing needs to be added. Volume added on top of hedges just produces an emphatic person who still sounds unsure. What is required is subtraction.
Once you go looking, you will find your hedges are not varied. Most people have three or four and use them constantly. Write down yours today and you will have the whole list by evening.
There is a distinction here worth protecting, because people overcorrect the moment they see the problem. Genuine uncertainty should be stated, clearly and once, as information. I am about eighty percent on this, or I have not checked the second half. That is useful and it is not a hedge. A hedge is uncertainty attached to a sentence you are actually sure of, bought as insurance rather than offered as information. Keep the first, remove the second, and the test is simply whether the doubt is real.
So the drill is subtraction and nothing else. Take your list of hedges. For one week, before you speak, deliver the sentence without its opening hedge and without its closing question mark. Say the thing. Full stop. Nothing added in compensation, no extra volume, no harder tone, because the plain version is already stronger than the hedged version was going to be. Practise on low stakes sentences first, ordering coffee, answering what time works for you, saying what you thought of something. It will feel blunt to you for about four days and it will not sound blunt to anybody else, and that discrepancy is exactly the size of the discount you have been applying to yourself.
There is a Done For You version of this, built from your own list of hedges rather than a general one. It sits inside the work, not on this page.
If you keep being treated as more junior than you are, The First Call is fifteen minutes, free, and it is a conversation rather than a test. You talk, I listen, and by the end we both know whether this is work worth doing. The locating itself happens in The Diagnosis. One door: saswatlife.com.
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