"Everyone heard that"

Clothes are one thing. You might accept that nobody's reading your jumper, and still be sure that they heard what you said, because saying something is different. It goes out into the room. In the meeting, the point you made that didn't land, or the joke that got a small silence, or the question that turned out to have been answered on the previous slide, those have witnesses. Everyone heard.

The same paper has a study about this. Its third study put people in a group discussion and afterwards asked each of them how prominent their own contributions had been to the others, both the good ones and the bad ones. Then it asked the others. Both were overestimated. The remark you were pleased with stood out less than you thought, and so did the one you'd like back. The listeners weren't rating your contributions at all, mostly. They were thinking about their own.

That last part is the bit worth sitting with, because it's what a meeting is. Everyone in the room is composing their own point, or worrying that they haven't got one, or replaying the thing they said ten minutes ago. Your remark arrived into six other people's private meetings and was heard by six people who were busy. The silence after the joke was six people each deciding whether to laugh and looking to see if anyone else had, which takes about a second and feels like a minute if you're the one who told it.

I'm not saying nothing you say is heard. If you say something genuinely awful, people notice, and chapter 6 is about what they do with it. I'm saying that the volume of your own voice in your own head is not the volume at which it reached the room. The discussion study found the gap for good remarks too, which matters, because it means the fix isn't to say less. It's to stop assuming the room kept a transcript.