What stepping back buys you

Go back to the Monday meeting and slow down the moment in which you decided not to speak.

Just before it, something was happening in your body. Perhaps your chest was tight, or your face warm, or your heart quicker than a person sitting in a chair needs. You had a picture of the faces turning towards you. Then you decided to let it go, and within a breath or two the tightness eased. You sat back and the meeting carried on without you.

That easing is the payment. It arrives at once, it arrives every time, and it costs nothing you can see. If you've wondered why you keep doing something that annoys you so much afterwards, this is why. The annoyance comes an hour later. The relief comes in two seconds, and habits tend to be built by whatever comes first.

Now look at what you were relieved of. You weren't relieved of a bad outcome, because there hadn't been one. You were relieved of a prediction. It went something like this. "I'll say it, it'll turn out to be wrong or obvious, and they'll think less of me." Stepping back didn't test that prediction. It removed the only situation in which it could have been tested. So the prediction left the meeting untouched.

In fact it left a little stronger. Your mind files the episode as a near miss. You nearly spoke, you didn't, and nothing bad happened. The credit for nothing bad happening goes to keeping quiet. Next Monday the same prediction turns up with one more near miss behind it.

Therapists who treat anxiety have a name for this pattern. They call the things people do to head off a feared outcome safety behaviours, and the standard account is that these behaviours keep the fear alive, because the person never finds out that the outcome wouldn't have happened, or that they could have coped if it had. That account was built for clinical anxiety, and it's widely used in therapy. The experimental evidence is thinner than you might expect. Some small studies found that people did better when they dropped these behaviours, and a pooled analysis in 2016 leaned the same way without being conclusive. Applying the idea to ordinary self-doubt is my step, not the researchers'. I think it fits, and the exercise at the end of this chapter lets you judge for yourself.

If it does fit, then the relief you get from stepping back is relief from a discomfort that stepping back helps to maintain. I don't want to overstate this. Your doubt has other sources too, and some of them are outside you. But my bet is that a good share of next month's doubt is being manufactured by this month's step backs, because each one protects the prediction from the facts.

That's the hidden cost. There are plainer ones.

You collect no evidence. Your opinion of what you can do is based on a record from which the hard attempts are missing. You have no idea how your point would have landed, because it never landed anywhere. A person in that position can't have an accurate view of themselves, however honest they try to be.

You get no practice. Speaking up in a room is a skill, and so is sending work out when it's good enough, and so is applying for things. If you've been stepping back for fifteen years, you may have the practice of someone who's done these things a dozen times. They'll feel harder for you than for other people, and you'll take that as more proof.

Other people fill in the blank. Colleagues can only judge what they see and hear. If you're quiet, most of them won't conclude that you're thoughtful and cautious. They'll conclude that you had nothing to add, and after a while they'll stop turning to you. Then you'll notice that nobody asks your opinion, and you'll take that as proof as well.

You pay in hours. The fifty minutes on the email were real minutes. So were the evenings spent going over a presentation you already knew.

And there's a slow cost that's easy to miss. After enough years, you stop seeing the adverts. The wanting itself shrinks to fit what the doubt allows, and from the inside that doesn't feel like loss. It feels like being realistic.

There's a fair objection here. Sometimes you would have been wrong. That's true. Say that of ten points you hold back, two would have been mistaken or already known. The habit saves you those two small embarrassments, and the price is the other eight. It's also worth checking what the two would really have cost. Think of the last time a colleague raised something that turned out to be old news. I'd bet you gave it about thirty seconds of thought and have never held it against them.

I'm not saying you should always speak, always apply and never recheck anything. Sometimes it isn't your meeting. Sometimes the point is minor or the timing is poor. Holding back can be a judgement. The test is whether you made one. A judgement weighs the situation and can come out either way. If yours has come out the same way every time for years, then the feeling is deciding and you're supplying the reasons afterwards.

Here's something to try before the next chapter. Think of the last three times you stepped back. For each one, write down in a single sentence what you predicted would happen if you'd gone ahead. Then write down what happened instead, because you didn't.

Many people find the first part hard. The prediction turns out to be something like "it would have been bad", with no detail. That vagueness matters. A prediction that never says what it expects can't be shown to be wrong, and that's a large part of how it has lasted this long.