Nobody told me this early enough: the people who sound most certain in meetings are not always the most right.
They’re performing certainty. The rest of us are just watching.
I spent the first few years of my career mistaking confidence for competence. Assuming my uncertainty meant I didn’t know enough to speak up. It took a long time to realize that admitting you’re not sure — out loud, in a room full of people — is actually the more honest and often more useful thing.
Three things I wish I’d known earlier:
1. No one is as certain as they sound. When everyone else seems to have it figured out and you don’t, that gap is usually smaller than it appears. “I’m not sure, but here’s my thinking” is a complete sentence. Use it.
2. Your instincts are data. The feeling that something is off — in a design, a decision, a direction — is your pattern recognition running faster than your reasoning. You won’t always be right. But silencing it entirely is a loss. Treat it as a starting point, not an embarrassment.
3. Feedback is a gift with terrible packaging. No one teaches you how to receive it. The natural response is defensiveness, because what’s being critiqued is something you made. But feedback is almost never about you. It’s about the gap between what was expected and what was received. You can’t evaluate it clearly from a defensive crouch. Hear it first.
None of these are complicated. All of them took me longer than they should have.