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Overcome your fear of speaking up for yourself at work

If you fear speaking up for yourself at work, there may be some internal factors holding you back. Joel Garfinkle offers strategies to overcome them.

Let’s explore why you are afraid of speaking up for yourself at work, diving into the internal beliefs that cause you to hold back from speaking up. The more you know what is really going on for you, the more effectively you can learn how to speak up at work.

How often do you have something worth sharing, but for whatever reason, you just don’t share it? What happens is that the second before you are about to utter that statement, your brain tells you not to. It’s often based on a fear of failure or of judgment from others. Over the years, I’ve had many clients state these reasons for why they don’t know how to speak up at work.

  1. “I’m scared I might say something wrong.”
  2. “I worry that others will see me as incompetent.”
  3. “I’ll speak up, but only when I have something useful to say.”
  4. “Whatever I say has to be brilliant.”
  5. “I’m not important enough to state my opinion.”

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