The Meetings That Make Your Heart Race
- Laurence Paquette
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Even at VP level, I still walk into certain meetings feeling like I need to earn my right to speak.
Especially the ones where I'm there to challenge something, defend my team, or escalate a problem and the room is filled with senior people.
I prepare obsessively for those meetings. Not because the material is complicated, but because I need to talk myself into believing my opinion is valid enough to say out loud. I go over my points more times than I'd like to admit. I run imaginary objections. I rehearse conviction until it looks natural.
I thought this would go away with seniority. It hasn't.
What I've noticed is that the feeling isn't really about the meeting. It's about what the meeting represents — a moment where you might be wrong in front of the right people, or right in a way that makes someone uncomfortable, or visible in a way that feels risky. That's a different kind of preparation. No amount of data makes it disappear.
And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one managing it quietly.
Most people I know at senior levels have some version of this. The heart rate that picks up. The loop that runs in the background asking whether you really have standing to push back here. We just don't say it out loud, because saying it out loud feels like evidence that the doubt is justified.
That's the part I keep thinking about. We've built leadership cultures where showing up with conviction is the expectation, but the internal work it takes to get there is completely invisible. Nobody talks about it. So everyone assumes they're the only one doing it.
They're not.
Comments