Write your view before the meeting

Career · Little Light original

Before a meeting with senior voices, it is easy to arrive with questions but no position of your own. The discussion begins, someone confident names a direction, and every idea that follows is shaped around it. By the end, you may agree without knowing whether you were persuaded or simply carried. Give yourself ten quiet minutes beforehand. Write what you think is happening, what evidence matters, and what you would recommend if nobody else had spoken yet. You are not preparing to defend a fixed answer. You are preserving an independent starting point that can be tested against what you hear. Change it when better information arrives, and notice why it changed. Professional judgment grows when it is used, not only when it is borrowed from the most experienced person in the room. Your first view may be incomplete. It can still help the conversation see another risk, another possibility, or a question that confidence moved past too quickly.

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