STFU: Why shutting up could be the most inclusive thing you do today

I am killing it!

That was the actual sentence in my head. Word for word. I was standing in front of 200 students, my first lecture as a professor, and my internal monologue was running hot.

Holy shit, how awesome is this.

I can't believe I'm a professor.

Look at them! Everyone's so engaged! I'm doing so well!

Shaping new minds. That phrase came up more than once. I am shaping new minds. I was thirty-something years old, freshly minted PhD, and convinced I was the best thing to happen to that lecture hall since the projector.

The students were nodding. Some were taking notes. A few were laughing at the jokes I'd rehearsed over breakfast that morning.

I wrapped up. Felt the buzz. Started packing my bag.

Then Katie came down from the back of the auditorium.

She had a notepad. She was not smiling. She walked up to me and she said, calmly, all the things I had done wrong that day. Not loud. Not angry. Just a list. The students I'd talked over. The questions I'd half-answered before pivoting to my own next point. The hand that had been up for ten minutes that I hadn't called on. The way I'd made a joke at someone's expense without noticing it had landed badly.

She didn't lecture me. She just told me what she'd seen.

I stood there with my bag half-zipped and I had nothing to say. Because every single thing she described, I had thought was the lecture going well.

The thing I was doing wasn't teaching. It was performing.

The students weren't engaged. They were watching. There is a difference, and I could not tell the difference, because I was the one doing the talking.

This is the part I haven't said out loud before. The killing-it feeling wasn't about them. It was about me. I'd built a one-man show and called it pedagogy. Every minute I spent enjoying my own delivery was a minute Katie was watching someone else's hand stay in the air.

I want to be clear about what was happening here. I wasn't being cruel. I wasn't being malicious. I was being earnest. I genuinely thought I was doing a great job. That is what makes it worse, not better. The damage gets done by the people who think they're helping.

Now here's where it gets uncomfortable.

The current conversation about inclusion in the workplace is built almost entirely around speaking up. Use your voice. Be an ally. Say something when you see something. Speak truth to power. Find your voice in meetings. Don't stay silent.

Most of that advice is aimed at the wrong people.

The people who need to speak up more are not the ones in the room with the most airtime. The ally training, the bystander programmes, the "find your voice" workshops, they keep arriving at organisations where the actual problem is the opposite. The problem is not that nobody's talking. The problem is that the same three people won't stop.

And those three people are usually the ones being told they need to use their voice more.

I was being told, at the time, that I needed to be more visible. Speak up at faculty meetings. Build my profile. Take up more space. The advice was reasonable for someone else. For me, it was rocket fuel on a fire.

What Katie gave me was not feedback.

Feedback would have been "you could improve your lecture technique." That's the kind of thing you can nod to and ignore.

What Katie gave me was a description of what was actually happening in the room while I was busy congratulating myself for being in it. There is no improvement plan for that. There is only sitting with the fact that the version of yourself you most enjoy being is also the version that other people have to work around.

I have spent the years since then trying to shut up earlier. Not always successfully. The instinct to fill the room with my own voice is still there. I notice it most when I'm nervous, or when I'm trying to impress someone, or when I think I have the answer. The killing-it feeling still shows up.

The difference is that now, when it does, I know it's a warning sign.

If you are in a leadership role and you are reading this and the killing-it feeling is one you recognise, that is the thing to pay attention to. Not the meetings where you stayed quiet. The meetings where you walked out feeling great. The meetings where you were sure it had gone well. Ask the Katies in your organisation what they saw. They have a list. They are not going to volunteer it.

Shut up so they don't shut down.

That phrase came out of that lecture hall. It has been in every keynote I've given since. I used to think it was advice for other leaders.

It was always advice for me first.

P.S. Katie graduated. She's doing brilliant things. She knows this story has been told on stages in 32 countries. If you're reading this, Katie, thank you for the notepad.