You know the moment.
You have the thing you want to say. It’s good. You’ve been turning it over for the last four minutes while someone else talks.
And then the conversation moves, the window closes, and you tell yourself you’ll speak up next time.
Here’s what I think is happening in that moment.
You’re waiting for permission. And nobody in that room is going to hand it to you.
—
My guest this week is Bushra Khan, and she’s an interesting person to hear this from because she’s not an introvert. She said if she claimed to be one, her family would riot.
She’s a business professor who teaches leadership to MBA and engineering students, and she’s noticed a pretty striking difference between those two rooms.
Her MBA students walk in on day one having already figured out who they’re going to work with. Try to reshuffle their groups six months later and it’s a revolt.
Her engineering students ask her a different question:
Can you email them for me?
Someone said they’d submit their part of the project. They haven’t. What do I do?
And Bushra says: I don’t know. What do you do?
That exchange stuck with me.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do. You’re waiting for someone to tell you that you’re allowed to do it.
—
What she said next is another idea I keep thinking about: discomfort doesn’t mean incompetence.
She compared it to math. Around seventh grade, kids start telling themselves I’m just not good at math, and it can become part of how they see themselves.
But struggling with something and being incapable of it are not the same thing.
Speaking up in a fast meeting can work the same way. The hesitation is real. It just doesn’t tell you what you’re capable of.
—
The part of the conversation I want you to hear most is when she gets practical about meetings, from both sides.
If you’re running the meeting, she says walk in with a notebook and three questions:
Did I get a full sentence from every person, not just a “yep, sounds good”?
Did everyone offer a plus, a delta, or an aha?
And if someone stayed quiet, did I follow up with them within 24 hours?
Then she added something I hadn’t expected.
You may only have to do that follow-up once or twice. After that, their brain has started to register you as a safe person, and they’re more likely to speak up on their own.
—
And if you’re the quiet one, the one getting steamrolled, her advice isn’t to be louder.
It’s to rehearse the interruption out loud.
With a colleague. With a partner. In front of a mirror.
She’s done it with students, playing the over-the-top colleague while they practice breaking in.
She told me about one student who laughed through the first round, giggled less on the second, and by the fourth had actually leaned into it, in her own voice rather than Bushra’s.
It feels ridiculous the first time.
That’s part of why it works. You’re giving yourself a chance to practice something that currently feels uncomfortable before you have to do it for real.
We also got into her MVE framework — mirror, validate, empathize — for the conversations where you’re technically right and nobody’s moving.
And she has a two-minute physical exercise she makes every MBA student do before presenting in front of hundreds of people.
There’s a lot more in the conversation, but those are the pieces I’ve been thinking about since we recorded it.
Have a listen.
Connect with Bushra: