Serena had a win ready before I even finished asking the question.

I start every coaching call by asking clients to name one win from their week, and most people find that harder than it sounds. Serena didn't. In her very first session, she told me she'd finally spoken up in a client meeting, asked some pointed questions in front of the client and the room, something she never let herself do when her boss was there. Normally the fear of looking foolish, or making her boss look bad by association, kept her quiet. This time it didn't. The conversation that followed was one of the best that meeting had.

When I asked what had changed, she pointed back to our very first conversation, the free discovery call before she'd ever become a client. It had lasted five minutes on this particular point, but it was the five minutes that mattered.

I ask most of my clients to do a version of the same exercise early on: name the fear sitting underneath whatever's holding you back, not the polished version, the real one, and then walk through what actually happens if the worst case comes true. It borrows from an idea entrepreneur Tim Ferriss made popular, that we spend far more energy defining our goals than we ever spend defining the fears standing in front of them. Naming a fear precisely tends to shrink it. Leaving it vague is what gives it room to run the show.

Serena's fear, once she said it out loud, was that she'd look like an idiot in front of her boss. That was it. Once it was sitting on the table instead of running quietly in the background, she could actually look at it, and it didn't hold up. She already had a seat at that table. Nobody puts an idiot in the room for a client meeting. The fear wasn't information about her competence. It was just noise that had never been challenged.

So she decided, in that moment, that the fear didn't get to make her decisions anymore. Then she went and tested it, in a real meeting, with real stakes, in front of the person whose opinion she'd been managing for.

I see a quieter version of Serena in most of the leadership teams I sit with. Someone stays silent in a meeting, not because they don't have the sharper question, but because they're doing quick, constant math about how it'll land with whoever outranks them in the room. Multiply that by everyone else doing the same calculation, and you get a room full of capable people producing a conversation that's much smaller than the sum of what they actually know.

The instinct is to call this a confidence problem and try to fix it with encouragement. It's rarely that simple. Confidence is vague. Fear, named specifically, is a problem you can actually test against reality, the way Serena did in five minutes on a call she almost didn't take.

What's the fear you're managing around in your next meeting, specifically enough that you could say it out loud, and what would actually happen if you did?

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Most leaders aren't dishonest. They're wearing a mask, a version of themselves that's easier to approve of, and it's quietly costing them their best people and their performance. Shannon Talbot helps overwhelmed leaders take it off. She's a leadership speaker, facilitator, and consultant, and the author of Breaking Free. Learn more at shannontalbot.com.