430 | Speak confidently at work by mastering this one underrated skill

Now, to teach this skill, I'm going to start with an analogy.

So here's what I want you to imagine.

I want you to imagine that an Olympic gymnast is being interviewed by a journalist after winning an Olympic medal, and the journalist says to them, "How did it go? Tell us what this was like for you." And they point the microphone at the Olympic athlete, and the Olympic athlete says, "It was honestly easy.

Everything went as planned.

I felt ready.

Competition day went smoothly.

My warmup felt easy.

I executed each move perfectly, and I was able to demonstrate my skills pretty easily and win the medal." Now, when you hear this, it sounds a bit odd, and to help us figure out why, I wanna contrast it with examples from real Olympic athletes.

So the first athlete is Katie Najat.

She won the gold medal in Tokyo in 2020 for pole vaulting.

When she was interviewed after she won, here's what she said.

She said, "It was the worst warmup I've had in a long time, and I did an ugly first few jumps." She later said, "It took me a few jumps to get into it, but I was just fighting, and I finally found a smooth jump.

It came together." I want to share another example.

This next one is Jessie Diggins.

She won the bronze medal in 2026 this year for the 10-kilometer cross-country freestyle.

Here's what she said when she was interviewed after she won.

She said, "You can block out the pain to some degree while you're racing, but when you finish, it all comes flooding in.

I knew that was going to happen, but I was only going to let that in once I crossed the finish line." Now, these real quotes from the real Olympic athletes obviously feel very different than the quote that I shared at the beginning that was invented.

And I believe it's because we instinctively know that being an Olympic-level athlete is hard.

Even if the athlete is super talented and the best in their field, we still don't expect them to experience the Olympics as easy.

So when an athlete says that their experience was easy, it sounds strange.

We expect their experience to sound more like the real-life examples that I shared, where they talked about how tough it was and how much grit they had to demonstrate and how deep they needed to dig within themselves to keep going and win the medal.

And also, that's why we're really inspired by them.

And the lesson from this analogy is that being an Olympic athlete requires not one skill set, but two separate skill sets.

I'm gonna explain what these are and then how this applies to you when it comes to speaking with confidence at work.