Early in my corporate career, I would, on occasion, keep my thoughts to myself even when I believed my ideas would help advance the discussion and that my contributions would make a difference. I was fearful that my ideas would be rejected or that my comments would be seen as irrelevant or even stupid.

Fortunately, I had a great boss who valued my ideas and encouraged me to speak my mind at meetings. He told me that our firm needed everyone’s good ideas and I was wrong not to share mine with the group. He was right.

This behavior, in some instances, is based on wanting to reduce stress by avoiding the stigma of failure. As it attempts to mitigate stress, it may be effective in that regard but not speaking our minds to avoid creating personal stress is basically a misuse of resilience. Having a resilient mindset means that we are not afraid to risk failure because we know we recover easily and are better for taking the risk.

All of us have amazing and creative ideas to share with others. It took me awhile and the words of my manager to assure me that my contributions would make a difference in our firm’s success. Today I recognize that my coaching and consulting practice isn’t effective unless I am providing my full thoughts and ideas with clients.

We all have brilliance, please share yours.

© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2017