Name: How to Stop Being Shy & Quiet at Work (3 Communication Mistakes)
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T18:00:47.000Z
Duration: 17 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Are you someone who is quiet, shy, and introverted, especially at work?

To-infinitive

Today we're going to talk all about communication skills and I'm going to share with you three mistakes that I notice introverted, quiet professionals tend to make at work and how you can fix them.

If you're new here, hello, I'm Linda Rayner.

I'm a career strategist and I help introverted professionals to go from quiet to confident so that you can enhance your career and level up your life.

Now, you might be the hardest working person in your office, but at the same time, you don't enjoy being in the spotlight, garnering attention, and you actually prefer to just sort of stay in the background.

But you're getting to a point in your career where you're noticing that this is having a negative impact on your career, where you're starting to feel less visible and valued by those in your workplace.

And so if you're asking the question, how can I improve my communication skills in a way that others will see me as a respected, trustworthy, recognized leader, rather than just a doer, then this video is for you.

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about two key reasons why you struggle to communicate as an introvert.

The number one reason why communication is more important than ever in today's workplace climate and three subtle communication mistakes that you might be making and how to fix them.

And by the way, everything that I talk about in this video is going to be available in a free PDF download, including the suggested communication phrases that you can use as the antidote to your mistakes.

So if you want to get access to that, just simply type in the word communicate in the comments down below, and I'll be sure to send you the link so you can download the free PDF.

I really want to talk about this communication topic.

Communication is more than just the words that come out of your mouth.

It's more than just about how you pronounce a certain word or how you string together sentences.

In my opinion, communication is an art form.

It's a form of self-expression and it's based on how you feel about yourself, how you carry yourself and the energy that you emanate from within.

So the first key reason why you're struggling to communicate as an introvert at work is this.

There's a belief in you that says, as long as I work hard, my work should speak for itself.

This is something that many of us hold on to, especially if you're a child of immigrants as I am, or you're an immigrant yourself.

There is this mantra in the immigrant community where you don't talk about your work.

You just put your head down, you work hard and your work should speak for itself.

So we likely got this from our childhood, from our upbringing, but we also learned this in school because in our school days, we were programmed to behave in a way where you didn't necessarily have to tell the teacher how hard you were working or studying behind the scenes.

If you did your work, if you studied hard, then your work spoke for itself.

So that means you got the A's or the A pluses in your classes and courses simply because you had put in the hard work and effort and you didn't have to go walking around telling anybody anything.

And so naturally we carry this thinking forward into adulthood.

We naively assumed that as long as we work really hard, we grind away at our jobs, that our bosses, our managers, they'll take notice and they'll eventually give us the promotions and the salary bumps and the opportunities that we deserve.

This actually does work, but eventually it hits a certain point.

You get to a point, usually at the mid-manager level, which is where a lot of my clients are at, where they notice that they start to feel stuck and stagnant in their careers.

They notice that they're not getting the opportunities to move up further beyond manager level such as senior manager or director or C-suite as easily as they did before to get to where they are.

And the culprit is their communication skills.

Another way to think of this is to see yourself as a singer.

You're a moderately successful singer who has been recognized for your talent and ability to sing and now you have a show to perform at.

You're on stage in front of your audience, but before the show started, they took away your microphone.

Now you don't have a microphone to sing with.

Even with the best voice and the best talent, if you have that many people in the audience, they're not going to be able to hear your voice.

It doesn't matter how talented you are, unless you amplify yourself, unless you do something to raise the volume in your voice, those people that are out there watching you aren't going to be able to hear how talented and capable you are.

And this is the same thing that's happening to you right now at your workplace.

If you're finding that your career has stalled over the last little while, likely it has to do with the way that you're broadcasting your voice and we'll get into that in just a bit.

Now the second belief that you might be holding onto says it feels cocky or arrogant or as if I'm being a show-off if I talk about myself and how good I am at work.

So this particular belief, where did it come from?

It likely came from your childhood, again, your upbringing.

Perhaps you had parents who were highly critical and so anytime you said something, they would criticize you and that caused you to eventually shut down or quiet your voice.

Perhaps you had parents who had high expectations of you and they only demanded that you said things that were accurate and if they weren't accurate, again, you were shut down.

Perhaps you were just teased and bullied for the way that you spoke, whatever it is, it's important to investigate and understand why you hold onto this belief that you are arrogant or cocky if you talk about yourself, when in reality, we know that in the corporate world and in the business world, being able to talk about ourselves positively is actually what's going to attract the success and the goals and the achievements that we want to make.

And here's the number one reason why I feel communication is the number one skill that you need to have as we move into the future.

Artificial intelligence, in other words, AI.

AI, as we know, it is already taking over the basic tasks that a lot of jobs out there involve.

And so that means that our jobs are going to change.

Working hard alone is not going to work anymore because AI is going to be doing the hard work.

If you can't communicate with your team members, if you don't know how to persuade, convince, lead, direct and guide others to move in the direction of your ideas, if you're not able to ask thought provoking questions and generate fruitful conversations, you are going to unfortunately struggle in your career as we move forward in this new workplace climate.

And so that is why I have made it my mission to help quiet, shy and introverted professionals, just like yourself, to embrace your authentic voice, to step into your confidence so that you can get the opportunities you deserve and go after the career that you want.

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So without further ado, let's get into the three common mistakes that I've noticed in my own clients who are introverted and quiet, just like yourself.

These are things that you might not have thought of them before, but once you start to recognize that these are mistakes and these are things that you can shift and change, you'll start to approach your communication completely differently.

And I've been able to help my clients through their communication land job offers, get promoted into higher level roles, and enhance the way that they communicate with their team members, with their colleagues, and with their managers.

Mistake number one, you're overusing the word sorry.

In other words, you're being overly apologetic unnecessarily.

Growing up, we were raised to be polite, and we had to say sorry when we did something wrong or we made a mistake.

But for some reason, for some of us, that's carried forward into adulthood, where the use of the word sorry becomes part of our everyday vocabulary.

Let's say that you're presenting in front of your coworkers in a meeting, and one of the figures on your presentation is inaccurate.

Maybe you have the wrong number on there, or maybe your spelling is incorrect, and someone points it out.

Why do you really need to apologize when you think about it?

So instead, the suggested phrase would be, great, thanks for catching that.

You see the difference between being apologetic and saying sorry for a mistake that you made that you shouldn't necessarily apologize for versus thanking someone for pointing out something and being at the same level as them.

You're not putting yourself underneath them.

And the reason why this is not a good thing to do is because subconsciously, you're making yourself smaller than the other person.

Another example where I see the word sorry being used way too often is in meetings when you're about to give an opinion or you're about to ask a question, I find that the word sorry for some reason is prefaced before you ask the question or before you give your opinion.

So for example, you might say, sorry, but I just wanted to add something.

Or you might say, sorry, but I just wanted to say one more thing.

There is no reason to apologize for having an opinion or having a question.