Hello, this is Priya Raghunathan and you are listening to Low Volume, a short weekly show about quiet confidence. Today I want to tell you about a pitch I lost in 2016. A competitor spoke for 40 minutes, showed three drawings, and got the job. I had 30 drawings and said almost nothing. For a long time I believed the lesson was that I needed to become louder. It was not. The lesson was that preparation is its own kind of confidence, and I had prepared the wrong things. In the next 20 minutes I will walk you through the three questions I now answer before any meeting, why I let the drawings do most of the talking, and a small exercise you can do tonight before whatever you are dreading tomorrow. Find a quiet corner. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.