Most people meet a hard conversation by letting it go. There is a method for doing the other thing.
A quarter of UK employees told the CIPD in 2024 that they had faced conflict at work in the past year, and 47 per cent of them did nothing about it at all. You had the point ready. You rehearsed it twice while someone else was talking. Then the moment moved on, you said nothing, and you carried it home.
Dr Antje Bothin has been on the far side of that silence. As a child she had selective mutism, and there were stretches when her voice would not work at all. She now runs Assertive Voices from Scotland, and she thinks most confidence training aims at the wrong target.
Here is what she says is actually happening in the room, and what to do about it in your next meeting.
Louder Is Not the Skill
Ask a room what assertiveness looks like and you get the loudest person in it. Bothin has written that people picture “sharp elbows, dominant posture and alpha-male behaviour,” and that she believed the same thing for years.
That picture is why certain courses do not take. “Most trainings only teach assertiveness techniques but there are unconscious patterns from the past to address,” she says, and she lists them without softening: overthinking, thinking you have nothing valuable to say, feeling not good enough, fear of rejection, and cultural rules like women should be quiet.
The numbers point the same way. The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, commissioned by the Treasury and published in 2019, found that only 39 per cent of women felt confident in their capabilities to start a business, against 55 per cent of men. The review was explicit that this was about belief and not ability.
Underneath the belief, Bothin says, sits something faster and more physical. When the brain reads a situation as unsafe, the nervous system freezes and the words do not come out, and that is automatic protection rather than a character flaw. Other people notice the silence. It gets awkward. And then it gets expensive: someone who does not contribute in meetings does not get promoted, and a business owner who cannot speak up loses the client.
Technique on top of a freeze response is a plaster on the wrong wound.
What She Learned in the Silence
Bothin’s qualification for this work is not only the certificate.
I did not learn assertiveness from a textbook. I had to fight for my own voice, step by step. I conquered selective mutism, broke through the physical blocks and learned how to command respect in business without ever changing who I fundamentally am.
She has written that a residue of the old speech block still surfaces occasionally at a hectic networking event, leaving her on the sidelines for a moment while other business owners talk over each other. Which makes what she does at those events worth noticing. At a recent event, she took the microphone for the introduction round, then thanked the organisers afterwards and asked her fellow participants whether that had taken calm confidence. She was demonstrating the method on herself, in public, in the same week she was educating her followers about it.
The other half of her equipment is academic. At the University of Sheffield Information School she spent five years studying how people actually talk and take notes in structured meetings, for a thesis on automatic meeting summarisation. She was analysing who spoke, who was recorded, and what survived into the decisions, long before she coached anyone through the experience of being the person nobody recorded.
The Ladder, One Rung at a Time
The V.O.I.C.E. framework is her answer, delivered as a six-week one-to-one programme: Value your voice, Own your presence, Initiate with clarity, Create boundaries, Empower with impact.
Take one client, unnamed. Before, she stayed quiet rather than set the boundaries that would protect her time and energy. The work was not a pep talk. It was what to say, in scripts. It was how to say it, in role-play with real-time feedback. It was body language, calming the body, and the mindset shift Bothin insists is an important part, the one where a person can say “I am an assertive person” and mean it. The aim is to make the client believe they have the right to own space and make a plan for when and where to try it in practice.
Then the rungs. They built a step-by-step confidence ladder starting with easier tasks and repeating them, with Bothin holding the accountability and giving praise, guidance and constructive feedback along the way.
Afterwards the client was using I statements, naming what she needed without offending anyone, and reaching compromises. Her negotiation and conflict-resolution skills improved because she was finally in the conversation.
In my coaching sessions with clients I work with, I use that exact quiet focus to map out where your own confidence or your boundaries are breaking down. I won’t give you loud, generic advice. I will give you precise, steady tools that fit your actual personality.
Say Something in the First Ten Minutes
The instruction Bothin gives that most people have never been given is a deadline. Say something, anything, in the first ten minutes of the meeting. You have to do the thing you are afraid of, she says, because that is what builds the confidence, not the other way round.
The rest is mechanics she has published in full.
Stop waiting for the right moment, because fast conversations do not pause and you have to manufacture your entry point. Use a vocal placeholder rather than a whole paragraph: “I’d like to jump in here for a second,” or “To build on that point…” Use a physical cue, a slightly raised hand or direct eye contact with the speaker as they wrap up, so your body signals readiness before your voice has to. And if you were talked over all meeting, take it up one to one afterwards with the person running it, using an I statement rather than an accusation.
Breathe. Pause. None of it requires a personality transplant.
The Room Also Has to Change
The other half of Bothin’s practice is corporate, and it starts from the position that the individual is not the thing that needs fixing. We need to look at the bigger picture.
Some people dominate meetings and others become invisible, she says, and a good facilitator is the one who makes sure everyone gets heard. That means praising ideas and celebrating small wins. It means active listening instead of interrupting. And it means not taking verbal communication for granted at all: introverts will often contribute more through a post-it note, the chat box, a shared whiteboard, or an email than they ever will by fighting for the floor.
Employers are not close to this yet. In the CIPD’s 2025 survey of just over 5,000 UK employees, only 37 per cent said managers let them or their representatives influence final decisions.
Her research habit carries straight into the room here. People naturally record decisions and action points, so she has her coachees write down their insights and the points that matter, which is the same instinct that sent her into meetings with a notebook at university in the first place.
Why Her
She has now been on both sides of the meeting, as the researcher and as the person who could not speak.
The credential caught up with the experience recently, when Bothin gained Accredited Practitioner Coach status with the International Authority for Professional Coaching and Mentoring, thanking them for guiding her through the process. Her verdict on it was characteristically unsentimental: “Accreditation is not just a badge.”
There is outside recognition too. She was a finalist in the Small Business Heroes Awards in both the Creative Hero and Connector Hero categories, and a nominee for the Women’s Business Awards. She mentors female founders through the Mentor Match programme run by the Royal Bank of Scotland and Digital Boost. Seven recommendations sit on her LinkedIn profile. One client’s summary of what changed is the shortest description of the work anyone has managed: “I am now feeling prepared to speak up in a calm state in my next group meeting.”
You do not need loud vocal cords to be undeniable. You just need inner clarity. You can be a quiet leader. You do not have to scream to be heard.
Where Antje Is Now
Bothin works from Lanarkshire, a decade after moving there and going independent. She offers one-to-one assertiveness coaching over six weeks, group training sessions and workshops for teams, delivered in person and online.
Outside the coaching she runs the Hamilton Writers Group, writes poetry and fiction, and volunteers with selective mutism talking circles for people who are living now with what she lived with then.
She counts her first business as proof she could build one and her pivot into coaching as proof she could reinvent it. “Now, I am ready for Chapter 3.”
The Dr Antje Bothin Playbook: Five Moves for the Next High-Stakes Meeting
- Speak in the first ten minutes. Set yourself the deadline before the meeting starts, because the fear shrinks only after the action, never before it.
- Manufacture your entry point. Fast conversations never pause on their own, so use a short vocal placeholder to signal that you are coming in.
- Signal with your body first. A slightly raised hand or direct eye contact as the speaker finishes buys you the floor without raising your voice.
- Build a ladder, not a leap. Start with the easiest version of the thing you are avoiding, repeat it until it feels comfortable, then take the next rung.
- Open a second channel. If you run the room, let people contribute in writing as well as out loud, and you will hear from the ones you have been missing.
Dr Antje Bothin coaches assertive communication at assertivevoices.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
