5 Habits Quietly Killing Your Perception at Work (Part 1)

I sat in your team’s performance calibration the other day. Here’s what I heard.

Manager 1 (your manager): “What do you all think about them?”

Manager 2 (your manager’s peer): “A few things hold them back from being a top performer. For example, I’ve been in countless meetings led by them where their follow-up has been weak.”

Manager 3 (your manager's peer): “Yeah, I’ve seen the same. Also, they are consistently pessimistic. They point out what won’t work but rarely brings solutions.”

Manager 1 (your manager): “Wow. Okay. That’s helpful. I’m hearing that they’re delivering results, but there are areas to work on. I’ll hold off on the promotion for now.”

You were excited. You were led to believe a promotion was on the horizon. But when the moment came, there wasn’t enough support. Your manager didn’t have the data points to challenge the perception forming around you.

Even though you’ve delivered value, small things got in the way.

It’s not just your performance that shapes how people see you. It’s how you show up.

It’s how you speak in meetings, follow up afterward, frame decisions, and build trust in rooms you’re not in.

This could be you. And you wouldn’t even know it.

For the next few weeks, I’ll share five habits that quietly undermine how you’re perceived at work, even if you’re doing everything “right” on paper:

• Softening your language

• Being the voice of pessimism

• Over-explaining simple decisions

• Changing stories based on who’s in the room

• Treating meetings like a finish line, not a starting point

Each one chips away at how people experience your leadership. Each one is fixable.

We’ll break them down with real examples, tactical rewrites, and small shifts that can have a big impact.

Habit #1: Softening Your Language

There are three quiet ways professionals soften their language at work:

• Wrongly Apologizing

• Over-qualifying

• Asking unnecessary validation questions

Each one signals uncertainty, even when you’re fully capable. Let’s break them down.

Over Apologizing

A while back, my mom gave me a loving but pointed reminder:
“You say sorry too much.”

She’s right. It’s a reflex. And it undercuts everything that follows.

Last weekend, we left the Y after swimming, and my daughter insisted she needed a bandaid. (It was for a week-old cut that wasn’t bleeding. That’s another story…)

I walked up to the front desk and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but do you have a bandaid?”

Sorry… for asking for something reasonable.

It’s a low-grade, polite-sounding way of saying: I don’t want to be a burden.

But apologizing when you’ve done nothing wrong makes you sound unsure. That subtly erodes how others perceive your confidence.

What should you do instead?