Three ways to get talking wrong

You said the right thing four minutes too early.

The meeting had just started. You raised a question, the person running it glanced up and said, let's come back to that. Nobody came back to it. You spent the next hour composing the same sentence eleven different ways.

Confucius listed three mistakes people make when they speak in front of someone senior.

Speaking before you're invited is rashness. Speaking when it's your turn and staying quiet is concealment. Speaking without reading the other person's face is blindness.

Three words: rash, hidden, blind. He bothered to name three separate failures, which tells you he'd watched a lot of people walk into them.

Most people only remember the first one. The over-eager person who talks too much. The second one is quieter and costs more. Men and women with something real to say, sitting on it for years, learning to call that patience.

In my experience that silence has little to do with humility. Same fear as the rashness, aimed the other way, and it reads as not caring.

The sentence you held back today, if it mattered, say it tomorrow in a smaller room with two people in it.

MOJOWAY is where I rehearse that. Replaying what you said and what you didn't is how awareness of your own timing gets built, one honest transcript at a time.