Shortly after I transitioned to management, the startup I was working for was acquired by a large multinational company. During the process of onboarding, I was in charge of running introduction sessions about my team’s system for a group from our new parent company. I was pretty intimidated—I had only been a manager for a few months, and these new colleagues were senior, halfway across the world, and intensely smart.

I scheduled a first meeting to go over our architecture and, afraid to waste anyone’s time, I put only 30 minutes on the calendar. As I built my agenda, I realized I would need an hour to get through the content. I remember feeling stuck and anxious. I needed more time with the group, but it had already been so hard to find an open slot! And surely all these important people were way too busy for me.

I was in the middle of typing out a very apologetic message when it hit me: I was basically telling every invitee that their time was more valuable than what I had to say. Even if I never used any of those words, apologizing for having to increase the meeting duration implicitly told that story.

When someone tells you a story directly, you generally spend some time questioning it. Even if high school English class was long ago, once something is categorized as a “story” in your mind, you’ll probably think about who is telling you the story, why, and whether you agree. Implicit stories—the subtle narratives underneath whatever we’re saying—might not get this level of scrutiny. This makes implicit storytelling an incredibly powerful persuasive tool, and one you are likely using and receiving all the time without noticing.

If I had continued with my apology and timid request for a longer meeting slot, I would have accidentally convinced many of my new colleagues that I was not worth their time. Their conscious rationale might have been my relative inexperience, lack of organizational awareness, or short tenure in the new company. Underneath those reasons, though, would have been an instinctive, subconscious mistrust of my value.

How do you change the stories you are implicitly telling at work? It is a skill that takes a long time to build, but I recommend starting with these steps:

1. Notice what story you are telling now. Often this is a story you’re telling yourself that may spill over into your actions (e.g., “I’m not good enough at my job,” or “that new hire is an idiot,” or, in my case, “my new colleagues are more important than I am”).
2. Don’t worry about whether or not that story is true. Instead, evaluate whether it is a productive story for you to tell to the people around you. Maybe that new hire really is behind the curve, but you implying so in your behavior will not help them grow.
3. Write yourself a more helpful story. Do this when you have some emotional distance from the situation. If your story is that you aren’t good at your job, talk to someone who you know will help you feel as confident as possible before crafting your replacement narrative. I recommend finding a new story that is still a reasonable interpretation of reality. For example, go from “I’m not good enough at my job” to “I’m in a valuable process of building the skills I need for my job,” instead of trying to jump to “I’m amazing at my job.”
4. When you need to make decisions at work, especially when communicating with others, think what would someone who believed my new story do or say? This doesn’t mean you actually have to fully believe your new story, just that you need to see it as reasonable enough to guide your actions.

Even after stopping myself from sending a bunch of apologies, I still anxiously believed that all my new colleagues were more important than me. But I asked myself: What would I do if I knew my presentation was absolutely worth their time? The answer I came to was fairly simple. I extended the meeting to an hour with a straightforward note: “We’ll need a full hour for the presentation. If this slot doesn’t work for you, feel free to suggest an alternate time.”

I had already been thinking quite a bit about implicit storytelling when I attended a talk by Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor. To paraphrase something she said that really stuck with me: “We communicate on an emotional level all the time, whether we intend to or not.” In the same way, we tell stories all the time, whether we intend to or not. Even when we are being as direct as possible, others will hear a narrative underneath our words. So don’t try to opt out—instead, take the time to understand and use implicit storytelling in order to communicate more effectively with everyone around you.