You are in a meeting held in your second or third language. You know the answer. You are building the sentence, checking the tense, deciding between two words, and by the time it is ready the conversation has moved two topics on. Someone else says a rougher version of your point and the room agrees with them.
If that is your working life, the first thing worth hearing is that the gap you feel is not a gap in ability. It is latency. Your judgement is intact and arrives on time. The packaging takes an extra second, and in a fast meeting a second is expensive.
Some of what helps is just mechanics.
Prepare two sentences before the meeting, actually written out, for the point you know you want to make. You will read them once and not need the paper, but the sentence is built before the pressure arrives.
Take the floor before you are ready, not after. I want to say something about the migration. That is four words, it holds your place, and it buys you ten seconds while everyone turns to look.
Use the chat. Dropping your point in writing while somebody else is speaking is not a lesser contribution, and in writing you are often the most precise person in the room.
Ask people to repeat things, out loud, without apology. Sorry, say that again. Nobody thinks anything of it, and pretending to have understood costs far more later.
And tell people how to help you, once, plainly. Say numbers twice. Put the decision in the channel afterwards. Most colleagues will do it gladly and never think about it again.
If you are the one whose first language the meeting is in, you have work here too. Slow down. Drop the idioms and the sports metaphors, which carry nothing across. Do not finish other people's sentences, however helpful it feels. And never mistake an accent or a small grammatical slip for a lack of understanding, which is a mistake that has cost companies extremely good engineers.
You are doing this job in a second language. Most of the people in the room could not do it in theirs.
– Asael Shinder
