Lachlan Brown
A few years back, a junior writer on my team finally told me something that knocked the wind out of me. She said she used to rehearse her Slack messages to me three or four times before hitting send. I had no idea. I thought I was being friendly. She thought I was scary.
That moment opened my eyes. I started watching how people behaved around me, not how I assumed they did. And the truth was uncomfortable. Without ever raising my voice, without ever trying to be difficult, I was sometimes making people feel small.
The strange thing about intimidation is that the people doing it are usually the last to know. Confidence, directness, focus, and emotional steadiness are all good traits. But to someone wired more cautiously, those same traits can feel like a closed door.
Here are eight signs, backed by psychology, that you might be intimidating people without ever realising it.
1. People over-apologize around you
The first clue is the word “sorry.” Sorry for bothering you. Sorry for the dumb question. Sorry to take up your time. None of it was necessary, but it keeps spilling out.
Researchers describe excessive apologising as a form of appeasement behaviour, often linked to low self-esteem and submissive social posturing. It is a small linguistic ritual people use to lower the perceived threat in a room. If you keep hearing “sorry” from someone who has done nothing wrong, you are very likely the room.
2. They agree with you a little too quickly
This one took me a long time to notice. I would float an idea, and everyone in the meeting would nod. I would suggest a direction, and suddenly everyone had been thinking the same thing. Convenient, right?
Actually, no. When people find you intimidating, they short-circuit disagreement. They sense the social cost of pushing back and quietly opt out. Research on assertiveness and group dynamics shows that strong, direct communicators often unintentionally suppress dissent in others, because conflict-averse individuals will choose appeasement over honesty when they feel outmatched.
If your meetings feel suspiciously harmonious, the harmony might not be real.
3. Your eye contact lands harder than you think
I am a steady eye-contact person. Always have been. For years I thought of it as a sign of respect, of full presence. And it is. But it also has a flipside.
A widely cited study published in Psychological Science by Chen and colleagues found that direct gaze can shift from a connection cue to a dominance cue, making listeners more resistant to persuasion and more likely to perceive the speaker as confrontational. Other research on dominance hierarchies has shown a similar pattern: more dominant individuals tend to sustain eye contact even in tense moments, while others reflexively look away.
If people keep breaking eye contact when you speak to them, it may not be shyness. It may be self-protection.
4. They visibly relax the moment you leave
This is the one almost nobody catches in real time, because by definition you are not there to see it. But I started noticing the inverse. I would walk back into a café where my colleagues were sitting, and the conversation would dip. Shoulders would straighten. Phones would go away.
Psychologists describe this as a release of social vigilance. The body had been quietly in performance mode and only lets go once the perceived authority figure is gone. It is not necessarily a verdict that they dislike you. More often, it just means interacting with you costs them more energy than interacting with each other.
5. People over-explain themselves to you
An ordinary “I’m running ten minutes late” becomes a three-paragraph essay about traffic, the previous meeting, and the alignment of the planets. Watch for it.
Over-explanation is a cousin of over-apologising. It is a hedge against being judged. Clinical psychologists note that this kind of preemptive justification tends to show up in people who feel they need to earn the right to be present in a conversation. If multiple people do this with you, the variable in the equation is you.
6. They mirror your energy a little too carefully
Mirroring is a beautiful thing when it happens naturally between equals. Two friends laugh at the same moment, lean in at the same time, settle into the same posture. That is rapport.
But there is a heavier version of it that I think of as defensive mirroring. People match your volume because they are scared to be louder. They match your seriousness because they are scared to be playful. They follow your lead in every micro-decision because they are trying to avoid getting it wrong. Watch their faces. If the smile lands a beat after yours, every time, that is not connection. That is calibration.
7. They rarely initiate conversation with you
Look at your last fifty messages, calls, or coffee invitations. Who started them?
If you are almost always the initiator, that is information. People who find you intimidating tend to wait for you to make the first move because the cost of being rejected by someone they perceive as powerful feels higher. A systematic review on the social functions of silence notes that silence and withdrawal are commonly used as protective strategies when one party perceives a power imbalance. The absence of initiation is itself a message.
8. Your silences feel heavier than other people’s
This last one is subtle. Research highlighted by Psychology Today on the work of Koudenburg and colleagues found that just four seconds of silence in a conversation is enough to make many people feel rejected or anxious.
Now imagine those four seconds coming from someone they already perceive as senior, focused, or formidable. Suddenly the pause is not a pause. It is a verdict. If you are someone who is comfortable with silence, who does not rush to fill the air, you may be unintentionally cranking the social pressure up to ten while you sit there feeling perfectly relaxed.
What to do about it
None of this means you should shrink yourself. Confidence, directness, and emotional steadiness are not flaws to be apologised for. The traits that intimidate are very often the same traits people respect.
But awareness changes everything. Soften your eye contact a touch when someone seems tense. Ask actual questions and wait for actual answers. Initiate occasionally instead of always being initiated. Laugh first. Make the silence safe.
The most powerful people I know are not the ones who walk into a room and dominate it. They are the ones who walk in and somehow make the room feel bigger for everyone in it.
That is the version of strength worth aiming at.
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