Walking into a meeting with confidence feels great until the thing you were leaning on disappears. In this lesson, you step into Kendra’s shoes: she expected polished slides and talking points, but the client cut the deck and asked her to explain the proposal out loud. Suddenly the room got quiet, and the gap between “looks impressive” and “actually understands it” showed up fast.
That moment is the hook for a simple skill that protects your credibility when it matters most: being able to stand on your own reasoning, not your tools.
The core idea is this: you can use AI to speed up your work without letting it do your thinking. When AI drafts a plan, it can sound confident even if you have not fully earned that confidence. That is how people become “artificially educated,” not because they are lazy, but because the output creates an illusion of understanding. The Empty Room Test breaks the illusion. It is a self check you run before a high trust moment: if you were alone in an empty room with no slides, notes, or assistant, could you explain your work clearly in your own words?
Start with Practice Round 1: explain without tools. Set a timer for two minutes and speak out loud, not in your head. Your goal is to cover three things in plain language: what you are trying to achieve, why your approach makes sense, and what trade offs you are accepting. Imagine you are proposing a customer onboarding improvement. You might say the goal is to increase repeat purchases, the logic is that simpler sign up and a helpful follow up sequence reduces drop off, and the trade off is investing in existing users instead of chasing new leads right now. If you cannot get through those basics smoothly, you do not need better slides, you need clearer understanding.
As you practice, pay attention to where your voice tightens or your explanation starts to sound like a pasted script. Those are your weak spots. Speaking out loud forces you to choose words you actually own, and it exposes fuzzy logic that “looked fine” on a document. That is the point. The Empty Room Test is not about performing, it is about discovering what you do not yet understand so you can fix it before someone else finds it in public. Each time you repeat the two minute explanation, you should feel your message become simpler, cleaner, and more natural.
Next comes Practice Round 2: own the reasoning by anticipating the breakers. Ask yourself two uncomfortable questions: what could break this plan, and what would make me change my recommendation? If your plan depends on steady new sign ups, what happens if sign ups stay low? If you are relying on an email series, what if customers get tired of it and tune out? If resources shrink mid quarter, what pieces are essential and what gets cut first? This is how you turn a pretty plan into a resilient plan, because you are no longer just describing what you want to do, you are demonstrating that you have thought through how reality might push back.
This round also changes how you show up in conversation. When someone challenges you, you are not scrambling for a clever response, because you already walked the road mentally. You can say, clearly and calmly, what assumptions you are making and what you will do if those assumptions fail. That is the difference between sounding like you memorized a script and sounding like you understand your work. Clients and leaders trust people who can explain both the plan and the “what if” paths without getting defensive or vague.
Finally, Practice Round 3 is about matching your confidence to the evidence. AI can tempt you to present everything as certain, because the writing is smooth and decisive. Instead, sort your points in your mind into three buckets: what you know from reliable data or direct experience, what you believe is likely based on reasoning, and what you still need to verify. Then speak that way. You might say, “We know our repeat purchase rate is low based on last quarter’s numbers. We believe improving onboarding will help because engaged users tend to return. We still need to confirm whether a loyalty perk will change behavior, so we will monitor it closely and adjust if it does not.” This kind of honest precision makes you more credible, not less.
Take this lesson forward as a repeatable habit: before your next important meeting, run the Empty Room Test. Do a two minute explanation in your own words, stress test your plan with real risks and pivot points, and be clear about what you know versus what you are still validating. When you can do that, your work has your fingerprints on it again. AI stays a helpful assistant, but you stay the owner of the thinking, and that is what people trust.
