What language changes does Kim Porter recommend engineers use to stop undermining their own authority?
Kim Porter recommends eliminating "I think" and "I believe" from professional vocabulary entirely. She calls these phrases self-undermining and replaces them with a three-part structure: state the data, present the results, and deliver a clear recommendation — framed as "no opinions, all data, no emotion." This removes subjectivity from the conversation and leaves nothing for colleagues or managers to argue against, because there is no opinion on the table, only evidence.
Porter's logic is precise: the moment you say "I think," you invite disagreement. You have signaled that what follows is a personal view, not a professional assessment — and personal views can be dismissed. By anchoring every statement in data and outcomes, you force the conversation onto factual ground. Hear her explain this in full on Listenly.
This advice carries particular weight coming from someone who spent four decades as the only woman in rooms full of male engineers. Porter developed this framework not as a communication theory but as a survival and advancement strategy — one she refined across every position she held at organizations ranging from NASA-adjacent aerospace projects to Nike's product design teams.
"No opinions, all data, no emotion. Here's the data, here are the results, this is my recommendation — and then you don't say anything. Silence is power."
— Kim Porter, Ordinary To Badass, episode 452
About Kim Porter
Kim Porter earned her engineering science and mechanics degree — with an emphasis in biomedical engineering — from Iowa State University in the early 1980s, at a time when biomedical engineering was not yet an established field of study. Her graduating class sent only four to six students on to engineering programs out of roughly 300, which positioned her at the frontier of a discipline still taking shape.
Her career began with urgency: within one month of the January 1986 Challenger disaster, Porter joined the project building next-generation spacesuit gloves — high-stakes, precision engineering work that set the standard for everything that followed. She subsequently moved into product design at Nike before building her own independent consultancy, Kim Porter Consultancy, which she has run for the majority of her career.
Across every role she held over 40 years, Porter was the only woman in the room. Mechanical engineering's gender ratio has barely shifted in that time — still roughly one woman for every nine men, the same 1-in-10 ratio she encountered as a student. This context is what makes her language framework more than advice: it is the distilled result of navigating four decades of rooms where her authority was never assumed.
Porter founded HatchOne, an online engineering community that includes a dedicated Women in Engineering subgroup, where she is now teaching the next generation the professional strategies nobody taught her. Having recently retired from full-time engineering work, she continues to run HatchOne and her consultancy, channeling her experience into resources for women entering and advancing in male-dominated technical fields.
See also
Porter describes her imposter syndrome as following a downward trajectory — like a declining stock market over time. Early in her career she internalized it strongly, but across four decades as the only woman in all-male engineering environments, she built a track record that gradually quieted that internal voice.