Thirteen years in, and the thing I am working on now is conviction.
For most of my career I hedged. I would present three options when I already knew which one was right, because three felt collaborative and one felt like arrogance. I would say, I think this might work well, when what I meant was, this is the answer, and I have known it for a week.
I have slowly come to think that hedging was not humility. It quietly hands the risk of the decision to the client, who is not equipped to carry it, and if the weaker option gets chosen, I get to stay blameless. That is a poor way to work, and it tends to produce poor work.
Conviction is not the same as arrogance. Arrogance is certainty without the years behind it. Conviction is having spent enough time in the room to actually know, and then saying so plainly, so that the person paying me gets the benefit of what they are paying for.
The change is easy to describe and hard to do. I bring one recommendation. I bring the reasoning. I bring the alternatives I considered and set aside, and why, so it reads as a judgment and not a whim. Then I say, this is what I would do, and here is where I would need you to trust me.
Clients have responded to this better than I expected. Most of them, it turns out, are tired of being asked to choose. They did not hire a designer to be handed a menu. They hired someone who had done the work before.