Hey Martin,
A lot of your comment actually sounds pretty familiar to me.
The main suggestion I have based on what you wrote is to pick a small number of specific things you’d like to do differently, then gradually practice those in some conversations, treating it explicitly as practice that you will need to do for a while, not as a magic fix that you’d be able to implement perfectly if only you were a good enough person.
To unpack that:
Specific things to do differently: from your comment, it already sounds like you’ve already identified some things you do that make you “bigger” than you want to be—interrupting people and speaking in a loud voice. Take those, as a starter.
Practice in some conversations: explicitly pick some interactions where it feels OK to experiment with this—maybe it’s first conversations with people you’re not likely to meet again, or maybe it’s group conversations with 4+ people where it’s fine if you don’t say much, or maybe it’s some other type of context. However you choose, start trying to keep an eye out for “practice conversations”.
Treating it as practice: in most conversations, you probably have multiple goals you’re pursuing at once—maybe to learn something, maybe to tell someone else something, maybe to get them to like you, etc. The idea of explicitly picking some subset of conversations to be practice conversations is that in those ones, you bump up practicing your selected skills to be above your other goals.
Practice you’ll need to do for a while: At first, your main goal is just to notice chances to practice the things you’ve picked. The first few times you try it, you might not notice until it’s too late—maybe you’ll notice once you’re a sentence and a half into interrupting someone, or you’ll talk quietly the first time you speak, but not the second. That’s totally OK! See AgentyDuck on why noticing is so important (and hard). If you notice at all, that counts as you getting practice, and therefore as a win. If you stick with it, you’ll gradually get better at noticing, and the better you are at noticing, the more chances you have to practice doing the thing.
This is basically what I did many years ago when training myself out of some pretty similar habits. Maybe the most similar was that when I felt insecure in a conversation, I would (subconsciously) default to trying to speak as much as possible—I think motivated by trying to show people I was smart? But this just resulted in (a) people being annoyed that they couldn’t get a word in, and (b) my average contribution being not that interesting, because I was saying so many things. One thing I practiced very explicitly was noticing when I was feeling this kind of insecurity, and raising my bar for how interesting/funny/etc I expected my contribution to be. I knew theoretically that it’s much more likeable to say a few things people enjoy than lots of things they don’t, but it still took a lot of attentive practice to change my in-the-moment habits.
I’ll note that trying to express “HI, I’M A LOUD IDIOT, PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO SHUT UP.” sounds to me like basically the epitome of low-big as described in the post—and I therefore wouldn’t recommend it. I can understand it seems appealing since you’re perceived as being much bigger than you want to be, and you’re trying to compensate for that, but this is such a “big” way to try to compensate that I think it’s bound to backfire. Instead, I think it’s totally feasible to learn to work with features of yourself that you seem to be treating as fixed (voice volume, interrupting-ness, body language), to actually directly affect how “big” people perceive you to be, rather than asking them to forgive you for it.
This is great! Very related to Open Philanthropy’s concept of reasoning transparency, especially the section on how to indicate different kinds of support for your view.
I vividly remember learning about this within my first few weeks working at GiveWell: when I submitted an early draft of some research on malaria, my manager took one look at the footnotes and asked me to redo them. “Don’t just find some serious-looking source—what actually led you to make the claim you’re footnoting?” I was mindblown, both that this was such a novel thing to do and that I hadn’t even really noticed I wasn’t doing it.