Leading means being willing to be wrong in front of the people you want to impress.

Protecting an image and actually learning are usually in direct competition, and the audience you most want to impress is the one that makes it hardest to choose learning. Admitting a gap in front of them feels like handing over the thing you were trying to earn. In practice it does the opposite, since people can generally tell when somebody is bluffing, and the honesty is the rarer signal.

Say the sentence you have been avoiding this week: you do not know, or you got it wrong. Say it in the room you would least like to say it in. Then ask the question you actually needed to ask.