Most meeting preparation is really just rehearsal for the version of the meeting you hope happens. The one question you are quietly dreading almost never makes it into that rehearsal, which is exactly why it throws you when it actually gets asked.
Why imagining failure works better than avoiding it
Psychologist Gary Klein built a technique called the premortem on a specific 1989 finding, when researchers Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that imagining an outcome had already happened, rather than might happen, increased the number of reasons people generated for it by roughly a third. Worth being precise about what that means, because it often gets stretched: they found people produced more explanations, not better ones, and said so in the paper. Klein's insight was that the same shift works for individual preparation, not just group risk planning. Imagining the dreaded question has already been asked, and working backward from there, surfaces a sharper answer than simply hoping it will not come up.
Why avoidance feels like preparation but is not
Rehearsing the version of a meeting you want to happen feels productive, and it is, for the parts that go as expected. It does nothing for the moment that actually determines how the meeting is remembered, the hard question, the objection you do not have a clean answer to yet. Skipping that part is not efficient preparation. It is the part most worth doing first, not last.
Where to start
Before your next meeting that matters, name the one question you would least want asked, out loud or in writing. Then actually answer it, even if the honest answer is that you do not know yet and here is what you would need to find out.
Having a real answer ready, even an incomplete one, changes the moment entirely. An unprepared silence reads as being caught out. A direct "I do not have that fully worked out yet, here is what I do know" reads as someone in control of the situation.
Knowing exactly which question you are actually dreading, versus the ones that just feel uncomfortable to think about, is something only you know going into a specific meeting. What this gives you is the habit of naming it honestly instead of letting it stay vague.
There is a specific way to answer a hard question live that sounds like confidence rather than deflection, and it is worth practicing before the meeting where it actually comes up.