A tall woman in stiletto heels showed up for one of my presentation skills workshops.
She said, “I used to be a Victoria's Secret model, but then I got too old. I had to find a different job. Now I work in IT.”
She was demoralized by the change, lacking confidence.
“People used to love me.”
Relying so much on her outer beauty, she never developed her inner beauty, her character, her voice, her true self. High heels were all she had left of a glamorous past life.
She was consumed by worries about inadequacy now. Her mind spun with, “There’s nothing special about me anymore. I don’t stand out anymore. I’m too new in IT to impress anyone.”
She’d always connected with her audience via a beautiful body. She was lost now in how to connect with people when her body changed, her youth gone.
The workshop was difficult for her. Seeing the camera that we used to video her presentations caused her to automatically strike a pose, but posing is the exact opposite of connecting with the audience.
It was difficult for her to learn to forget about the camera, to shed the years of self-conscious posturing, to turn her focus to the people sitting in her audience, to be interested in them.
She had to break through BIG barriers to let go of the need to posture, to arrange herself to just the right angle, the need to impress, and to simply stop posing.
She's not alone in this.
Most people don't know how to truly connect with others as themselves. There's always something holding them back, some self-consciousness, a feeling something is “missing”, or something they put between themselves and others to protect them.
Often this is manifested when you see presenters trying to connect with their audience through their PowerPoint slides. You can see the trouble they would have if you took the slides away from them. They’d feel exposed, vulnerable, unsure.
Whether it’s slides, a beautiful body, or some attitude a person assumes because they think it makes them impressive, it doesn’t make any difference. The REAL skill is connecting directly as yourself.
The real skill is to not be afraid to face them and connect with who you really are. And to let the power of that be the compelling force.
She had to break free of a tangled network of lies and false ideas that come with a glamorous life, break free of all the things others had told her to believe about herself, to find her inner substance, to find who she really is, to discover the ageless, timeless, unvarnished beauty inside of her, the beauty that if you nurture it, grows and never diminishes with age.
And when she did make that breakthrough and discovered herself… she was radiant, more powerful, more compelling, and more beautiful than she’d ever been.
It was and is a lasting beauty. It is limitless. And she was strong in knowing how to keep it growing. She had tears in her eyes when she took my hand to say goodbye. It was the start of a new life.
Every woman has the power to emanate this extraordinary beauty, every man to emanate a powerful attractiveness. Somehow the day-to-day world manages to squash it. Or so it seems.
That's why I love delivering these workshops, because they enable each person to re-discover and awaken it for themselves. They look younger, fresher, charismatic, more stunningly attractive, and more magnetic the moment they do. Their “before” and “after” videos are stunning.
This is not something you are missing. It’s not something you must find that you have lost. “It” is there, inside of you, even as you read this.
All that is needed is for you to remember, and to clear the obstacles standing in the way of the real you “showing up” for the world.
If you are looking to create extraordinary outcomes, this is the powerful and attractive person we want to meet.
Be the cause!