Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
How to completely change the way people listen ...

“I’m now walking into meetings and making what I want happen. The first thing I noticed was that everyone started listening to me differently. Even my boss. Now people go quiet when I speak and genuinely listen, even my superiors. I hadn’t realized there are different kinds of listening. This is REALLY different. After that, it’s not hard.”

This broke all the rules considering where Agoston was on the corporate ladder. He was young, early in career and had no authority. But he spoke up at meetings, in hallways and conversations. His influence was growing daily. It wasn’t long before he was promoted and began rapidly moving up the organization.

Before he did the Causative Communication workshop, no one listened to him.

What made the difference for Agoston was mastering the skill of…

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Instead of persuading, try this...

The question, “What do I need to say to get the outcome I want?”  is a good question. Knowing the answer to it is essential to being causative.

The reason people experience difficulties when they’re looking at a situation through this lens is because they don’t realize that they’re skipping steps.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
How to draw-in an audience of 40,000

Alistair came to me for coaching because his evaluations were filled with words like “Dry”, “Dull”, and “Not inspiring”. They thought Alistair was a smart technical geek with no leadership ability. The “Loyalty” scores in his division hit the bottom.

It was very quickly clear to me that Alistair had tremendous leadership ability and was an exceptional strategist. He was tripping up on his ability to communicate, and so the outside world never saw it.

When you trip up on communication, you will trip up on leadership. They go hand in hand.

I coached Alistair on many skills. The continuing monthly evaluations from his All-Hands told us whether he was winning.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Two skills you need to create human connection

Watching Arjun’s initial presentation, I could see he was rational, professional, very corporate. But it was not compelling. You might walk away liking Arjun, but not much moved or influenced by him.

Virtual presentations had always thrown Arjun off, especially with people that he didn’t work closely with and didn’t see that often.

We worked on many skills. I’m going to talk about two that really made a big difference. They both have to do with your state of mind.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The VP Secret for preparing for critical ...

A well-loved and successful Vice President recently came to an in-person Causative Communications class we were delivering for their company to talk to the students about how she utilizes the skills she gained from our classes to create real success in her daily life and her career.

The students loved her talk. She was supposed to talk for about 20 minutes, but they were so enthralled it went on for about an hour and a half, with question after question, each followed by her giving them practical advice that inspired them. Their faces were glowing listening to her.

One question she was asked was, “How do you prepare for a challenging meeting or big presentation?” This was a particularly good question for her because she goes into many very difficult negotiations and conversations, as well as gives many important presentations. Her answer will surprise you … (read more)

Coaching

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How to tell the truth...and why it matters

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Walter is a very high-level engineer who works on new product development, critical products that generate billions in annual revenue for the corporation. He presents quarterly to the CEO and executive leadership team who rely heavily on Walter’s technical expertise.

Walter is a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. I liked him right away. But when he started the presentation that he wanted to practice during our Executive Coaching Session, all the life in him drained away.

I asked him, “Walter, you don’t look like you’re enjoying this very much. What’s happening?”

He said, “I really hate giving this presentation.”

Me: “Why?”

Walter: “Last quarter, without talking to me or my team, the CEO promised Wall Street we would have a new product release in January. A brand new product that’s really complicated to develop. The CEO was feeling pressured because our competition is ahead of us on it.

“In our last presentation I tried to tell him that we’re not ready, that it will take us at least a year and I tried to explain why.

“He cut me off and told me that he had already publicly promised Wall Street and we had to do it. He said that since the competition had done it, he didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t do it. He said it was my problem to figure out, and just to go solve it.

“I went back to my team and we’ve all been running around in complete confusion for the past quarter. We’ve gotten nothing done and now I have to present our quarterly results and we don’t have any. I have to make it look like we’re working on it and moving forward when we’re not, and you’re right - I’m most definitely NOT enjoying this at all.”

Walter was faced with the dilemma of: How do you present something that violates your integrity? (READ MORE…)

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How the "techie guy" learned to win over every audience

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“I’m a techie guy. I’m not one of those dynamic, charismatic types. I don’t even like them.”

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Steve. He had just been promoted to Senior VP. His boss, the Executive VP, reached out to me within weeks of Steve’s starting in his new role:

“You’ve got to help him. He’s in a very visible position now. His presentations are dreadful. He’s dry, monotone, off-putting. The employees are not warming up to him. Frankly, I don’t think they like him.”

The problem was that, while Steve dislikes the dynamic, charismatic type, that’s exactly the words used to describe the previous Senior VP, the one Steve was replacing, the one everyone loved, the one who had just left the company, the one everyone missed, the one everyone wished would come back.

You see the problem.

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This is better than being polished

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“I was struggling to find words.”

Vince, one of our Executive Coaching clients wrote that in an email that he sent along with the video of an extremely difficult conversation he had with a group of very unhappy individuals who felt they had experienced a great injustice.

He wanted to show us how, in an hour, this extremely distrustful group transformed into a smiling, grateful, warm, and unbelievably appreciative group of individuals who beamed at him with great friendliness.

It was remarkable to see.

Vince’s journey has been a fascinating one. He is a deep man, a good man.

Like many who come to us for Executive Coaching, his goal was to have executive presence and polish.

Isn’t it funny that now, after his coaching, he is writing about struggling for words? It sounds like he’s not “polished”. You would think he didn’t achieve his goals.

Yet Vince achieved something that goes way beyond.

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The secret to more progress, faster

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Don (VP of a major corporation here for coaching): “I want to extend my executive presence throughout the organization, beyond my immediate area.”

Me: “What does that mean?”

Don: “I want them to know I can add value to their activities.”

Me: “Is there a problem with that?”

Don: “Yes, they’re not seeing it. They think that I can only add value in my own area. Not outside of it, not for them cross-functionally in the organization. It’s frustrating.”

Me: “Have you ever told them that you can add value?”

Don: “No.”

Me: “Why not?”

Don: “They need to see it for themselves.”

I call this “Executive Charades”.

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The end of dull corporate presentations...forever

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“Can I send you the feedback from my last presentation?”

Only a week earlier, Lukas had completed the Mastering Virtual Presentations workshop.

It was supposed to be “just another normal corporate presentation”.

When you see those two words together, corporate presentation, what do they conjure up for you. Something thrilling? Gripping?

Very few people find them exciting.

Lukas was asked to give a “quarterly update,” which is the same low level of thrilling as a “corporate presentation”.

Except that Lukas surprised them all. And he was amazed by the response. He’d never gotten feedback like this before. No one had.

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The price tag on your soul

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“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

I was coaching Victor, a young man in his early 30’s who had already made millions. He came to me questioning everything. Early success in the venture-capital world led Victor on a hot pursuit of things he found did not matter to him once he had them.

The things that matter most are the ones you can’t see, like deep human connections. Like kindness, respect, real understanding, and emotional well-being.

Victor was missing all of the above and burst into tears when he found a safe haven with me to be able to say it out loud.

“My life feels like it’s been stripped of meaning.”

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How to talk to someone who doesn't want to talk to you

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Victoria leads a high-level Engineering team. It’s vital to her team that Sales doesn’t promise the customer anything Engineering can’t deliver.

It wasn’t going well. Engineering was no longer being invited to meetings involving Sales. That’s putting it mildly. Engineering was told to “stay out.” The relationship with Sales had gotten extremely contentious, to the point where the door was completely shut.

Victoria showed up for the Causative Communication workshop wanting to know how to communicate effectively with these people. How do you talk to someone who doesn’t even want to talk to you?

Her big focus was on finding out, “What do I say?”

She honestly believed she understood the Sales position and needed to get them to listen to her. She also knew they weren’t open to hearing anything.

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Fred’s search for executive presence

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“I’m the one who held back your promotion because I don’t think you have sufficient executive presence to be promoted to VP.”

I was helping Fred prepare for an upcoming one-on-one with the Executive Vice President, Olga, who was going to say these very words to him. Fred was there to change her mind.

We were practicing acknowledging the difficult things Olga would be telling him. Fred had earned some tough feedback and now had to pay the price of hearing it.

Even in the best of circumstances, Olga made Fred defensive. His hot buttons were triggered quickly. In past conversations, Fred’s strategy for getting Olga to change her mind was to overwhelm her with reasons she was wrong. But that didn’t work. It made Olga like him even less.

As Fred practiced acknowledging the piercing statements Olga would be making, I pointed out to Fred that his acknowledgements came across very reluctantly … and Fred just about shouted:

“Absolutely! I AM reluctant! Absolutely! I don’t WANT to acknowledge her when she’s WRONG!”

Acknowledgements have nothing to do with right and wrong. 

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What is essential is invisible to the eyes

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“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Maxwell was quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the wonderful French writer, author of the lovely book The Little Prince.

Maxwell was a student in the early morning Causative Communication workshop I was delivering for European students last week. We were wrapping up the last 5 minutes of the 2-day training, talking about the class.

The golden sun was rising in California as he spoke.

Maxwell continued: “The Little Prince is required reading for every child in my country. I thought of this quote because ‘the invisible’ is what I believe you work on in this class, and this is what we have learned to do.”

He was right.

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Body language and other ways to ruin Executive Presence

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“What are you doing?”

I was asking Alessandro this at the beginning of the Mastering Virtual Presentations workshop. Alessandro was giving his first presentation and I was trying to make sense of his sudden stone-faced glare and forceful hand gestures.

“I was told I need executive presence so I’m trying to come across with gravitas.”

The problem was that he was trying to do it with his body.

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How to deliver bad news

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“I know it’s bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Morgan was demonstrating how she delivers bad news. She looks like she hates you.

The truth was, Morgan hated the message she was delivering. Because of the supply shortage, she now couldn’t get the order that you need right now to you for a year. Who could possibly love that message?

The immediate response Morgan got was, “Well then, we’re going to your competitor.” Morgan was in customer service. It was her job to save the customer.

What was upsetting Morgan was how upset she was FOR her customer. She could FEEL their pain. She felt horrible because she CARED so MUCH for them and because she could do nothing to change the vicious material shortage for them.

I asked Morgan, “Why don’t you tell them? Let them know how you feel, how much you care, and how much you would love to help them?”

That had never occurred to her.

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Fighting harder and other ways to fail

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“You have to be willing to fight for what you want.”

And Beatriz was only too willing.

However, no one she worked with, including her boss, was in the mood for a fight. They had started running the other way when they saw her coming.

Beatriz‘s response was, “If you’re not getting what you want, you need to fight harder.”

She came to me for coaching because this strategy was failing her. Beatriz had run out of ammunition, but didn’t want to surrender.

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The aura of executive presence

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“Dominique is smart, people like her, she gets things done. But we can’t promote her to VP yet. She has no executive presence.”

Imagine Dominique‘s reaction when she heard those words spoken by her senior management.

“But, but, but … I’m qualified! I don’t get it!”

That one missing ingredient was stopping it all.

What is executive presence? It’s an aura.

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Wearing your thoughts on your face

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“She gets very defensive whenever I ask her a question.”

Vincent was describing Vickie, the Executive Vice President who had just cast the deciding vote to veto Vincent’s promotion to Vice President.

Vincent was complaining about how difficult Vickie was just to talk to. And he was trying to get her to understand how qualified he was to be a VP.

From his perspective, the problem was …. Vickie.

And, it was true. She did get defensive with Vincent. He visibly irritated her.

But Vincent had identified the wrong root cause for why Vickie reacted this way to him. As you know, if you have the wrong root cause, you’ll get nowhere.

What was Vincent not seeing?

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"It's not my nature..." and other lies you've been told

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Valeria had a problem. She’s a passionate woman and it was a passionate problem. “People don’t listen to me. They tune me out. They don’t do what I’m asking them to do. They don’t even give me a response after a while.”

“It’s not my nature to talk slow.”

It has nothing to do with her nature. If it did, I wouldn’t have been able to help her.

With a little bit of coaching, I got Valeria to adjust her velocity (think of it as her “speed”, how many words she was jamming in) so people could really understand the individual words she was saying.

An amazing thing happened. And it happened very naturally. Valeria used fewer words.

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How to give up “persuasion” for something much better

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Tim: “You’re not going to believe this. It feels weird to have everything suddenly going well.”

What is Tim talking about?

He’s talking about a change in strategy that initially seems subtle, but one that creates more power than most people have had in their lives.

To understand it you have to understand humanity and the better you understand that, the more successful you will be.

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The pure signal you send to your audience

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A man on stage plays the trumpet. The note he plays floats out over the crowd. The audience is still. Listening. Absorbed in that note. Nothing exists but that moment, that note. He gives his note everything and, as he does, so does the audience. He holds it, lets it go. The audience lets out their breath as they gently land into the silence.

When he’s not playing his trumpet, this man is a powerful force for good in a leadership position within his world-renowned organization.

He aspires to senior leadership and came to us for coaching on Executive Presence.

It turns out that what he learned about presence elevates not only his communications in the challenging professional world he inhabits, but also in his extraordinary other world as a musician.

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The attorney who “out sold” the sales team

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Daniel wasn’t supposed to say anything. He was the Corporate Attorney in the meeting between Sales and the customer they hoped to get. It was a big customer: the government of a major European country. If they signed a deal, it was going to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

He was only there because the prospective customer had initiated a strong dispute about his organization’s licensing terms.

His only charter in this meeting was to protect their intellectual property. He was there to tell this prospective customer, “No, we can’t do that”.

Daniel was fresh from a Causative Communication workshop and was watching it all go down. What he saw was painful. He could see every mistake being made, but it was his job to stay silent until the discussion about the license dispute made its way to the top of the agenda.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He thought to himself, “Well, I don’t think I can make it any worse than it already is.”

And so he jumped into the conversation. The sales team was shocked. What did the corporate licensing attorney think he was doing????????

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The singular power of self-awareness

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“They don’t want to change.”

“They’ve been doing everything the same way a long time. They’re stuck in their ways and they just don’t want to hear about any new way of doing it.”

Adira spent 15 minutes detailing events and deeds that proved how stubborn “they” were and, with a flourish, she finished with, “Perhaps I should leave and go to a different organization where they value creative thought.”

So I asked, “What would be the most ideal outcome you can imagine? What would be really wonderful if it happened?”

She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Wonderful?????” She spent another 5 minutes patiently explaining to me how “these people” were far from ideal, how they did not measure up to her standards, did not live up to her expectations, and how disappointing it all was.

Adira had no awareness of what she was doing. None.

She had no idea she was being critical. She thought she was being objective.

My job was to raise her awareness.

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When you're not a "natural" public speaker

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Thomas was one of three experts on a cyber-security panel, a media interview with a live audience televised across the world.

Thomas was looking directly into the camera, eye contact strong, executive presence strong, confidence strong, competence undeniable.

I started coaching Thomas about two years ago. The presentations he was giving back then had much less visibility. As his competence increased, he was asked to present more frequently.

When you see him now, you would say he’s a natural.

That doesn’t mean he started out that way.

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