Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Becoming the most listened-to person in the ...

Farzad is the most listened-to person in the division. But it wasn’t always that way. His boss had contacted me saying, “Farzad is a great guy with tremendous substance, but his rambling presentations are driving everyone crazy. Especially my boss!”

Farzad was known as “The guy who talks the most and says the least.”

Farzad showed up for Coaching eager and interested in learning. He said, “I know I’m doing something wrong because everyone multi-tasks when I’m talking, but I have no idea what it is. If you can help me with that, I would love to have everyone listening to me.”

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
When you're one conversation away from success

It was Valerie’s first Executive Coaching session of the new year and she was spiritless. She found out the CEO had decided to bypass her for the promotion from VP to Senior VP that she had been counting on. They wanted to bring in someone “fresh and with more experience” from the outside to be her new boss. Ugh!

Valerie got the bad news and then went out on the end of year holiday. It didn’t improve her mood.

“What’s going on?”  I asked her.

“It’s hard. It’s hard to come back. It’s hard to look forward to this new year with any optimism. I feel like I’m not being valued. My enthusiasm for what I’m doing is completely drained.”

What was really drained was her ability to communicate effectively. If you look at the above definition of causative, it’s the ability to make what you want happen. And the ONLY way to do that is through the way you communicate.

The only way to persuade is to communicate persuasively. The only way to convince is to communicate convincingly. The only way to shape reality with others is through your communication.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Your most powerful tool for success in 2025

Happy New Year!

I want to share my secret. People often comment on my confidence. They think I’m always confident I’ll get the outcome I want. I don’t look at it that way.

Let me give you an example.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The gift that transforms our world

Some gifts we give to enrich the lives of those we love. Presence is a gift we give ourselves that transforms our entire world and everyone in it.

Wishing you a very happy holiday with the people you love most!

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Holiday Family Survival Guide

The reason I’m writing about this is because of the holidays.  I’m the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants and we celebrate Lithuanian as well as American holidays. So we always get a double dose of celebrations throughout the year.

From my earliest memory, there was never a holiday dinner where someone did not get up from the table, possibly in tears or wounded silence, storm out of the room and slam the door loudly. Never.  It was not always the same person, we would rotate.

We got offended easily, and the way we handled it only made it worse.

Even so, I challenge you to find a family that loves each other more than we do.  If ever anyone said anything bad about any one of us, they were in trouble.

That’s how it used to be.

Coaching

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How to influence the leaders

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Some of the people that have come here for training have no authority and they’re being influenced by the people at the top in ways that block them from doing what really should be done. Their goal for the training is to learn how to influence their leaders, especially when the leaders don’t have the communication abilities needed for others to find them easy to talk to. Especially leaders who don’t listen.

 

When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.

I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.

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The power of pure intention

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Intention is an invisible wave that carries your communication across and causes you to be successful in being fully understood.

 

Learning how to create this carrier wave is a game-changer.

People often try a variety of different approaches before they land on the precision it takes to create pure intention.

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Creating exceptional relationships with "difficult" people

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If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.

It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.

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How to be a soft-spoken powerhouse

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Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be.  It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.

I loved her immediately.

The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.

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How to skillfully step into "frenzy" meetings

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Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”

But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!

Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!

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Touching another human's heart...at work

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There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this.  Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.

Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.

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The decision that makes your dream come true

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“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”

Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact.  It was a decision. 

Many people don’t get this.  They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”.  These only become facts after the decisions that create them.  Different decisions create different facts.

Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.

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When logical arguments don’t work

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Jayne showed up for Causative Communication desperate for a solution.

Her arguments were logical, rational and she had no idea why it wasn’t working. This kind of situation didn’t just happen once in a while in Jayne’s life.  It happened a lot.

Jayne thinks light years ahead of most people, she sees what they don’t see, she comes up with answers faster than they can perceive problems. And when she has to communicate from her world to their world, if they’re not already in her world, they don’t follow her.

If you are like Jayne, here’s what you can when logical arguments don’t work.

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Misled by hand gestures

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Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.

“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”

On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

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How to avoid the anticipation trap

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John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.

We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.

It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.

John had no idea he looked this way.

Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation.  He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable.  His face and tone betrayed him.

This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless.  It made him powerless. 

When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.

He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”

And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem.  Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.

John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.

Why is this important?

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Seeing the real you

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Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.

Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.

On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.

As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I.  They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….

Dreams don’t take a day off

When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”

As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail.  But I had learned well from them.

Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.

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What to do with someone who never lets their guard down

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We were meeting for the first time. Her face was hard, stern. She had her head tilted back and was looking down her nose at me. Her voice was uncompromising.

“I am the Chief of Staff here. We are responsible for billions of dollars of new product development and I report directly to the Chief Operating Officer.  Everything to the COO goes through me. I make sure everything gets done. I have global responsibility.”

Her eyes challenged me, daring me to top that.

I looked into the heart of this woman and said, “Very nice to meet you. You must have done a lot to get there.”

I wasn’t flattering her.  I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes and changed into a different person.  Her eyes softened and she smiled very slightly. 

She thought for a moment and said, “Honestly, it’s a tough job, they don’t always listen to me.”

I thought about that for a moment and quietly said, “I can really understand that. That would be tough.”

I was in no rush.  I wasn’t being sympathetic.  I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes to see if my understanding was true. Being understood was new to her. She saw it was. 

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Transforming Henry: the worst communicator in the room

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Some people think you have to be “born with” the skills and charisma that make a really great public speaker.  Not true.  Let me tell you the story of Henry.

I was invited to give a two-hour talk on presentation skills at a technical conference for a highly specialized professional association.

At the banquet the night before my presentation, I told the President of the association, Steve, that I wanted to line up a volunteer to coach during my talk.  He asked what qualities I was looking for and I said, “Someone who really needs to improve in their presentation skills.” 

Steve enthusiastically told me Henry would be perfect and I said, “Let’s go meet him.”  Well, meet him I did.  Henry hardly took his eyes off the floor while we were talking, and for the brief moments they did come off the floor, they went straight to the ceiling or the wall on our right.  Turns out, Steve interpreted my request as, “Who is the absolute worst communicator in this group?”

Henry didn’t look like someone who liked to be told what to do. I told Henry, “You know, I’m going to be coaching you in front of 300 people.”  He glared at me for a brief moment and said, “What does THAT mean?”  I said, “I’m going to be telling you what to do and you’re going to have to do it.  Are you okay with that?”  He mulled it over a little (looking at the ceiling) and then said, “I guess that’s okay.”  Neither one of us was sure that it was, but with these words we locked in our next day’s destiny.

After Henry left, Steve said, “I hope you’re going to coach him on looking at people!” And then laughed for 2 minutes straight. 

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How to light up the virtual meeting room by subtracting

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Tamara was nervous.  In two days, she had to give a presentation to 400.  Her first really big one.

It was Day 1 of Mastering Virtual Presentations and it was difficult for Tamara to practice without her teeth chattering.

The problem with being nervous is it makes you lose touch with everything good about you. Sometimes to the point where you can’t see anything good about yourself.  The things you tell yourself at these moments tend to be dreadful.

Tamara was doubting whether she could speak without forgetting what to say, without everyone seeing how nervous she was.

There was a lot riding on how well Tamara did. If the Salespeople got excited about the new product, the revenue it would generate would be tremendous. But they had so many other products that they were selling, one new one often didn’t register. Tamara was one of many speakers throughout the day that would all turn into a blur.

As one doubt piled on top of another, Tamara doubted even her own ability to speak coherently.

She was a nervous wreck.

It was a truly exciting product she was going to present. If only the Salespeople understood what it did.

In Tamara’s case, it was not a matter of adding anything to her presentation. It was a matter of subtracting.

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You’ll never get the outcome you want if your face looks like this …

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Last week I wrote about Victor, a VP I was coaching on Executive Presence.  I wrote about the effect Victor’s facial expressions were having on others and how it diminished his Executive Presence.

Victor’s BIGGEST realization was when he saw a screenshot of his face during a moment he didn’t think he had any facial expression, when he was feeling neutral, not one way or the other, not positive or negative, not really feeling anything.

What shocked Victor when he saw his face was that his “neutral” expression looked COLD.

People don’t realize that when you put a neutral expression on your face, you look cold. Try it in the mirror and see for yourself. Get your neutral face on and then look.

Neutral has no warmth in it. Zero.

And no warmth equals cold. There’s no way around it.

When it comes to human relationships, neutral leaves them cold about you. Possibly even defensive. You are discouraging them from warming up to you.

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How to have Executive Presence, even when you're not talking

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Larry, the Senior Vice President, was horrified.

It was an important meeting with important people. He was watching Victor, a newly promoted Vice President, and was completely horrified by what he saw.  It wasn’t about what Victor was saying…he wasn’t saying anything. The problem was what Victor was doing.

Larry sent me an email saying, “You’ve got to coach Victor on his Executive Presence immediately!”

I said, “What specifically?”

It turned out to be something I’ve been coaching a surprisingly large number of people on, so I decided to write about it.

Larry said, “Victor is doing great work.  But when he’s in a meeting, Victor looks totally bored, completely disengaged.  He’s too relaxed, leaning back in his chair, totally disinterested. And often he has a disgusted look on his face.  He’s creating a horrible impression.”

I told Larry, “No problem, it’s an easy fix.”

It was. It was one of the fastest coaching transformations in the history of the world.

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Curing yourself from unnecessary apologies

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A couple of days ago I started the first Executive Coaching session with Marcos. I asked him to tell me about his goals for the coaching and he said, “I really want to learn about Executive Presence.”  I asked him why.

As he was telling me his goals, he apologized three times.

“I’m sorry, this probably sounds like a silly thing. But what I’d really like is…”

“That probably doesn’t make any sense, but what I was thinking was…”

“I’m sorry that was such a long-winded explanation of what I am looking for, I hope that makes sense…”

He’s not the only one apologizing. If I count the number of times each week that someone apologizes to me for communicating, it’s quite a number.

“I’m sorry if I’m coming across opinionated…”

“I’m sorry, I just have to say this…”

“I’m probably taking too long to explain this …”

This is a new phenomenon in society. Somehow perfectly wonderful people have been made to feel they need to apologize for communicating.

I could spend an entire article talking about how this came to be, but I want to get right to the point: 

It’s not healthy.

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Why Causative Communicators don’t fight

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Many people ask me what happens when TWO people who totally disagree, but who have BOTH learned Causative Communication skills, come together?  In other words, when they each know how to make what they want happen, but both are super intent on achieving their own opposing or competing outcome? Wouldn’t that just cause a fight? Do they get stubborn and persistent?  Does it go on forever? Does it stick in an unresolvable stalemate? Does it get ugly?

Let me answer that question with something that just happened.

When Rick came to the Causative Communication workshop, one of his prime motivations was a situation with someone he called “the difficult guy”.  We’ll call this guy Philip. 

Rick and Philip completely disagreed on important details of a big project. Up to this point, every single meeting turned into an argument. They never agreed on anything. They never came even slightly close to achieving the outcomes they wanted.  All they managed to do was irritate each other.

During the Causative Communication workshop, as part of his practical assignment to apply what he was learning to real life situations, Rick decided to try what he’d learned in his next conversation with Philip. A real test.

Rick decided to initiate a conversation about a previously unresolved topic, but this time he would strictly follow the full process of the Communication Formula and see what happened.

Rick wasn’t going to give an inch on what he wanted, he was just going to follow the specific process of the formula while they talked about it.

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The power to lead from anywhere in the organization

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Paula was a young “Early in Career” engineer, her first job out of college. She was excited to land in a successful corporation filled with 80,000 employees.  As a new member, Paula was at the very bottom of the towering command chain.

While her position was small, her vision and her dreams were big. More than anything, Paula wanted to do good in the world around her. 

She came to Causative Communication to learn how to communicate effectively with the whole world where everything was new to her. She was young and wide-eyed and innocent, no accumulated failures pulled back her confidence. She was driven by her dreams, not by her fears.

Paula knew she had no command power over anyone, but she could already see that communication is a powerful force, and had concluded by watching others that the ability to communicate is the most powerful ability she could have when it came to working with a whole lot of people.

She was part of a small team that was part of a larger team that was part of an even larger team. Paula often attended meetings with 40 others from her division. Everyone had seniority and experience over her.

With the communication skills she developed in the workshop under her belt, Paula spoke up with confidence in these larger meetings. She voiced her thoughts, she acknowledged others, she participated. She didn’t try to control the meeting. She just wanted to be a part of it.

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