Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The real cause of stage fright

When you Google, “How to handle stage fright”, you’ll find many strange suggestions, some  from very prestigious sources. I saw a video posted by a respected MBA program where the solution presented is finding a friendly face and only talking to them.  Audiences hate that. Another impressive source posted a video demonstrating “Power Poses” where you have one hand on your hip and another on a chair. Looks ridiculous when you actually do it. Another respected source recommended drinking orange juice. Makes me wonder if he has investments in the orange juice industry.

No mention of a root cause.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The CEO dilemma of self vs mask

I’ve been asked to coach the CEO of a major global corporation.  Google his name and an abundance of videos pop up.  I’m watching portions of many of them to assess where I can help him.

This is a man who has been given so much advice on “how you need to come across”, it overwhelmed and finally drowned his soul.  Unfortunately, he listened to it. It led him into crafting this artificial persona. The persona he’s been told Wall Street and a faceless group of investors demands.

I’m seeing the superficial performance of a well-scripted theatrical role: “the successful CEO you should invest in.”

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
When you need them to change

It all began when a re-organization thrust Olivia into a new department. She felt like a failure almost immediately.  

The people on the new team were openly hostile, smug, superior, stubborn, cold, uninviting, and often mean.

Olivia very badly wanted to blame them. 

But Olivia did something that most people don’t do when faced with a situation like this.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The secret to everything

It was a virtual workshop on Causative Communication. On my screen were five beautiful faces. Each one of them representing a wonderful person in different countries across Europe.

Julien had just finished practicing presenting a proposal to sell the government of his country a new high-tech product. The others were watching.

Julien knew something was really different about the way he was communicating. He reached the end. Long pause and then he said, “That was Amazing! I never felt that before.”

4 heads nodded. They never had either.

Julien: “What was that?”

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The first step for crafting a compelling ...

When Jeffrey started his coaching three months ago, he knew something was off in the way that he was presenting. He said to me, “If I could be 10% of what my boss is as a presenter, I would feel like I achieved a big goal.”

The problem Jeffrey was having was a “There’s so much to say about this” problem.

When you feel like there’s so much to say, it’s easy to fall into the trap of talking too much. The audience completely disengages.

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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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Earning the audience’s attention

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“I can feel it. People’s minds get very quiet when I start to talk. They’re totally quiet until I’m completely finished. They’re really listening to me.”

Mateo, a recent graduate of Mastering Virtual Presentations, wrote that to me last week.

Why are they quiet? Because they turned off all thinking.

When do audiences do that?

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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.

Neon lime-green shoes and the art of listening

Yesterday, driving to the office, I saw a tall woman crossing the street. It was 8 am, sun was shining, 59° outside.

She was wearing short, light blue shorts, a large, purple puffy down ski jacket, a maroon woolen hat topped with a big pom-pom and long flaps that came over her ears, and bright, neon lime-green running shoes.

It made me think about listening.

And I was thinking that, if I really wanted to understand her, if I really wanted to be able to communicate with her, how fun it would be to suspend all judgment and simply listen and understand why from her point of view.

No thinking, “It’s too cold for shorts! And way too warm for a ski jacket! And never cold enough for a woolen hat here in California. And those fluorescent lime-green shoes, you can see them from two blocks away!”

It’s so important in listening that there’s no thinking.

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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?

How I “negotiate” with expert negotiators

Alexander: “We’re trying not to like you.”

Me: “How’s that going for you?” (Laughing)

Alexander: “Not well. Why do we like you so much?” (Laughing)

Me: “Well, I like you!”

So, that sounds like the absolute silliest conversation you’ve ever heard, right? It gets even more absurd when I tell you that it was with three of the most highly trained, most highly skilled negotiators in a large global corporation that has over 100,000 people.

They put three top negotiators up against me. They heard that we don’t give discounts. Their Procurement Division found that utterly unacceptable because they always demand deep discounts. So they put three of their best people on the call to negotiate a discount with me.

They were serious, rough, tough, brutal, cold. I would describe them as even vicious. I didn’t know people could get so mean and demanding.

Then, 20 minutes into the call, the above conversation happened.

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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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Kalasia’s awakening

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Kalasia was a nervous wreck. She was preparing for a presentation to the CEO. Her project was at a critical decision point. The CEO and senior leadership team would decide yay or nay whether her ideas for transforming the organization would succeed, or be shelved as irrelevant.

In her initial coaching video, you could see Kalasia actually wringing her hands as she spoke. Even her voice sounded unnatural, filled with fear as Kalasia strained to project a professional composure.

Kalasia started our coaching session saying, “I’ve been recording myself, I’ve made a thousand recordings and I hate them all, I hate seeing myself on video.”

I asked her, “What is the outcome you’re going for?”

No hesitation: “To convince them.”

Struggling with the treacherously self-sabotaging purpose “to convince”, and overly focused on her gestures, Kalasia had become a powerless woman, desperate for approval and trying too hard to make her ideas sound “convincing”.

The more artificial Kalasia became, the more nervous she got.

The purpose “to convince” is a trap.

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