Leadership Presence Starts with Presence

Welcome to Cultivating Leadership Presence! This biweekly newsletter shares actionable tips, exercises, skills and stories to help you embody leadership presence and speak authentically… so you can lead yourself and others to greatness!

Leadership presence is a bodily-felt felt-sense of power to confidently express your ideas, expertise and value to a group in a way that helps the group progress forward to a better future. It is an impressive blend of qualities, characteristics and skills that causes others to want to follow you. It is a human tapestry woven of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual elements. It involves behaviors, actions, intentions, physical embodiment, speech, voice, vision and soul purpose.

If you want to cultivate leadership presence, you must start by increasing your sense of presence, period. That means, increase your awareness of two things 1) being more deeply embodied and 2) being focused fully in the present moment of time. When you are up in your head feeling anxious, distracted and unfocused, others will perceive you as having little leadership presence. In this newsletter, we’ll start the journey of cultivating leadership presence by understanding the meaning and experience of presence. I will also share a mind/body exercise to help you build an embodied sense of presence.

What Presence Means

Presence means to focus all of your attention and awareness in the here and now moment. Presence is not only a mental notion. It is a whole-person experience where your attention and awareness are focused inside your physical body all the way down to your feet.

When you have full-body awareness, all your faculties come together into a unity state. You are aware of your physical body, your emotions (which are felt in the physical body) and your thoughts all at the same time. Whole-person awareness also allows for a palpable connection with your spiritual self. So, presence is truly an integrated state of Oneness. Action and awareness merge so you experience a Flow State. Flow and Presence are the same experience.

How to Develop More Presence

The secret to developing a strong presence is to get out of your head and into your body. You focus more of your attention and awareness below your neck and down into your entire physical form. There are many ways that you can develop greater presence. Any physical activity that you do with conscious awareness will help you develop presence. Yoga, Tai Chi and Qigong are good practices. They each require you to focus on physical movement and breathing at the same time, so you are conscious of what you are doing inside your physical body while moving.

While those practices are helpful, I believe the fastest and easiest way to develop presence is to learn to ground yourself in your physical body. Grounding is a simple mind/body exercise that focuses your awareness into all the parts of your physical body from your head down to your toes. It’s also the inner experience of FEELING grounded. When you are grounded, you feel weighted and are aware of living inside your physical body.

What Having a Grounded Presence Does for You.

Grounding drives your attention into the present moment because it brings your attention into your physical body; and your physical body is always in the present moment. Grounding helps you feel safe, solid, contained, confident, calm and relaxed.  Over time, practicing a grounding exercise, you develop stronger and stronger presence which will be perceived by others as (you guessed it) leadership presence.

When I was 36, I was “in my head” all the time. As a result, I was scattered, unfocused and showed up with a weak presence to others.  It seemed that other people did not see me or take me seriously.  When I tried this grounding exercise for the first time, I became so deeply grounded and felt strangely at home in my skin. In 14 minutes, I had become calm, comfortable and energized. It felt so good to be out of my head and into my body, that I was inspired to do it every day for about a year. I can say that it has been one of the most life changing, impactful and effective exercises that I have ever done.

For over 30 years I have taught it to thousands of business professionals across all industries. About 95% of my clients say the grounding makes a big difference in their comfort, confidence and presence.

Grounding Exercise Explained

Grounding in your physical body is a very simple exercise which takes 12-14 minutes to do completely. Wherever you put your attention in your physical body, psychophysical energy will start to flow.  To ground yourself, you place your attention into every part of your physical body. As you put your attention into each body part, you will feel a sense of energy flowing and filling that body part. The idea of the exercise is to fill yourself up with attention, awareness and energy. I like to say, “Get full of yourself… in a good way.”

Access two Versions of the Grounding Exercise which I call Ground Yourself for Star Quality Presence.

So, I’ll offer a couple of options where you can get access to audio and video recordings of Ground Yourself for Star Quality Presence.

Free Video of the First Half of Grounding Exercise

Purchase Audio of Full Grounding Exercise

How to Use the Grounding Exercise

There are two ways to utilize the grounding exercise to develop presence in the moment and build your leadership presence. First, you can use it as a daily exercise. If you do it daily, it has a cumulative effect. As I stated earlier, over time and with practice, you develop a stronger sense of presence and comfort in your skin. You will feel its impact fairly quickly as you go about your daily business. Second, do the grounding exercise right before an important meeting or presentation. It will help calm your nerves, get focused, reduce the sense of being scattered and strengthen your confidence, so that you experience your leadership presence as you go into the event.

 One Client’s Results from Grounding

This grounding exercise is fairly simple, but it produces profound results. Here’s one example from many client success stories.  I won’t mention his name as he is well known across his industry. During the early 2000s, I was privileged to work with a man who was the president of a medium size company. He had much bigger ambitions for his life.  He asked me to help him craft the story of his leadership efforts at his company, including the efforts of his remarkable team. He wanted to make sure that his story was balanced. While he was highlighting  his remarkable results in interviews, he was not claiming to have produced the results all himself. It was a team effort. As a part of my coaching, of course I taught him the grounding exercise. After he finished coaching with me, I didn’t hear from him or about him for several years. And then I saw that he was the COO of a Fortune 500 global company. And a few years later, I saw that he had become CEO of that company. I recently heard from someone who knows him well that he continues to use my grounding exercise before important meetings, interviews and presentations to calm and center himself.

Just Do It!

Clients often ask me to help them develop a stronger and more powerful leadership presence. Grounding is the very first thing I teach my leadership and public speaking clients. The first time I guide them through it, they are amazed at the powerful results they feel. In just 14 minutes, they transform their sense of presence, reduce their anxiety, become clear-headed and are able to speak with much greater flow.

But here's the funny thing, after a few weeks of coaching, they start asking me, “Isn’t there something quicker? Can’t I do this faster?” I sigh and shake my head “No”, because I have taught them to experience a full-body presence in just 14 minutes! The human body is much slower than the human mind. It takes time to focus your conscious awareness into your body and feel psychophysical energy flowing into your whole body. You must learn to slow down your thoughts and focus attention inside your body. When your thoughts are racing, you can’t feel flow in your body and you can’t flow your speech.

Give yourself some time to develop a grounded presence. It took me about a year to feel a strong presence after grounding my body daily. But then, I was very in my head when I started practicing. There were parts of my body I just could not feel at first. It may not take you as long as it did for me, but do give yourself some time to let it transform your presence.  You’ll probably use this grounding exercise the rest of your life.

If you want to cultivate leadership presence, you must start by developing more presence. Just do it! 

Please share what happens when you start grounding yourself.  Have you felt as though you are in your head too much?  How does grounding make a difference?

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Sandra Zimmer guides professionals to speak authentically and embody leadership presence. Clients say she calms their nerves and magnifies their brilliance, giving them confidence to speak from a zone beyond what they thought they could do. She coaches them to develop physical presence, vocal power, message clarity, genuine connection, storytelling, keynote talks, presentation skills, interview preparation and gravitas.