Three Beliefs That Are Crushing Your Executive Presence

I recently spent a rainy morning with a group of highly accomplished people – all well-spoken, all thoughtful and deliberate and curious, all operating at the top of their game in their respective industries. Stated simply, they are all absolutely crushing it; I felt privileged to be in their company.  

Our conversation spanned multiple topics around leadership, but one issue kept rising up: executive presence. How do you get more of it? How do you respond to feedback around it? How do you take up more space in the rooms you’re in, and gain access to those you aren’t yet invited to join? Now, I’ve got lots of thoughts about the idea of executive presence generally – and if you follow me here on LinkedIn, or if you’ve been in a professional room with me for more than thirty seconds, you’ve heard some of them – but the morning I spent with these folks made me think more foundationally about the role mindset plays in evaluating our own leadership presence.

Plain and simple, what you believe informs your behavior, which in turn influences your reality. Carol Dweck’s work on mindset is nearly two decades old, but it remains some of the most influential scholarship on mindset — a topic you’ll hear discussed as much in boardrooms as in elementary school classrooms (the kids are all right, y’all). In my experience both training groups and coaching individuals, some of the same fixed beliefs surface over and over again when we talk about executive presence. 

Belief: Feedback is inherently confrontational. 

Reframe: Feedback is information. It can be good information, it can be useless information, but at the end it’s just data. What you believe informs how you behave, which in turn influences your reality. So what would happen if you allowed yourself to reimagine your relationship with feedback? If you resisted the urge to defend or deflect or overexplain and instead approached feedback through the lens of using information to make yourself better?  I can promise you’ll live with less stress and anxiety and – bonus! – you’ll get out of your head.

Belief: I can’t have executive presence because I’m an introvert.

Reframe: Executive presence has nothing to do with how reserved you might be; leadership is also about deep listening, something introverts excel at doing.  Executive presence is not about a title or a degree, about being tall and dashing, about being the loudest and most gregarious person in the room. It’s about how you leave others.

Belief: To be confident, I must know how to do everything all the time. 

Reframe: I gain confidence by doing hard things before I’m ready. You may have gotten this message that sort of being super hyper sure of yourself all the time and knowing more than everyone is what executive presence is. But that’s not true. Having confidence does not mean you know everything. Confidence is born of being certain of what you do know and being able to admit there are things you don't know at this moment (but you can certainly find them out). Confidence is understanding that you deserve to be seated at that table. You deserve to sit in that pitch. You deserve to have that dialogue with a client. Confidence is cultivated. People think they'll just get it with time, but that isn't how it works.

Your homework: come up with at least one belief you're holding onto that is impacting your leadership presence. Is it that you're too inexperienced to be in the pitch meeting? Too junior to take on the stretch project? Too old? It's not a good time to ask for that raise? You're just lucky to be working at XYZ Firm? Don't edit yourself. Nobody needs to see your list. But to truly begin tackling some of these so-called "softer skills," you've got to first be aware of what's limiting you that you can control.