Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Getting the support of senior leadership in 90 ...

Victoria’s fate for the next five years hung on what happened in the next 90 seconds.

Those 90 seconds would shape her future for the next five years, the future of her team, the future of the organization and very possibly the future of the industry.

Victoria wasn’t nervous. She was calmly enthusiastic. This is what mastery looks like.

Victoria’s coaching sessions had prepared her. Good coaching does that. It builds your confidence and makes you fearless. Real confidence is built on solid, consistent demonstrations of competence.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The secret to presenting to leadership as an ...

Being close to Silicon Valley, we have had many senior executives send engineers and other technical leaders from various disciplines, including finance, to us for coaching on their presentations to leadership.  Their biggest complaint is also their top goal for the people they send. They phrase it like this: There’s too many details in their presentations.

What they mean is, too many unnecessary details. It drives executives crazy. And engineers are at a loss as to what to leave out.

There is a big disconnect between “engineering logic” and “executive logic”. I’ll explain what that is.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Transforming Leaders into the Dream Team

A team can be good when it has a star, or even two stars. But it’s nothing compared to a unified, seamless team when you are ALL amazing. This kind of team creates a juggernaut of exhilaration as it makes a common purpose real and broadly felt throughout the whole organization.

It’s a joy to be a star. It’s an even greater feeling of elation to be part of a dream team. You walk that much taller, hold your head up that much higher, knowing that to your left and to your right, your compadres are doing the same.

Dream teams are not the product of some mysterious luck or having a few stars. They’re shaped by practice. And they can happen fast.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
A woman who does the impossible

Today is Administrative Professionals Day when we celebrate the unsung heroes of the corporate world. I’ve been working with them for decades and my admiration for them is boundless.

This article is about an extraordinary one, Debbie Gross, the author of The Office Rockstar Playbook: How I Leveled Up as an Executive Assistant and Helped My CEO Build a Multibillion-Dollar Company.

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

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What to do when the audience turns their cameras off

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It was a virtual meeting. Most people think the word “virtual” means “Far away; using technology” and definitely “not as good as in person.” (I hear this all the time.)

However, if you look up the word “virtual” in a good dictionary, you’ll see that it means “Creating the power of real without actually being real”. I want to let that sink in.

In other words, virtual reality is different than actual reality, BUT when it is done well it has the power of actual reality. In other words, it creates a new reality.

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The most effective presentation strategy ever

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When people in the audience come to you afterward and tell you, “You really helped me!”, they’re saying that you are valuable to them.

Being valuable will do more for your career than anything else. It’s measured by how much you help. Think about the most valuable people in your career. They’re not the ones who dazzle you. They’re the ones who help you.

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What it takes to own the room

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Someone asked me what makes my coaching different. I’m going to talk about one thing I do, and one thing that all of our incredible ETS Coaches do, that makes it extraordinary. My purpose in telling you is perhaps knowing what I focus on will help you focus on this too as you go to your next meetings and give your next presentations.

Many communication coaches and programs coach the visible: the hand gestures, the voice inflection, emphasis on certain words, body language, the slides, the smile. The visible, physical mechanics.

I coach the invisible. The invisible is manifested, and others can see it, but what I coach is not visible.

I coach: Being there, presence, affinity, attention, awareness, interest, intention, creating understanding, command, dignity.

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So good they won't interrupt you

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Imagine being in a really good movie. Would you interrupt what’s happening on the screen? Never! You would never let anyone else interrupt either until it’s over.

The audience only gets restless and starts to talk, or wants to do something else, when what’s happening in front of them doesn’t hold their interest.

The right question to ask yourself is, “What does it take to be uninterruptible? What does it take to be so good, everyone wants to hear everything I have to say? How do I keep them totally captivated from my first word to my last?”

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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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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