My parents came to America from Lithuania with nothing. They had a beautiful life in the old country, and lost it all when the Soviets occupied their land and took it all away. I gained something infinitely valuable from them as they built a new life here. My parents showed me by example that the only real security we have is our innate ability to dream new realities and create them into being, abilities which nothing and no one can take away without our permission, and which they did so well.
I always think about what I learned from them as we go into a new year. I’m filled with a feeling that was well expressed by the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke, “And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been.”
This threshold into a new year is a beautiful time for self-reflection, for dreaming of the future.
I’m a first-generation immigrant. My parents came from Lithuania, right across the sea from Sweden.
We have a beautiful Christmas Eve tradition I think you’ll enjoy hearing about. It creates a very special moment.
Each person at the dinner table receives a large wafer of unleavened bread and we have communion.
You might have heard of “Holy Communion”, which is different. That’s when a Priest blesses the wafer and gives it special religious significance.
This Christmas Eve tradition of communion is not religious. If you look the word communion up in the dictionary, without the word “Holy” in front of it, it means:
The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.
You can see it’s something special.
I have no doubt you have been extensively virtual this past year. Me too. I’ve been coaching hundreds of people, trapped in a machine-based communication medium that feels stripped of soul and humanity, teaching them how to make all their virtual communications meaningful to their audience.
I’ve met too many people who have no personality left. It’s been sanitized out of existence.
I’ve met people who are afraid to speak up and are way too quiet. They say way less than they should. I’ve met people who are always apologizing for what they think and who they are (“I’m so sorry I feel this way …”). I’ve met too many who are filled with self-doubt, trying to figure out “what’s wrong with me”.
And I’ve met too many “corporate professionals” who have learned to say and do all the right things, and then wonder where the satisfaction is in life.
Henry didn’t let the outside world influence him at all.
Jake, the executive I was coaching, was looking at the camera like it was a snake. He had come for coaching for what’s called “Direct to camera” presentation skills.
Many executives are coming here for this coaching because so many are being asked to make Direct to Camera videos. They’re being asked to sit in a small room and talk to a camera, with no actual audience present, to create a solo video that will be watched by 200 or 10,000 people. Many of these videos will be posted online for the public to see. I recently coached an executive who posted a video to 5,000,000 views.
It’s a weird feeling to talk directly to the camera. It’s not a “natural” skill.
The problem wasn’t that Ashley was soft-spoken or insufficiently forceful. The problem was that she didn’t have the skill of communicating with intention. Not surprising. Few people do.
When people really want something from another person who isn’t cooperating, they often fall into the trap of being forceful, being louder, trying harder, and even demanding.
They find out the hard way that none of these work. Intention is very different.
People who come to me for coaching or training ask me to teach them how to be “impactful”, “compelling”, “charismatic”, “powerful”, “memorable” … and more.
No one yet has ever come to me and said, “I want to be unmistakably clear”.
And yet that is exactly what they’re missing. Unmistakable clarity.
When what you’re saying is unmistakably true and unmistakably clear, you ARE powerful. You are compelling. You are impactful. You are successful.
Nick, a young leader, completed Causative Communication and signed up for executive coaching to develop his messaging and presentation skills to high level executives.
I was looking forward to seeing Nick again. He showed up for his first coaching session looking WOW! Nick was looking directly at me with a smile, exuding warmth and charisma. He was captivating.
I said, “Nick, you look amazing! What are you doing?”
Nick said:
Developing executive presence does not happen by accident. Presence delivers your message before you ever speak a word. Most people see the effects of their presence without fully understanding its cause or how to control it.
Developing executive presence does not happen by accident, it is not a power reserved for the few.
Executive presence is engineered.
Most presenters talk too much. They present too much information of little interest and save their important points for the end of their presentation. You can tell this is happening if the audience is relatively tuned out during the presentation but perks up toward the end. Some audiences never perk up. They just look relieved when it’s over.
Most presenters don’t know how to create a powerful set of Key Messages that land with impact and move their audience. They just throw out excessive details and hope some of them will matter.
“She gets very defensive every time I talk to her.”
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 with him. She always disagreed with everything he said. And now he was trying to get her to agree to promote him to VP. Even though his boss, the Senior Vice President, was fighting to make it happen, Vickie wouldn’t budge. It was hopeless.
From his perspective, the problem was …. Vickie.
Everett, a senior level executive, came in with many goals for his Executive Coaching. Everything from wanting to become a rock star when he gives presentations, to mastering persuasion during negotiations, resolving high level conflicts, getting others to do what’s needed and handling tough, sensitive conversations. Everett runs into everything and everyone in the course of his high-powered week.
Everett did get everything he wanted, but Everett’s biggest win was something he never expected. And that was the incredible relationship that unfolded with his three-year-old son.
He walked in and transformed his team before he even said a word.
The team of 20 was stressed. Agitated. A reorganization had been announced and they didn’t like where it was going. Their tension was palpable, even in the silence as they waited for him.
Evan walked in, stood in front of his team, and calmly looked at each person. A calm moment of simply connecting with each one.
The whole room calmed down.
I was coaching a small group of women for a “Women in Leadership” program in a high-profile energy company. One of them raised a difficulty about working from home and how much she disliked communicating virtually, how much better it was to be in person, and how you lose the essence of a human connection when you’re looking at a computer screen. She felt she wasn’t communicating as effectively through this technological medium. The experience caused her stress she didn’t experience in person. Others in the group agreed, they felt the same way.
And then I had them make one change that created a complete transformation.
Today I was coaching Daniel who’s working on closing a $10 billion deal. What’s the difference between working on a $10 billion deal and a much smaller one?
Besides all the zeros to the left of the decimal point, and the fact that with a $10 billion deal you’re probably working with a team of excitable people who are sometimes even more of a challenge to manage than the customer, other than these things, there’s not going to be much difference in the skills you need to close either one.
Both will take the ability to connect with another human being.
“Um’s” are what’s known as “filler words” during a presentation. They’re unnecessary and distracting. As in, “What we learned was important because … um …. what customers were saying was that … um… they wanted faster service.”
She turned to me and said, “Can you help him with the ‘um’s’?”
I told her yes, but not to worry about it right now. She trusted me and nodded.
I coached him on other things and within an hour they had disappeared.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?”
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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