The Executive Presence Tactic You Need

This week, I was the proudest coach on earth to have two clients in London as part of a round table meeting of world leaders in mining, while another was speaking at a global medical conference in India, and many others were in Board Room meetings and on panels for International Women’s Day all over the nation. Let me tell you, none of these wonderful people – many of whom I consider friends – stopped at the first hurdle. They committed. They did the work. It took discipline on their part and mine. And they love me for it.

This discipline has nothing to do with punishment. This is a discipline in a learning context, meaning self-control and focused effort needed to achieve goals, including setting limits, following rules, and maintaining a productive learning environment. We can all do it, but when the unconscious mind kicks in, with its defensive habitual patterns, we misconceive it as ‘natural’, every one of us needs help from someone who will drive the new ways of working home.

This is the discipline I learnt through a decade in the music profession, one of my favourite jokes being the Hale and Pace Music teacherskit. Believe me, it was a fabulous learning experience and the only way one could achieve success.

For example, learning the frameworks of interaction for different scenarios doesn’t mean glimpsing over them and hoping you will remember. It means understanding the theory, repeating and repeating it until you own it. Discipline means dropping the old patterns and being dogmatic about implementing the new.

Memory techniques also are like a muscle. You don’t get a jar full of memory. You work on memory skills and build your memory muscle. It’s boundless. You get clever with your own techniques, experiment and learn to rely on them for success. And, like muscle building, you need the discipline of constant integration into your practice.

When it comes to skills, opening your arms from your body and knowing and working with congruent gestures under stress is a challenge you don’t back away from. And might I add that the research about building testosterone by opening your arms for a power position was disputed a long time ago. Instead, this is about trust from an external perspective and freedom of the body and breath from an internal perspective. Doing it at first is often about dropping years of protective habits (jamming the arms tight to one’s sides, for instance). Getting the arms out and away from the body is almost painful, certainly psychologically. Guidance, with discipline, is everything.

This all means battling Imposter Syndrome – characterised by a persistent feeling of inadequacy and self-doubt. The thing is, Imposter Syndrome was only coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. Before that, it was simply what it is – the psychological fear response from adverse life experiences that have had a damaging impact in adult life, working below the conscious level as a limiter to progress.

We could work for endless years getting to the bottom of that pain, but as James Clear of Atomic Habits tells us, people who tend to be more disciplined have made the idea of doing what they have to do easier than if they avoid it. In other words, you fight through Imposter Syndrome and do it anyway because you trust the result will come. This notion of ‘taking action’ is exactly the same outcome as that derived from the research of Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code. Stop thinking and start doing – with discipline.

It sounds a bit ‘Forest Gump’ like, but, as a coach, I’m a soft-centred chocolate – tough on the outside and soft in the centre. I get the discipline you need. This week, I am off for three days with The Chief Executive Women Program. I’ll be strong – stronger perhaps than many might have expected – but we will all be pursuing our goals with love, and I look forward to sharing their successes.

Let me hear your thoughts.