Executive presence gets mistaken for appearance. The blazer, the gaze, where the hands are, and the grooming. All of that is real, and none of it tells you what happens when something breaks. Presence is how you manage the moment the plan stops working. It’s trainable. You’re not born with it.
They stood in front of just under a thousand people and told the entire crowd they almost stripped on stage.
They meant tripped.
One slip of the tongue. That’s all it takes. Maybe it was nerves. We’re all human, and we are all going to mess up.
What they did next shouldn’t surprise you. They kept moving right into the next sentence. Kept on going like it didn’t happen. Delivered the rest of the opening like a boss.
I noticed it. I looked over at a friend, and he noticed it. We had a quick chuckle, and then we went back to listening.
Most people think presence is the clothes
Most people think executive presence is being in the right clothes. That fine cut of a blazer or a dress or a suit or, heck, even a hoodie. How you hold your gaze, look at the crowd, and bring them in. How your hair is finely groomed, or in my case, freshly shaved, because I don’t have hair.
Maybe you think it’s getting prepped for TV. The right amount of makeup, no puffiness under the eyes, no tired look on the face. A little pep in your step. How you approach the stage, how you walk onto it, that big room energy.
Yes. That’s true. It is a lot of that, and being prepared, and how you walk on matters. We’ll get to that in another conversation.
And freezing is expensive.
It costs you the hours you put into preparing. It costs you dollars, if you’re pitching or sitting in a sales meeting. Sometimes it costs you your reputation, or your credibility with a room you’ll have to walk into again.
And sometimes it costs you the only shot you were ever going to get.
None of that gets decided by your blazer.
Executive presence is how you prepare for something. Recovery is how you manage it when things don’t go to plan.
Eisenhower, who planned the largest invasion in military history, said it in one line: plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Plans and alternate plans. A, B, C, D, E, F. They’re all going to go awry. What happens in the moment, and what you do when it all goes sideways, that’s the presence.
What the room reads
Maybe it’s tripping on stage. Maybe it’s that moment when your hands shake, and the water goes all over the place. Maybe it’s hardball questions. Maybe somebody goes after you and starts digging into you.
Can you hold yourself together? Can you keep your calm? Can you keep your nerve? Can you keep moving?
Because that’s what you need to do as an executive. This is the time to play chess while everyone else plays checkers. I’ve seen press conferences where people have lost it, and it shows. Sometimes you have to dance effortlessly while somebody is trying to tear you down in the moment.
So what happens in that moment?
The first thing most people do is stop breathing. That’s the first mistake.
Breath is fuel. We stop because the fear is probably something we picked up out on the savanna, where you go still so the lion doesn’t eat you. But we don’t have to worry about lions. It may feel like the room is going to eat you when you mess up. It isn’t. So pause and breathe. Breathe so that when you move next, it’s deliberate.
Everything after that is visible. Some people tense up, and an audience can see it. Some people get a look of sheer panic. The words stop coming, or they trip over them. There’s the nervous smile, the awkward laughter. Why do people always laugh when they make a mistake? Sometimes it’s someone hunched over in defeat.
I’ve seen pitches stall, the person unable to move forward. I’ve seen sales presentations where the presenter felt they’d gone down in flames and had no way to figure out which way was up. They felt like they’d lost the room. They gave up mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Here’s why that costs more than the mistake did.
If you have kids, or you’ve been around kids, you’ve seen this. They fall flat on their face, and then they stop. They pick themselves up and look around at the people near them. When you have a horrified look on your face, that tells them something is wrong. They begin to cry. They begin to scream. They’re reacting to your face. But if you smile and say “how you doing there, big guy?” and keep moving, they don’t think anything of it.
The audience is the same way. They saw the mistake. What they haven’t decided yet is what it means, and they take that from you. Give them the horrified look because the error is glaring, and their inner nature kicks in. They see it. They react to it. They’re not going to cry, but they’re going to know something’s wrong.
React with confidence instead. Switch gears. Change direction. Build with energy. They’ll see that too.
So hold your gaze. Look into people’s eyes. Realize it’s only in your head. Shake it out, not physically, mentally. Look at somebody. Smile. Regroup. Breathe. Reestablish a footing that feels solid.
And be careful about joking your way out of it. It works sometimes, not always. Some people point it out and make it worse. Some people can’t land the joke and make it worse. Your presentation is not defined by your mistake. It’s defined by the outcome, and the audience is as ready to move on as you are.
Communication is boxing
Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Then what happens? You don’t quit. You don’t throw in the towel. You bob. You weave. You go back. You jab. Jab. Keep moving forward.
You never know where the punches are going to come from. You know you’ve put the preparation in place, you know you’re in the ring, and you know you’re there to move and react and counteract and keep punching forward.
You only lose when you stop. If you make a mistake, get punched, and give up right there, you’re done. You’re KO’d.
Keep punching. You may win. You may not. But there’s always another chance to get back in the ring.
You can build this
How do you get to the point where you don’t freeze? It’s not easy when you start, and there are no quick wins. It’s reps. Getting up on stage, getting up in front of people, getting used to making mistakes.
Could be a boardroom. Could be a classroom. Could be a room you’re pitching in, or a room where you’re delivering a message to your employees.
I’ve seen people spend years at it, and I’ve seen people get there in a matter of weeks. The difference is how fast you put a rep behind what you just learned. If you wait weeks between learning something and using it, it won’t be refined. It’ll feel like starting over.
So shorten the gap. Do you practice in front of your mirror? Do you go out of your way to present more? Do you get up in front of your colleagues and speak? Maybe it’s on the street. Maybe it’s at the bar. Sales is one of those things too. It’s a muscle. The more you use it, the more it grows, even when the stakes don’t matter.
Some of it is watching other people take the hit and handle it well, then stealing what they did.
Here’s the rep for this week. Practice the recovery, not the delivery. Stand up, start two minutes of something you have to say soon, and blow a line on purpose. Then run the motion. Breathe. Eyes up. Smile if it fits. Next sentence. Don’t acknowledge it.
Do it ten times, and it stops being a decision you have to make under pressure.
It’s trainable. You’re not born with it. Some people feel like they’re born with it, and some people look like they’re doing fine up there, but that’s only because they’ve done it a couple hundred times.
So what happened to them?
They got their round of applause. They finished strong.
And I never heard anything more about it. No Monday morning conversations at the water cooler. No chats during the coffee break. No whispers during the other sessions.
I’m not going to tell you nobody saw it. I saw it. My friend saw it. We looked at each other about it.
It just didn’t matter.
And then we went back to listening.
The room doesn’t reward preparation. It rewards presence. There’s a difference, and it’s trainable.
I write about this every other Tuesday — the stuff I can only tell you from inside the room. Get it here.
And if your team needs to hold a room when the plan dies, that’s what we build.
