Sonya | Leadership Presence Coach: [00:00:00] There's this gap between what you're projecting and how you actually feel about it, and managing that gap takes energy. Every meeting requires a bit of a warmup. Every presentation requires a mental rehearsal of. How do I need to be in this room? You are kind of curating this version of yourself to each audience.
One of my clients described it perfectly, she said. There's this mismatch between my internal confidence and how I'm showing up externally. She knew she was capable being experienced, but the more she tried to fix it, it was like projecting harder, something she wasn't, and the wider the gap felt. That is a trap for some.
Welcome to the Style and Strategy Podcast, where personal brand meets leadership and style. I'm Sonya, I'm bringing you practical strategies, [00:01:00] bold insights, and honest conversations to help you amplify your presence, unlock your next level, and lead with clarity and confidence.
Sonya | Leadership Presence Coach: There was some research done at Darmouth to put makeup artists in a room with a group of volunteers, and each volunteer sat down and the artist carefully applied a realistic looking scar across their face. And you may have heard me talk about this, particular study before.
But to give you a bit of a, a summary in case you haven't heard it. So the volunteer would look in the mirror and saw the scar and took a moment to absorb it. Then the artist said she needed to touch it up before they went out to meet other people, and here's what happened. She didn't actually touch it up, she removed it entirely.
And there was no mirror in front of the volunteer when that happened. [00:02:00] And so they walked outta the room completely unaware that their face was normal, but they believed that the scar was still there. And so when they came back, every single or nearly every single person reported the same thing.
People stared at them. They were uncomfortable. They avoided eye contact. They said that they treated them differently. And the thing was the scar wasn't there, but the expectation that they would be judged changed how they read every interaction that they had. I think about that study a lot when I'm working with women in senior leadership Because the version I see of it in corporate is this a woman who's been told at some point in her career that she needs to work on her executive presence. And from that moment on, she walks into every room scanning for evidence that she's not landing.
[00:03:00] A client once described it to me as being a great, safe pair of hands, but knowing they're asking whether she's ready for broader, they interpret a colleague's distraction as dismissal. That's what I wanna talk about today in the podcast, because the difference between, sort of putting on presence and actually leading from who you are.
Because over the last few episodes, I've really tried to make the case that executive presence, as it's traditionally been taught, is not always working for women in leadership or that it's not complete. And if you refer back to my previous episodes, I touched on why that model was actually built for a different era and we need a more expansive version.
So I walked you through the three components that you need to work together, internal clarity, strategic positions, and how other experience you. [00:04:00] And so today I really wanna get practical. What does it actually look like when you stop putting on a mask, trying to be something else and start leading from identity?
And why does that distinction matter so much for the women listening to this right now? when I talk about putting on a mask or being something that is not entirely linked to who you are. The reason why I say this is because myself included, I went through a period where I didn't even realize I was doing it until someone says something.
You may have read a book or done a course, and you learn to really project confidence. You know how to speak with brevity, hold eye contact, all those things, manage body language. Dress the part. You do all of it and you do it well, and people will look at you and potentially say, you've got presence, but inside it's actually costing you [00:05:00] something.
There's this gap between what you're projecting and how you actually feel about it, and managing that gap takes energy. Every meeting requires a bit of a warmup. Every presentation requires a mental rehearsal of. How do I need to be in this room? You are kind of curating this version of yourself to each audience, which is different from my latter example that I've used in previous podcasts.
One of my clients described it perfectly, she said. There's this mismatch between my internal confidence and how I'm showing up externally. She knew she was capable being experienced, but the more she tried to fix it, it was like projecting harder, something she wasn't, and the wider the gap felt. That is a trap for some.
So the tactics work on the surface, but there isn't this foundation and [00:06:00] you really feel disconnected from it because you are building presence on top of a question mark of who you actually are, what your mission is, what you really want to be perceived at. And so this is where I come back to that study from Dartmouth.
Because it becomes so relevant. The psychologist who designed it, described it, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, is if we expect others to react negatively to some aspect of how we present, then there's very little of those that others can do from really preventing us from confirming that expectation.
It's like we've put a, this invisible cap or glass ceiling on ourselves. So think about what that means in a corporate context. If you've internalised the message that your presence needs work, you'll find evidence for it. In every room that you walk into your CEO pauses [00:07:00] before responding to you, you read it as hesitation about your credibility.
A colleague talks over you and perhaps you interpret it as a signal that your authority isn't landing or you are reading the room through a filter that was installed by somebody else's feedback. And it may not be what you think it is. So what's the alternative here? I'm gonna give you an example.
We've got this incredible woman running a company that rated her own presence out of a three out of 10.
All the capability, all the evidence, but actually what she doesn't have is a clear picture of how she's designed to lead, which means she doesn't have this foundation on her external expression. She is putting on this mask of what she thinks a leader should be rather than understanding how she naturally designed to lead and letting that element become more visible.
And that's [00:08:00] that pattern I see over and over the capabilities there, but the infrastructure of leadership identity is missing. She doesn't need more skills. She doesn't need a communication course. She needs to understand her own design so that everything she does externally has something to tie back to that something real to underpin it.
So there's some research on self-efficacy, by Bandura. And it talks to that the most powerful source of confidence isn't necessarily positive thinking or projecting certainty. It's mastery experience doing something and experiencing the success of that. But there's potentially a step before that. You have to trust yourself enough to take the action in the first place, and you can't build that trust on a foundation of a mask or someone else's version of leadership.
In episodes 93 and [00:09:00] 94, I introduced that idea that leadership presence is a dynamic into interplay of three components, right? Internal clarity, positioning, and how you're experienced. And when all three are sort of connected together, people experience you at. The level you actually lead, and where one is off, something feels wrong and you can't name it.
what I wanna add to this today is you can't fix the external components without addressing the internal one first. Yes, a lot of times we can put on a great outfit, right? And we can feel beautiful in it. But that's a moment in time. We can have a communication coach sharpen that delivery. Right, or a voice coach, or you can work on your stakeholder strategy.
But I fundamentally believe if you haven't done the foundational work of understanding how you're naturally designed to lead, all of those external fixes are kind of just add-ons on top of a [00:10:00] shaky foundation. So one of my clients described. , Going and having a conversation around wardrobe with someone else first, but they didn't understand her corporate context, so they couldn't really connect to how she was experienced in the room And
she said to me during conversations that, look, you were the only one who could do both. And what she meant from that, I believe, was that the external work only made sense to her when it was built on this whole deeper internal clarity piece. The style served the identity not the other way round. So what does this look like when you stop coming at it from a, mask and actually start leading from who you are?
The morning gets simpler. You get dressed easier. Your question of what I need to be today, you're actually just working from this clear understanding of [00:11:00] what your leadership identity is today, and then your wardrobe becomes a tool to reinforce that rather than some sort of daily decision that you have to get through.
And that's not a small thing, right? Mental energy required to recover from one change after the next, after the year next, can get and become quite challenging. Secondly, the conversation start to change. So when you are leading from identity, the preparation is about the context and not sort of, well, I've gotta put this mask on today.
You know how you naturally influence. You're not rehearsing a character that feels really uncomfortable. And then finally, the third is the gap between rooms closes. I've always heard, and I have also experienced it myself, where we go, I'm a different person at work than I am at home or in a boardroom [00:12:00] versus an industry, dinner.
And, you know, my latter context is I want you to feel the same. It's just a dialled up version. And a soft one because we're not just one thing. So when your presence comes from your identity, you are the same person in every room. You're just choosing facets of your leadership to bring forward, depending on what the moment requires.
When you bring those two worlds together, you start to feel whole, right? That whole integration, that feeling of being the same person across every context, that is what identity first presence creates and why it sustains in a way that like putting on a mask or trying to be something or someone else's strategy, never can.The identity work gives you this clarity, right? And so you don't have to manufacture. before every meeting. I keep coming back to that Dartmouth scar study because those volunteers walked into conversations believing something [00:13:00] about themselves that shaped the experience and every interaction they held afterwards, the scar wasn't there, but the belief was, and the belief was enough to change everything.
So have a think about what are the beliefs about your own presence that might be shaping how you read the room and what would change if those beliefs were built on a clear understanding of who you are as a leader rather than someone else's feedback on what you should work on. That's where the real work begins.
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