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.

Causative Communication

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How to defuse arguments before they even begin

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It was a pleasant afternoon and I had a pleasant book….

I was sitting with an exquisite cup of white tea in a beautiful local tea shop. They serve delicious teas made from leaves growing on ancient trees, picked by hand in the Spring and then lovingly hand-processed on very small family farms in very remote regions of China. 

My environment was perfect.

At the table next to me sat a couple.

The man was in quite a pleasant mood. He was telling the woman about something that had happened that morning. He was enjoying talking with her and enjoying the telling. He finished and smiled at her.

The woman spoke: “Why didn’t you ask her? I would have thought that would have been the first thing you would have asked her.”

The woman’s question seemed polite, but her tone of voice had a slight edge, an unspoken quality of “I’m trying hard to be very polite, but I really don’t get how you could have done something so wrong.”

 I’m sure she was completely unaware of her tone. Most people are.

I picked up my book and pretended to read because I knew where this conversation was going. I didn’t even know what they were talking about, but I knew they were headed for a fight.

Can you see how the question itself makes him wrong?  I knew he was going to defend what he did.  In other words, he was going to get “defensive”.

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The alternative to being confrontational

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Anita and Kevin made everyone in the meeting uncomfortable. Their disputes were legendary.  As the heads of different departments, they stubbornly fought for what they believed were conflicting priorities. They argued even the smallest points. Neither one would give in an inch.

Attending a meeting with them was torture.

Anita’s boss finally told her it was affecting her career. Although she was a top performer, her confrontational approach was forever going to stop her from getting promoted to Senior Director and then VP, her passionate objective.

It didn’t matter how “right” Anita was, or the fact that she “won” every argument and was ultimately proven right, people flinched when she was in the room.

Anita couldn’t believe they wouldn’t promote her!  “How can they justify holding me back when my performance is outstanding?!!!!  I’m only doing what they told me to get done!!!!”

That’s how Anita found herself in front of me.  A strong, smart woman in a super dilemma. What should she do when she was right, the other person was wrong and they wouldn’t back down?

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Living the magical life of an expert communicator

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Jesse is used to doing the impossible. He just applied for a position that everyone told him he couldn’t get.  He’s been told many times that “usually” people need to “prove” themselves for several years before they’re considered for these higher levels. 

 Jesse long ago decided that “usually” was not for him.

 He applied for the position … and got it.  Right away too, I might add.

 Jesse has gotten every position he’s applied for in the last 5 years, and there have been a good number.  Many more than “usual”.  His career is on the fast track.

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The solution to thinking under pressure

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I have a client in my life who makes unreasonable requests. I know, you’re thinking, “You’re lucky it’s just one unreasonable person in your life!”  Well, there are more, but this is about a particularly prickly one. 

The requests are always over the top, and sometimes they're impossible.  At a minimum, they're "make-your-team-bend-over-backwards-to-make-this-happen".

I was always caught off guard by his demanding and harsh attitude. I used to try to reason with him, but was always a little off balance.  I never came out of the meeting feeling good. Afterward I was always thinking, "Oh, I should have said ....."

I think it was uncomfortable for him too.

I decided one day, "No more of that!" (I hate feeling like an idiot.) I realized I wasn't giving myself time to think through what he was asking. My immediate reaction was always, "You have got to be kidding!" and I never had time for a second thought before he was demanding an immediate answer.

So, I changed my operating basis.

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The look in your eyes

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The look in your eyes tells me everything I need to know.  Way in advance of it happening, I can tell by the look in your eyes if you are going to win, barely maintain, or lose.

What is it I see?  I see the strength of your intention.  It tells me everything about how it’s going to turn out for you.

Intention is something I teach, so I know a lot about it.  It’s the secret ingredient of all success.

But, intention is not generally well understood.

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Breaking free from what's holding you back... made easy

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Causative [kaw’-zuh-tiv], adjective: Making what you want HAPPEN. Being able to cause your intended effect or outcome at will.

When did we first stop being causative? Well, if it didn't happen sooner, it probably happened for most of us when we started school and were told to sit down and be quiet … for hours and hours at a time.

They told us exactly where to sit. We weren’t allowed to leave that seat.

They made us ask permission for everything, including leaving the room.

If we did something without permission, we were bad. It didn’t matter if it was right. It was automatically bad if it was done before asking for and receiving permission first. Even if it was just standing up to stretch.

If we wanted to talk, we had to raise our hand and wait to be called on. Raising your hand was dangerous because the teacher was asking a question that had one “right” and many “wrong” answers and when we were wrong, it was very public. Where I went to school, not many hands went up (usually the same ones over and over). We became skilled at avoiding eye contact with the person in the front of the room (something I still see today in my corporate workshops).

We weren’t allowed to talk to each other, only the one person in front of the room.

Everything we did was graded and compared to what everyone else did. Smarter than him but not as pretty as her.

We were graded based on one person's opinion of us, a person who often didn’t understand or like us. A person we thought was paid to be critical of us. To find every flaw.

Most of us did not get straight A’s. We were always falling short on something. Grades could easily make us feel that we were mediocre. Few were happy the day they got their “report card” and some hid them from their parents.

We were severely restrained from being causative. For years.

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