Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
How Henry became a VP without changing who he is

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.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Mastering “Direct to Camera” presentation skills

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.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The love we feel today

Me: “I just called to tell you how much I love you.”

Justine: “What’s wrong?”

Me: “Nothing‘s wrong.”

Justine: “Yes there is. You never call me in the middle of the week. And you sound like you’re about to cry.”

Justine’s my big sister. She was right. I was driving across the San Francisco Bay, on my way home …

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
One presentation strategy almost no one knows

“I don’t know if it’s possible, but I would like to be captivating.”

This came from Jeffrey who sounded like it would never happen.  He was telling me his goals at the start of the presentation skills workshop for senior execs their CEO had arranged. Jeffery is in Finance and no one would have described him as captivating.

Alan, the senior exec over Engineering, said, “Me too.”

The rest of the group all nodded, they wanted that too.

They all did their “Before” videos. They came across as brilliant, smart, experienced. None of them was captivating.

They looked at me hopefully.

 

By the end of the training, they were each not only captivating, but irresistibly compelling, and even charismatic. They came across as true leaders.

I’m going to talk to you about one of the things they learned that contributed to their transformation…

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
How not to lose the audience … or yourself

I was watching the audience. When Arte walked on stage, they were looking at him with mild interest, light curiosity. It was his quarterly All-Hands presentation to 1500 in his division. Arte started:  

“Good morning, I’m excited to be here, I hope you’re excited about being here also. Today I would like to talk to you a little bit about…”
By the time Arte got to that point, the audience had lost their spark, they were fading. He didn’t see it.  By the time Arte got to the middle of his presentation, even to him something felt flat. He started to talk faster. He tried to inject enthusiasm, but it felt forced. He ended by telling a sea of polite but uninspired faces they had an exciting future ahead.

Arte knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. He felt a powerful need to break free of something, but had no clue what was binding him and holding him back.

Coaching

,

Fred’s search for executive presence

,

“I’m the one who held back your promotion because I don’t think you have sufficient executive presence to be promoted to VP.”

I was helping Fred prepare for an upcoming one-on-one with the Executive Vice President, Olga, who was going to say these very words to him. Fred was there to change her mind.

We were practicing acknowledging the difficult things Olga would be telling him. Fred had earned some tough feedback and now had to pay the price of hearing it.

Even in the best of circumstances, Olga made Fred defensive. His hot buttons were triggered quickly. In past conversations, Fred’s strategy for getting Olga to change her mind was to overwhelm her with reasons she was wrong. But that didn’t work. It made Olga like him even less.

As Fred practiced acknowledging the piercing statements Olga would be making, I pointed out to Fred that his acknowledgements came across very reluctantly … and Fred just about shouted:

“Absolutely! I AM reluctant! Absolutely! I don’t WANT to acknowledge her when she’s WRONG!”

Acknowledgements have nothing to do with right and wrong. 

,

What is essential is invisible to the eyes

,

“What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Maxwell was quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the wonderful French writer, author of the lovely book The Little Prince.

Maxwell was a student in the early morning Causative Communication workshop I was delivering for European students last week. We were wrapping up the last 5 minutes of the 2-day training, talking about the class.

The golden sun was rising in California as he spoke.

Maxwell continued: “The Little Prince is required reading for every child in my country. I thought of this quote because ‘the invisible’ is what I believe you work on in this class, and this is what we have learned to do.”

He was right.

, , ,

Body language and other ways to ruin Executive Presence

, , ,

“What are you doing?”

I was asking Alessandro this at the beginning of the Mastering Virtual Presentations workshop. Alessandro was giving his first presentation and I was trying to make sense of his sudden stone-faced glare and forceful hand gestures.

“I was told I need executive presence so I’m trying to come across with gravitas.”

The problem was that he was trying to do it with his body.

,

How to deliver bad news

,

“I know it’s bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Morgan was demonstrating how she delivers bad news. She looks like she hates you.

The truth was, Morgan hated the message she was delivering. Because of the supply shortage, she now couldn’t get the order that you need right now to you for a year. Who could possibly love that message?

The immediate response Morgan got was, “Well then, we’re going to your competitor.” Morgan was in customer service. It was her job to save the customer.

What was upsetting Morgan was how upset she was FOR her customer. She could FEEL their pain. She felt horrible because she CARED so MUCH for them and because she could do nothing to change the vicious material shortage for them.

I asked Morgan, “Why don’t you tell them? Let them know how you feel, how much you care, and how much you would love to help them?”

That had never occurred to her.

,

Fighting harder and other ways to fail

,

“You have to be willing to fight for what you want.”

And Beatriz was only too willing.

However, no one she worked with, including her boss, was in the mood for a fight. They had started running the other way when they saw her coming.

Beatriz‘s response was, “If you’re not getting what you want, you need to fight harder.”

She came to me for coaching because this strategy was failing her. Beatriz had run out of ammunition, but didn’t want to surrender.

,

The aura of executive presence

,

“Dominique is smart, people like her, she gets things done. But we can’t promote her to VP yet. She has no executive presence.”

Imagine Dominique‘s reaction when she heard those words spoken by her senior management.

“But, but, but … I’m qualified! I don’t get it!”

That one missing ingredient was stopping it all.

What is executive presence? It’s an aura.

,

Wearing your thoughts on your face

,

“She gets very defensive whenever I ask her a question.”

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 just to talk to. And he was trying to get her to understand how qualified he was to be a VP.

From his perspective, the problem was …. Vickie.

And, it was true. She did get defensive with Vincent. He visibly irritated her.

But Vincent had identified the wrong root cause for why Vickie reacted this way to him. As you know, if you have the wrong root cause, you’ll get nowhere.

What was Vincent not seeing?

,

"It's not my nature..." and other lies you've been told

,

Valeria had a problem. She’s a passionate woman and it was a passionate problem. “People don’t listen to me. They tune me out. They don’t do what I’m asking them to do. They don’t even give me a response after a while.”

“It’s not my nature to talk slow.”

It has nothing to do with her nature. If it did, I wouldn’t have been able to help her.

With a little bit of coaching, I got Valeria to adjust her velocity (think of it as her “speed”, how many words she was jamming in) so people could really understand the individual words she was saying.

An amazing thing happened. And it happened very naturally. Valeria used fewer words.

,

How to give up “persuasion” for something much better

,

Tim: “You’re not going to believe this. It feels weird to have everything suddenly going well.”

What is Tim talking about?

He’s talking about a change in strategy that initially seems subtle, but one that creates more power than most people have had in their lives.

To understand it you have to understand humanity and the better you understand that, the more successful you will be.

,

The pure signal you send to your audience

,

A man on stage plays the trumpet. The note he plays floats out over the crowd. The audience is still. Listening. Absorbed in that note. Nothing exists but that moment, that note. He gives his note everything and, as he does, so does the audience. He holds it, lets it go. The audience lets out their breath as they gently land into the silence.

When he’s not playing his trumpet, this man is a powerful force for good in a leadership position within his world-renowned organization.

He aspires to senior leadership and came to us for coaching on Executive Presence.

It turns out that what he learned about presence elevates not only his communications in the challenging professional world he inhabits, but also in his extraordinary other world as a musician.

,

The attorney who “out sold” the sales team

,

Daniel wasn’t supposed to say anything. He was the Corporate Attorney in the meeting between Sales and the customer they hoped to get. It was a big customer: the government of a major European country. If they signed a deal, it was going to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

He was only there because the prospective customer had initiated a strong dispute about his organization’s licensing terms.

His only charter in this meeting was to protect their intellectual property. He was there to tell this prospective customer, “No, we can’t do that”.

Daniel was fresh from a Causative Communication workshop and was watching it all go down. What he saw was painful. He could see every mistake being made, but it was his job to stay silent until the discussion about the license dispute made its way to the top of the agenda.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He thought to himself, “Well, I don’t think I can make it any worse than it already is.”

And so he jumped into the conversation. The sales team was shocked. What did the corporate licensing attorney think he was doing????????

,

The singular power of self-awareness

,

“They don’t want to change.”

“They’ve been doing everything the same way a long time. They’re stuck in their ways and they just don’t want to hear about any new way of doing it.”

Adira spent 15 minutes detailing events and deeds that proved how stubborn “they” were and, with a flourish, she finished with, “Perhaps I should leave and go to a different organization where they value creative thought.”

So I asked, “What would be the most ideal outcome you can imagine? What would be really wonderful if it happened?”

She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Wonderful?????” She spent another 5 minutes patiently explaining to me how “these people” were far from ideal, how they did not measure up to her standards, did not live up to her expectations, and how disappointing it all was.

Adira had no awareness of what she was doing. None.

She had no idea she was being critical. She thought she was being objective.

My job was to raise her awareness.

, ,

When you're not a "natural" public speaker

, ,

Thomas was one of three experts on a cyber-security panel, a media interview with a live audience televised across the world.

Thomas was looking directly into the camera, eye contact strong, executive presence strong, confidence strong, competence undeniable.

I started coaching Thomas about two years ago. The presentations he was giving back then had much less visibility. As his competence increased, he was asked to present more frequently.

When you see him now, you would say he’s a natural.

That doesn’t mean he started out that way.

,

How to get a thank you note when you say "NO"

,

“No, I can’t do that for you.” “No, I can’t attend that meeting.” “No, I can’t give that presentation.” “No, I can’t be there.”

No one likes to say, “No”. It’s the same when you have to give bad news.

People are basically good. They don’t like saying, “No, you can’t have that.”

Imagine you’re in a job where you have to say, “No” 37 times a day.

Such was the life of Debbie Gross, Chief Executive Assistant for Cisco’s John Chambers, one of the top, most dynamic and cover-of-every-magazine CEOs in the world, leading a mega-organization of 70,000 employees, revenues of $48 billion.

Debbie had to say, “No” to heads of state, global CEOs and a multitude of impressively pushy individuals both inside and outside Cisco.

I remember well what happened the day Debbie changed her approach after one of our coaching sessions.

Results were instant.

, , ,

The art of knowing without seeing

, , ,

Alisa had an important presentation before our second Mastering Virtual Presentation Skills coaching session. She decided to try what she learned instead of her normal routine which is to look at her notes or her slides.

Afterward, Alisa made a brilliant observation, “The results exceeded expectations. Looking into the camera made me tune into their voices, how their voices sounded.”

I asked her, “What did the voices tell you?”

Alisa said, “I could tell they were warm, receptive, interested and engaged. I didn’t need to see their faces.”

Alisa is right. Human voices, when you really tune in, tell you everything.

, , ,

Managing 12 people in a heated debate

, , ,

Teams from three companies, different time zones, were coming together to discuss supplier issues. All three anticipating an unpleasant, contentious, argumentative, blaming, confrontational series of disagreements, punctuated by complete resistance on three sides.

Valerie, the vice president I’m coaching, was one of 12 people attending.

Valerie arrived to the meeting early. And did something no one had ever done before in their previous meetings: She turned on her camera.

As each person joined one by one, Valerie greeted them warmly and used the new skills we practiced in her coaching.

One by one, they all turn their cameras on and the next thing you know they were all talking warmly with each other. Like friends, actually.

And the meeting transformed into a collaboration.

, , ,

This never happens …

, , ,

Linda was given work that was beneath her capability. When she spoke up, she was dismissed. They gave a project that belonged to her to someone less qualified. No one would talk with her and her boss kept canceling their one-on-one meetings.

Everything about her was dark. She came across like doom and gloom combined with fear, resentment and blame.

Linda decided to find out what she was doing wrong that was causing her to fail, and to discover what she could do about it.

She transformed during the coaching. Every video showed dramatic progress. New strategies. New abilities. Real personal growth. She learned how to handle not just that situation, but any conversation, any communication challenge.

After using what she learned in our one-on-one coaching program, she became radiant and compelling. The people she works with changed from cold and hostile to warm and greatly appreciative.

They pushed her into a leadership position because they wanted her there. This never happens, ever.

,

Being the seventh person

,

Solomon Asch was a pioneer in Social Psychology. He designed and conducted a series of many experiments trying to understand individual judgment, including moral and ethical judgment, and the powers that, for better or worse, influence it.

The number of participants in the experiments varied, but often there were eight. One of them was always told they would be part of an experiment on visual judgment. This person believed the other seven people were told the same thing and were participating in the experiment on the same terms. What they didn’t know was that the other seven were all actors following a script.

It is stunning to realize that there was no instruction to conform given, suggested, or even implied. Not from the experimenter. Not from the other participants. The pressure and demand to conform came entirely and completely from the pressure the person put on themselves. They were their own executioner.

There are many, many situations in life in which each of us is the seventh person.

, ,

Painting 2022 with your palette of dreams

, ,

This week right now is for dreaming your 2022 into being.

2021 was all about What do I need to do to survive?

2022 does not have to be more of 2021. 2022 can go way beyond a survival endurance contest.

2022 can be about dreams that come true. Don’t look to the world for permission. There is no “Dream-Come-True Licensing Entity” that’s ever been any good.

You are your own licensing entity. You are the one who gives yourself a license to dream and to paint those dreams into reality, to make them come true. Or not.

Don’t limit your dreams by what other people dream.

Copyright 2025 Effective Training Solutions. All Rights Reserved.