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, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The 2 skills that enabled her journey from ...

Bryony hung up from the virtual meeting with her boss with a heavy heart and a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had just gotten the news she dreaded.

Bryony was a Senior Manager who’d requested a promotion to Director. Her boss said, “Well, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll recommend you because you’re doing good work” and had unenthusiastically taken Bryony’s request to her boss. The answer was not only “Not now,” the top boss dismissed Bryony’s future possibilities as well.

Her boss thought she was being helpful when she said,” You don’t really have a chance of getting promoted because you don’t have leadership communication skills.”

Bryony had no idea what she was talking about. She asked what skills were they?  The boss had trouble defining them, just that Bryony wasn’t coming across as “a real leader”.

Bryony sat for five minutes trying to figure it out, wondering if she needed to be bossier. It was not her style and if that’s what was required, it was hopeless. She also didn’t see how being bossy was a good thing.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
The skills an SVP needs to create trust and ...

A large corporation had acquired 8 successful companies through their Mergers and Acquisitions. They paid a lot for them. Each one of them had a CEO. Now the CEOs were Senior Vice Presidents, high up in the large company, but no longer the men in charge of everything and everyone.

The CEO had gone through our special virtual Leadership Coaching Program based on Mastering Virtual Presentations. When he saw each one of these 8 new SVPs speak to internal audiences, he cringed. They had good content, but lots of sharp edges and missing key skills in their delivery that would make them great. So, he signed them up for the program.

The 8 men showed up skeptical and arrogant, but willing to give me a chance to see if there was anything good in what I presented. They didn’t think so, but they weren’t rude about it. They were quite pleasant. But arrogant. Especially with each other. Each one tremendously competent. Each one exceptionally accomplished, and the proof was the organizations they had built from nothing and then sold for hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
Breaking the awareness barrier

Everything begins with awareness. When you are not fully aware of them, you lose sight of the person in front of you. An invisible wall forms, you unknowingly start talking at them, and your words can’t quite reach them. But when you become fully aware of them, truly present with them, the wall dissolves. You don’t have to try. Connection happens on its own. You start talking to them. Your communication flows naturally, it becomes effortless, and you reach them.

Coaching, Executive Presence
Ingrid Gudenas
You weren’t made to be ordinary

Ben didn’t want to just “improve” his communication skills. He wanted to stand out.

When he gave a presentation at a conference, he didn’t only want applause. He wanted people talking about it in the hall afterwards and telling everyone when they got back home.

When he met with his boss, Ben didn’t just want “a good meeting”. He wanted his boss fully engaged and talking to his boss about it, and that boss telling it all to his boss.

When he met with his team, he didn’t just want to “go through the agenda.” He wanted a team spirit that lifted everyone higher.

He wanted peers who respected him and sought out his opinions. He wanted customers with long-term, enthusiastic loyalty.

He wanted people’s faces to light up when he walked into a room.

Ben was done with ordinary. He wanted extraordinary.

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Coaching with candid screenshots

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I take many candid screenshots during the virtual training, and a number of videos with small enough groups when the workshops are in person. A candid photo is a photo where the person is not posing, they don’t even know a photo of them is being taken.

As people go through the workshops, and they see their faces change in their screen shots, especially when they see the anxiety replaced with affinity, they almost can’t believe how good they look.

Your face alone has 42 muscles. Some sources say it has up to 60. Every single one of them reflects your attention and your affinity.

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The power of dignity

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How do you teach the principle of dignity? Most people wouldn’t know where to start.

I start with the word. People don’t know what it means. And if you can’t define it, you can’t do it.

Think to yourself, do you have crystal clarity on dignity?

I use a revolutionary new process called Word Clearing to teach extremely powerful concepts, including executive presence.

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Navigating the maze when the other person is stubborn

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People make a huge mistake thinking that just because they said something, that the other person “got it”.  That it registered.

When the person you’re talking to is solidly stuck in a particular viewpoint, when they have an obstinately fixed idea, there can be a time lapse between the time you say something and the time it registers.  Why? 

Your communication hasn’t ARRIVED.

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How to change someone without saying a word

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He was a hard-driving senior executive everyone was terrified of.  His criticisms were plenty, immediate and penetrating. Even so, the people in his division were fiercely loyal. He demanded, and they achieved.

Yet even the ones who had worked with him for years trembled with fear when they were called into his office. Most of his people don’t know what real listening is. They are too terrified of him to really listen, too terrified to really be there for him. You’re not hearing anything when you’re terrified. You’re focused on your own survival. You’ve got to really be there for someone for them to open up.

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So good they won't interrupt you

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Imagine being in a really good movie. Would you interrupt what’s happening on the screen? Never! You would never let anyone else interrupt either until it’s over.

The audience only gets restless and starts to talk, or wants to do something else, when what’s happening in front of them doesn’t hold their interest.

The right question to ask yourself is, “What does it take to be uninterruptible? What does it take to be so good, everyone wants to hear everything I have to say? How do I keep them totally captivated from my first word to my last?”

When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.

I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.

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How to influence the leaders

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Some of the people that have come here for training have no authority and they’re being influenced by the people at the top in ways that block them from doing what really should be done. Their goal for the training is to learn how to influence their leaders, especially when the leaders don’t have the communication abilities needed for others to find them easy to talk to. Especially leaders who don’t listen.

 

When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.

I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.

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The power of pure intention

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Intention is an invisible wave that carries your communication across and causes you to be successful in being fully understood.

 

Learning how to create this carrier wave is a game-changer.

People often try a variety of different approaches before they land on the precision it takes to create pure intention.

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Creating exceptional relationships with "difficult" people

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If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.

It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.

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How to be a soft-spoken powerhouse

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Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be.  It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.

I loved her immediately.

The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.

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How to skillfully step into "frenzy" meetings

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Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”

But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!

Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!

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Touching another human's heart...at work

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There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this.  Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.

Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.

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The decision that makes your dream come true

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“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”

Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact.  It was a decision. 

Many people don’t get this.  They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”.  These only become facts after the decisions that create them.  Different decisions create different facts.

Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.

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When logical arguments don’t work

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Jayne showed up for Causative Communication desperate for a solution.

Her arguments were logical, rational and she had no idea why it wasn’t working. This kind of situation didn’t just happen once in a while in Jayne’s life.  It happened a lot.

Jayne thinks light years ahead of most people, she sees what they don’t see, she comes up with answers faster than they can perceive problems. And when she has to communicate from her world to their world, if they’re not already in her world, they don’t follow her.

If you are like Jayne, here’s what you can when logical arguments don’t work.

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Misled by hand gestures

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Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.

“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”

On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

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How to change everything with a single presentation

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Most people have a lot of attention on themselves, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they want, what they’re going to say, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s a deeply trained-in self-consciousness that makes the most important question in their mind when they’re giving a presentation the absolutely wrong question and that is, “How am I coming across?”

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

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How to avoid the anticipation trap

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John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.

We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.

It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.

John had no idea he looked this way.

Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation.  He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable.  His face and tone betrayed him.

This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless.  It made him powerless. 

When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.

He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”

And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem.  Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.

John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.

Why is this important?

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Seeing the real you

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Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.

Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.

On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.

As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I.  They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….

Dreams don’t take a day off

When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”

As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail.  But I had learned well from them.

Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.

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Affinity magic at home

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We all had tears in our eyes.  Elizabeth is an exec in the C-suite of a successful organization. Their senior exec team did the Causative Communication course together, and now, a month later in our follow up session, they were talking about the successes they created in the preceding month.

For Elizabeth, who was a stunning success in her professional life, this was personal.

Elizabeth‘s 12-year-old son, Matthew, had hit a stage where he wouldn’t talk to or look at her anymore.  He defiantly turned his head away from her whenever she was talking.

You can imagine the pain wrenching her heart.  Physically he was still in the house, but she’d lost his eyes.  She’d lost his heart. She’d lost his trust. She’d lost all connection.

What I love about Causative Communication is that you learn simple truths that require very light energy and produce powerful outcomes.

We spend a lot of time on the concept of affinity. This is one of the most misunderstood, undervalued, underutilized, and yet most INDISPENSIBLE elements of deep, rich, emotionally satisfying human relationships.

Affinity ISN’T what you’re thinking. Affinity is what you’re FEELING.

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The alternative to walking away

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I was explaining to Emily why I was not able to attend a meeting where I was not essential. The acknowledgement she gave me was a very resentful, “Bummer”.  

I then tried to tell her what I had already booked during that time, and also why the meeting would be fine without me.  Emily’s face was sour as I talked and she gave me an even more resentful, “Bummer.”  She clearly was not listening to me.

My first impulse was, “This is not fun.  I don’t like talking to you. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

And Emily was about to walk away herself.

At first, I was happy it was over, and then I thought to myself, “What would I tell a student to do in this situation?” 

They already know how to walk away.  But what they don’t know is how to transform an impasse like this.

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