Less showing off, more showing up
Transcript of this video:
A few years ago in a galaxy actually quite contiguous with the one that we’re in I went to a conference of a big division of an even bigger corporation, the start of which was done in a town hall format where the MD held forth very skillfully with his audience and he was quite masterful he had that technique of pointing to a member of his team in the audience, calling them by their first name, sharing a funny but quite flattering anecdote about his relationship with them and weaving them into the story of the strategy he was presenting.
And I remember sitting in the audience, and I’d never met this man, thinking, oh, he’s been very skillfully coached, hasn’t he? I think that spoke to my slight discomfort with what was going on, which was made clearer to me when later in the day I found myself in an informal meeting with him and two or three of his close colleagues where the presenter on stage had vanished and this other much more insecure, controlling, impatient person was visible and I noticed his colleagues were really treading on eggshells around him.
Now, of course, anyone in leadership has to some extent has to adopt a different persona in a large event from a small one. But I think that what he was demonstrating in his big performance was what I would call stage presence. It’s a kind of presence, but actually it’s not really about creating a real relationship with the audience. It’s a kind of showing off. It’s quite performative.
In my current way of thinking, it’s big P presence. There’s another trap you can fall into, another kind of big P presence, and it’s at the other end of the spectrum. And I realised it talking to my friend Mark McCartney, because we’re planning a workshop on presence next month. And in the course of our planning, we realised we’d sort of assumed that, of course, for a workshop on presence, you would want to be in a beautiful, quiet space where there were peace and restfulness and yoga mats and all of that. And we caught ourselves and thought, well, no, actually, we want to explore the idea of being present in a busy city, being part of life, not shutting out the world, but being open and responsive to it. So that creates a different, more playful, more energising, more alive sense of presence, which really appeals to me.
