Absence: The Number One Obstacle to Presence
January 10, 2012
I was at a team meeting recently where a group of us were talking about the leadership training program in an organization employing about 275 people. One person in the group asked the CEO, “What’s the opposite of leadership?” The CEO without any hesitation immediately said, “Absence!”
How interesting! I was intrigued by this view of leadership because I often think of absence being the opposite of presence. It made me start to wonder if presence and leadership are synonymous.
One way to compare absence and presence is to examine the distinction between self-consciousness and consciousness-of-self. When we are self-conscious, we often feel awkward, clumsy and alone, with a sense of separation (or absence) from the outside world. When we are really present, we are quite aware of ourselves in a balanced way as we fully engage in the activity of the moment and we connect to those around us so that we no longer feel separate, alone, afraid.
This is especially true when we speak in public or take on a leadership role. When we are anxious, we become self-absorbed and fearful about looking inept, making mistakes or forgetting what we planned to say. If, instead, we stay aware of ourselves as we focus our attention outward, placing a priority on the people in our audience, becoming open to receiving them, being genuinely curious about them, and thinking about how we can be of service to them, we lose that self-consciousness, we are in-the-moment, and we can then drop into a shared, collective place with our audience. This is being fully present!
Think about a presentation you’ve done when you didn’t feel you were as present as you know you can be, then complete the Obstacles to Presence Check List. You’ll notice that many of these obstacles reflect either an absence from the immediate situation or a degree of self-consciousness.
Occupy… The Conversation
October 18, 2011
Over the past month, I’ve been quite intrigued by the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. My interest has been on multiple levels. Most especially, though, I’ve been particularly curious about the group process and the community self-organization that seems to have emerged.
As I thought about what I’ve seen through videos and commentary, I decided to write an article for my new blog, Meaningful-Conversations, entitled “Occupy… The Conversation“. In this article I reflect on the unique speaking style that has emerged from this movement, the respectful way people listen, as well as the quality of group conversation that has no leader at the top. And, I end with the question, “What if all our important conversations had these qualities?”
A Conversation About Presence
August 2, 2011
This SpeakingPresence blog addresses the experience of presence in speaking through articles I write. I have a second blog, RevealedPresence, that explores presence through photographs and questions. Last month, Rabbi Jordan Rosenberg asked me the following question in a comment on that blog:
I am curious about what you mean by presence? Is it more or different than mindfulness? What is the source of the ‘presence’? Internal? External? Human? Divine?
This seemed a pretty fundamental question, so after some thought I wrote a response in a comment on that blog. Rabbi Rosenberg and I have emailed about ways to keep this conversation going and we’ve decide to cross-post on our respective blogs. I’ve moved the entire conversation to a blog post on that site and thought I’d share the link on this blog because my response is so relevant to the subject of this blog. You can read the entire conversation by following this link. I welcome any comments that people would like to make as a contribution to this conversation…
Beginner’s Mind
April 14, 2011
I don’t know if I’m getting older and feeling my age, if my chronic injuries need special attention, or if part of me is just getting “lazy”, but lately, after 20 years of practicing yoga (with a 5 year stint as a teacher), I increasingly find myself drawn to beginner yoga classes.
In these “easy” classes, rather than rapidly flowing through a series of yoga postures, I become deeply curious as I get to really explore the inner experience of each pose. I like the slowness, the intentionality, the quality of “less is more”, the level of very present attention, and, quite honestly, the degree of real physical exertion that I feel when I practice in this way.
Contrary to what my mind sometimes thinks outside of class, there’s really nothing “lazy” about this practice at all. It seems that by working in this way I can bring the quality of curiosity associated with a “beginner’s mind” attitude to each moment in the class and I leave feeling much more embodied than simply having had a good workout.
So, once again (as is so often the case in the articles I post to this blog), I wonder what does this have to do with public speaking presence? I feel intuitively that there’s a connection, but I’ll need to tease it out as I write this post.
In the more advanced yoga classes I sometimes find that in attempting to keep up with the class, particularly during fast moving posture flows, rather than paying careful attention to how it feels inside, I’m scrambling to simply get to the right place at the right time. And, by the time I’m settling into where I should be it’s already time to move on to the next posture.
It’s also more likely that my ego will get in the way. Can I go as deeply, as far, as flexibly as other people in the class? If I’m not really careful, I can sometimes push beyond what’s healthy for me in my attempt to achieve what I see others being able to do. The perfectionist in me can sometimes take over as does the performer, where I become more concerned with how I look from the outside rather than authentically listening to what is real and right for my body in that moment.
Speeding up, needing to perform and be perfect, and worrying about what our audience thinks of us are often the biggest obstacles to speaking presence. Rather than taping into what’s most important and real for ourselves and our audience and speaking authentically, we can obsess about not wanting to make a mistake, about looking good, about sounding like we know what we’re talking about. These concerns have the effect of taking us out of ourselves and creating enormous amounts of anxiety. Which, in turn, cause us to lose our ability to connect with our audience and to remember what we want to say.
When I work with clients on specific talks, I often find that the most crippling part is the fear of making a mistake or of forgetting what they want to say. There are two basic things that I help them discover. The first is that they can take their time. There’s no need to rush. The second is that I encourage them to try to say less, to simplify their message, and to speak to that message conversationally rather than as a presentation (performance). The “less is more” attitude is so essential in giving themselves the space to find what they truly want to say and also in helping the audience really get the fundamental message of the talk.
What if we were to approach each speaking situation with the curiosity of a beginner’s mind, letting ourselves pay careful attention to what we want to accomplish in the talk, to how we articulate what we want to say, to how our audience is able to comprehend what we are saying? What if we were to speak less and “listen” more? What if we let go of the need to performing and allowed ourselves to be real?
Maybe then every speaking situation could be like a beginning yoga class.
The first ingredient of rapport is full attention
December 31, 2010
I was listening to an interview today with Daniel Goleman, who, having previously introduced the concept of Emotional Intelligence, is now talking about Social Intelligence. His current work is looking at how the brain is wired to create connection. The sentence that drew me into the interview today was, “The first ingredient of rapport is full attention.”
“Where we put our attention, that’s where energy goes.” This is a statement that comes out of the Eastern contemplative traditions. In any speaking situation there are always multiple demands on our attention. Often it’s our own fear that commands the most attention. But, if we focus on our fear, we actually amplify it because that’s where all our energy goes.
Instead, what we need to attend to is what we want to say, to the technology we are using to deliver our talk, to the questions that are being asked, to the outcomes we want. Most importantly, though, where we really need to focus our attention is on making a connection with our audience.
When I ask participants in my groups to describe the qualities of people who they’ve experienced as having a great deal of speaking presence, one of the most frequent responses is that they felt as though they were the only person in the room and the speaker was speaking directly to them. This is what happens when the speaker gives their full and primary attention on the individuals in the audience. And, this is what then conveys the experience of rapport.
But how can we create that sense of attunement when there are so many competing demands for our attention?
We allow ourselves to relax into the connection by speaking directly to one person at a time using a soft available, receptive, inviting gaze. The gaze doesn’t have to be long, but it does have to be deliberate. We have to give each person our full attention, however briefly. We have to really see the individuals we are speaking to, not the “crowd”. I often tell participants to think of having a cup of coffee with each person in the audience as they address their comments directly to one person at a time.
When we speak with this quality of full attention, we actually slow down our internal rhythms which then help us to relax. At the same time, our audience is drawn in and feels a sense of rapport, of connection, of being fully attuned with the speaker. These conditions, then, increase the probability that people will listen more fully, attend more fully, to what we are saying. And, paradoxically, this then makes it easy for us to concurrently pay attention to all the other things we must focus on as speakers.
Returning to the familiar
December 31, 2010
Having just returned from a holiday visit with family, I’m well aware of how unsettling it can be to break out of the routines that are part of the normal patterns of our day-to-day life. To help manage these kinds of disruptions, my yoga teacher this morning reminded us of the benefits of returning to what is familiar.
Activities that are familiar help to center us, to ground us, to bring us back to ourselves. For people who have a regular yoga practice, the familiar means to return to the yoga mat, over and over and over. It also means to return to an awareness of the breath as well as a gentle attention on physical sensations in the body.
For many of us, an important speaking event can create the same kind of internal chaos that often accompanies the disruption of routine that the holidays present. Our normal schedule is disrupted as we prepare for the talk, deal with all the accompanying anxiety, and then actually deliver a talk. So the question is, how do we return to what’s most familiar in the midst of this kind of pressure?
My clients are often surprised when I suggest that they will get the most out of our work together if they practice some simple relaxation/presencing tools in their ordinary non-stressful daily activities. They come to me expecting that we are going to do a lot of speaking (and they do have multiple opportunities to speak), but they don’t expect that we are first going to focus on simple breathing and body awareness techniques to help them get centered.
In my groups we first practice quieting the mind and becoming centered through attention to our breath. We repeat this practice frequently during the course of our time together. After a while, clients begin to do this automatically and don’t have to be reminded. It becomes a familiar routine that can then be accessed under highly stressful situations. The routine itself is relaxing as is the familiarity with the routine.
I then introduce a grounding practice: To feel their connection to the ground and find their “roots”. For more on how to do this, read this earlier post on this blog. This has the effect of bringing us back to the present moment and fully occupying our physical selves. We can engage this quality of awareness either sitting or standing and can practice it in any situation — talking on the phone, walking from one room to another, standing in line at the grocery store. By practicing this awareness frequently in ordinary life situations, it, again, becomes familiar and something that can be easily accessed under stress. And, again, simply returning to this familiar practice will create a sense of balance and presence.
And, I tell them that by practicing these techniques in their day-to-day activities, these vehicles for feeling centered and relaxed will become familiar, and, therefore, more accessible when they are standing in front of a group making an important presentation.
The benefit of a conscious, regular, but simple practice of presence is that it becomes so familiar that just the act of evoking that practice will help to create a sense that where there was disorder, there is now order. The simple practices described in this article have the added value of also being relaxing in and of themselves and so can serve as easy vehicles for creating a sense of order and balance whether you are speaking to one person or a thousand.
Leadership lessons learned from two weeks of dance improv
August 26, 2010
I’ve just finished an extraordinary two week “Make a Show” dance intensive with two choreographers, Matt Kent and Renee Jaworski, from the Pilobolus dance company. (This event was sponsored by the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College and the Lebanon Recreation & Parks Department.) Essentially, 20 of us (an interesting amalgam of movers and non-movers with an age range from 16 to 60-something) spent a total of 41 hours together doing movement improvisations with a final performance at the end. (For a few photos visit the Hopkins Center Flickr site.)
Each daily session began with a large group improvisational warm-up. We’d then break up into different combinations of 3 to 7 people to work on developing a movement piece that came out of some improvisational theme that was given to us or that had evolved during the warm-up. At the end of each session we would perform our pieces and receive feedback and suggestions from the group and choreographers.
Every session we worked with different combinations of people on new movement pieces, giving us multiple opportunities to create together. Some of the pieces were successful right from the start, others needed a bit of tweaking to really work, and still others really never got traction because the group in that moment simply didn’t gel.
It was an incredibly rich experience with learnings on multiple levels. What I found myself reflecting on most was how we could apply so much of what we learned in this movement intensive to any group setting. This was a fascinating opportunity to study group dynamics and leadership styles in self-organizing systems.
Here are some of the lessons that I learned:
- Speak less, listen more.
- Trust your instincts. Trust the instincts of others.
- Pay attention to your “mates”. If you try something new, see if they’re with you and if not, ask yourself “Do I want to be a loner, or do I want to play with the group?”
- Offer suggestions and ideas, but let go of attachment to any of these if the group doesn’t respond.
- If you especially like something or if something doesn’t work for you let the group know.
- Don’t try to be a star. It’s so much fun to support others.
- If you do something well that you know might be in service of the project, let the group know. It’s not showing off. It is, instead, helping to expand group possibilities.
- When you get confused or lost, stop. Stand still. Look around. Notice what’s happening in the room. And then rejoin the group.
- When you decide to do something, commit. Make sure you are very specific about what you are doing, not wishy-washy, otherwise it will be really hard for others to follow you.
- You can lean into someone and get their support, particularly if you’re clear about your intention to lean and your willingness to be leaned into also.
- Don’t fall back on old patterns that might keep you from discovering what’s possible now.
- Admit when you are afraid or stuck and ask for help.
- Notice when you feel most alive and follow that impulse. Trust that others will discover it too and will respond.
- Notice when your opinions get in the way of creative problem solving.
- Listen to others not just with your ears but with your whole being.
- Don’t spend a lot of time talking about how to approach the problem. Try three quick variations and then decide which one you liked best.
- When you discover the group mind, the collective, allow it to flow naturally without feeling the need to artificially imposing a “new idea”.
- Agree on group norms but break the rules when they don’t seem to work for you.
- Make a clear opening and ending. Don’t let either be mushy.
- Stay connected to the group.
- Give enough time to let things develop. Don’t abandon something interesting too soon.
- When you see an opening — a doorway — take it and as you go through let it affect you.
- Play! Have fun!
This list is just a start. My guess is that I’ll be adding to this over the next week or so, so check back here again when you have a chance.
Authentic presence… What is it really?
August 16, 2010
After having had the pleasure of being in the presence of a number of “masters” in the last couple of weeks, I’m deeply immersed in this inquiry. What is authentic presence really?
Here are some examples of presence that I’ve experience:
- I attended a facilitated gathering of folks recently where the lead person demonstrated a remarkable ability to simply be himself whether he was talking to me one-on-one or talking to the entire group. There appeared to be no separation between his public self and his private interactions and all his interactions seemed casual, easy going, and relaxed while at the same time right-on and very direct.
- Later that week I attended a concert performed by two young singer/song-writers/musicians. The woman of the pair, especially, was mesmerizing whether she was singing, talking to the audience, or “off-line” dealing with issues of managing the sound system. As my friends and I tried to identify what it was that made her so intriguing we agreed that, once again, she was just herself, perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and not trying to put on a good “performance”. She was, though, completely engaged with her songs, her connection with the audience, and what was happening in the moment.
- Just this week I have begun an amazing two week movement immersion opportunity with a professional dance company, Pilobolus, where we are spending a lot of time focusing on this quality I call “embodied presence” when dancers are on stage. What I’ve learned so far is that everything, from the slightest movement of the eyes to the twitch of a little finger, will communicate something to the audience. Dancers on stage need to be deliberate, specific, and conscious of themselves or the quality of real presence is shattered. Even a casual, relaxed smile can be a distraction.
- In several exercises we did as part of the improvisational dance experience in this workshop, I became very aware of letting go entirely of my sense of self as the group of us dancer responded without thought and moved as a collective, a single unit, much like a flock of birds or school of fish. I became aware of a non-personal sense of presence that was held within the group as a whole rather than each of us as individuals. Yesterday, there was a moment when three of us were moving together in a frenzy in the center of the room to some rather chaotic music, when suddenly, with absolutely no forethought or signal all three of us froze in space. In that very same instant, without any warning whatsoever that I was aware of, the music changed, becoming softer. For the second time in two weeks, in two very different contexts, I heard someone use the word “us-ness” to describe this kind collective presence.
Last night I went to a party which ended with an open mic. In a very casual way, musicians of all sorts stood up and sang and played well known songs or songs of their own composition. There were many very talented people in the crowd. One young nine year old girl stood out for me with her presence. She came to the mic with her guitar in hand preparing to sing and play her own lovely composition. Her feet were planted wide. She stood tall and confidently. Her smile was brilliant. Her energy, passion and enthusiasm was clear in every cell of her body.
So, what is authentic presence really? Each of these examples touches on some aspect. What examples of presence have you seen recently?
Have you avoided speaking situations because of your fear of public speaking? Have you lost career opportunities because of this?
This fall is a perfect time to take the steps you need to change that! And, there are plenty of dates to choose from.
I’ve just posted a fall schedule for my public speaking small group coaching programs. For a preview, see the schedule below or visit http://www.riverways.com/pg-workshops.htm to learn more about how these programs might be just the approach to help you become the speaker you’d like to be.
SpeakingPresence Fundamentals: A one-day small group coaching program
* Fri, Aug 20
* Sat, Sep 11
* Fri, Oct 29
* Sat, Nov 13
* Fri, Dec 17
Successfully Speaking: A two-day small group coaching program
* Sat/Sun, Sep 25-26
* Fri/Sat, Oct 15-16
* Sat/sun, Nov 20-21
* Fri/Sat, Dec 10-11
Can’t remember what you’d planned to say?
June 25, 2010
Has this ever happened to you? You have an important presentation and you’ve done all your preparation. You don’t want to memorize the talk, but you also want to have a clear sense of what you are going to say and how you are going to say it. The morning of the talk you practice it in the shower and you’re really pleased with how it sounds. Then you get to the presentation and your mind goes blank. You can’t remember any of the beautifully crafted words that you had prepared earlier!
Something similar happened to me recently in writing an important email. I had an elaborate and rather complicated email which I had beautifully crafted in my mind while swimming laps for exercise. But when I sat down to actually write the email several hours later, I couldn’t remember a word of what I’d crafted in my mind.
I struggled for a while trying to recapture it, and then had to let it go and start from scratch by deciding to be real, direct and simple in my communication. In the long run, what I actually wrote was far better than what I had planned to write.
A couple of things stand out for me in this experience. The first is that when we get very attached to saying things a certain way, we actually create the conditions for forgetting what we have to say. Several years ago I wrote an article that expands on this idea which you can read by going to www.riverways.com/articles/tao-9.htm.
The other thing that I learned most specifically from this writing experience is that the best message when we allow ourselves to be real, simple and direct. So often, in coaching clients, I have to help them simplify their message. People tend to want to share everything they know and they cram way too much information into the short time they have to speak. They also think they need to be perfect and professional in their delivery, and so put on a persona and are not themselves.
My question to them always is, What’s the key message you want your audience to leave with? And, very simply, what are the key points that will help them understand that message? My coaching with them is then focused on how to convey that message in the simplest and most direct way possible. And, to just be themselves when they do the presentation.
The beauty of this approach is that whenever you find that you’ve forgotten what you were going to say, you can bring yourself back very quickly to the purpose of the talk by reminding yourself (and maybe your audience) of your primary message and remembering the simple key points that you wanted to be sure cover.
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Are you wondering how you can design talks that are simple, direct and effective? If so, check out my programs and services at www.riverways.com/programs.htm. Most specifically you might want to consider some private coaching to help you craft a message and delivery plan that will be easy to remember and effectively convey your message.
