420 | Executive presence: 3 beliefs that’ll make you unstoppable in the room

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The Art of Speaking Up 18 min 1 speaker 4 chapters transcribed 1 month ago
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What is executive presence and why does it matter for career advancement?

Jessica Guzik 0:00
Imagine 12 months from now getting a promotion, not because you took on more work, but because of the confidence and leadership that you demonstrated in meetings. This is the power of executive presence. And today I'm going to teach you what executive presence is and the three pillars that will help you build it. So we're going to start with the definition. And to help teach this, we're going to use an analogy. So I want you to imagine that you are watching a group of professionals have a work meeting. You don't know who they are, you're not familiar with the company that they work for, but someone comes up to you and says, hey, I want you to look at those two people sitting at the end of the table in this meeting.
Jessica Guzik 0:50
I will give you a hundred dollars if by the end of the meeting you can correctly guess which of the two people is a senior manager and which of the two people is a VP. Now to figure that out, you would watch them speak and you would look for clues. You'd look for clues like which one of them is more confident, which one of them is speaking more, which one of them seems more invested in moving everyone forward. All of those qualities that you would be looking for to try to figure out who's the senior manager and who's the VP, those qualities are executive presence. Executive presence is how you are showing up in the room. And it includes everything from your tone and body language to how often you speak up, to how confident you seem, to how invested you are in.
Jessica Guzik 1:43
Speaking up to help everyone move things forward. And the goal for you is to become the type of person where if someone was watching you in a meeting and they had to bet $100 on who they think is the VP or who they think is the most senior, they would bet their money on you. And you would want them to make that bet on you, whether you're a VP or not. Executive. Presence isn't about your actual title. It's about what your title seems like based on how you're showing up in the room. When you have great executive presence, people will mistake you for being more senior than you actually are, which is great for your reputation and great for helping you grow within your company. Now this naturally leads to the question of how.
Jessica Guzik 2:32
How do you show up in a way that has people mistaking you for having a higher leadership title than you actually have? Now, a lot of people get stuck because they think that the way that you do that is by being really polished and articulating yourself in just the right way. But that on its own usually doesn't get the job done. And if you've ever had a moment where you plan What to say, and you scripted it out, but it still didn't land with confidence, then you've experienced firsthand that executive presence is about more than just using the right words. It's about feeling like a leader and having the confidence deep inside that you need to show up big in the room. When you feel powerful on the inside, you exude a much stronger presence on the outside.
Jessica Guzik 3:29
And that's what I want to help you with today. Today, I want to teach you something called the belief triad.

How can you identify executive presence by observing confidence and contribution in a meeting?

Jessica Guzik 3:37
The belief triad is a set of three beliefs that will increase your confidence and have you walking into the Room feeling more powerful so that your executive presence is unstoppable. So I'm gonna teach you the three beliefs in the belief triad, starting with belief number one. Belief number one. of three is my presence in the room is essential. A lot of times when you're struggling with executive presence, you believe the opposite. You believe your presence in the room is not essential. And when you believe that, you defer to others. So you're more quiet, you don't disagree with people, you don't ask questions, and this shrinks your executive presence. Whereas when you believe that your presence is Essential for moving things forward in the room, you show up very different.
Jessica Guzik 4:39
You speak up, you ask questions, you contribute ideas. Here's how I want you to think about it. I want you to imagine that one of your children is doing really, really well in math class and they actually need to skip a grade for math class so that they can continue learning at the right level for them.

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