For many years now, I’ve been coaching my public speaking clients to act as if they felt confident by embodying that feeling through how they sit, stand and walk. These simple techniques serve to “trick” the mind into feeling comfortable and confidence while speaking. Recently I watched a TED talk by social psychologist Amy Cuddy More…
Tag: speaking presence
Openings… The biggest stumbling block
“The first few moments of a presentation always terrify me.” “I know my subject really well and know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to get started.” “If the first few minutes go well, then I relax for the rest of the talk.” Statements like these are almost universal. It seems More…
The yoga of public speaking
I’ve been a yoga practitioner for more than 20 years. At one time I taught yoga. I now take every opportunity I can to study with different yoga teachers from different traditions. I do so to expand my experience of myself and to extend my ability to return to a state of inner quiet while More…
The power of silence to unite…
I recently attended a meeting where after we went around the room and introduced ourselves, we dropped into a period of silence before anyone began to speak. This was not an uncomfortable silence but simply a time for each of us to become present so that the ensuing conversation felt very different than the way More…
Paying attention
I was in yoga class this morning doing a posture in which I was paying most attention to the position of my upper body. While in the posture, I suddenly became aware that I had no sense of what my left leg as doing… it was just hanging there without any awareness on my part More…
Syncing and sourcing
Eileen commented on my last blog and included a link to a video of birds moving in sync with each other. This idea of syncing is fascinating to me. I’ve been intrigued with how flocks of birds (and fish, for that matter) seem to have one mind and sometimes have found myself standing stock still More…
Find the haven of your back body…
The ability to step back, not get caught up in the fray, see the forest for the trees, is key for leaders in all capacities. When the chaos of an emergent crisis grabs everyone’s attention, it is so easy to jump in with both feet. All our attention gets pulled to the details of the More…
Intentional Attention: Insights from the cha cha cha
I took an aerobic dance class yesterday at my fitness center. We were doing the cha cha cha and a series of steps with lots of turns. Long ago as a modern dancer I was trained to “spot” when I turned, that is, to focus on one spot during a turn so that I could More…
More on Obama’s presence
Here’s one final thought on Obama’s presence during his inauguration speech. Think about how you felt while listening to his speech. Then read the text of his speech. Do you get the same feeling? If we go through the various ways we could have taken in his speech, we’d get varying degrees of his presence: More…
Inauguration Presence
The epitome of true leadership presence! Presence is about so much more than the words that we speak. Yesterday we had several exquisite examples of real presence. Barak Obama and Elizabeth Alexander were the most compelling for me. Barack Obama: Most people pay attention to his words because they are so riveting. I’m curious about More…