He had been told, consistently, that he needed to “show up with more presence.” He had been trying, consistently, to do exactly that. And it wasn’t working — because he was trying.
Executive presence that is performed is detectable. Not always consciously — but people feel it. The slight overpitch in the voice. The eye contact that is slightly too deliberate. The pause that has been calculated rather than felt. It registers as effort, which registers as insecurity, which registers as the absence of the very thing being performed.
What Presence Actually Is
Genuine executive presence is not a set of behaviours. It is a state of being — specifically, the state of being genuinely, completely, unhurriedly here.
Not thinking about what comes next. Not monitoring how you’re landing. Not performing authority — simply inhabiting it.
This sounds simple. It is, in practice, one of the hardest things for high-performing leaders to do, because high performance typically requires constant self-monitoring. The instinct is to be always slightly ahead of the present moment — planning, anticipating, preparing.
Presence asks for the opposite. It asks you to land completely in the now.
The Coaching Work
We spent several sessions not on how he communicated, but on what he was paying attention to when he communicated.
In a typical senior meeting, his attention was distributed: fifteen percent on the other person, sixty percent on managing his own performance, twenty-five percent on what came next. The person in front of him could feel — not consciously, but somatically — that they did not have his full attention.
The work was not to add skills. It was to remove the monitoring. To practise, in safe contexts, what it felt like to simply be there — without an agenda about how being there was landing.
The feedback he received, within two months, was consistent: “There’s something different about how he shows up now. He’s more… present.”
Coach’s Reflection: The next time you find yourself in a high-stakes conversation, notice where your attention actually is. Is it on the other person — or is it on managing how you appear to the other person? That noticing, alone, begins to shift something.
Call to Reflection: When have you felt most genuinely present in a leadership context? What were the conditions that made that possible?
Yatish Chandrasekhar is an Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant at The Yogi Compass. He works with senior leaders across industries to help them discover their True North. If this resonated, he’d love to hear from you.