Presence is like riding a bicycle. No matter how much you read or talk about riding, the feeling of being in balance on a moving vehicle is a feeling, not a concept. This felt sense can be pointed at, and you might understand it theoretically. But until you actually have the experience of being in balance, it does not fully click. And once you experience it, you can always come back to it rather effortlessly.

The following article was originally published as a guest post for my colleague Clare Norman's blog. Clare, too, is an ICF Master Certified Coach and I'm honored that she invited me to write this piece for her series on love in coaching. While it is originally intended for coaches, I find that what it points to is equally applicable to anyone in a leadership role. I hope you read it with a felt-sense rather than intellectually.

The industry standard for executive presence is Gravitas, Communication, and Appearance. To lower our vocal register, stand with an open posture, dress for the role, and speak with decisiveness. Here, presence is simply a substitute word for whatever signals credibility. These can be useful instructions. They approach leadership as a performance, and presence as a series of levers to pull to manipulate how others perceive us. And while this approach can get you promoted, it comes with

There is a biological reality to burnout. If you work 18 hours a day, skip sleep, and ignore your body’s limits, you will crash. No amount of ‘mindset work’ can override your natural physiology. But I sometimes see leaders who are not working 18-hour days, who are getting 7 hours of sleep, and yet are on the edge of burnout. Conversely, I see leaders navigating high-stakes crises, working intense hours for weeks, who emerge tired but strangely invigorated. This

Almost all of us are convinced that we are navigating a solid, objective world of circumstances and events. We look at the market, our teams, or global trends, and we believe we are seeing them exactly as they are. We operate under the assumption that our mind is a high-fidelity camera lens, simply capturing footage of reality, perhaps applying a wide-angle or macro filter here and there, but ultimately recording the "truth" happening outside of