Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, Mindshift Advisors
Presence is one of the most overlooked leadership skills in the book. Presence is not flashy. It’s not immediately obvious the way a polished deck, a great idea, or a fast thinking leader might be.
But presence is the condition that makes all of those things – and so many more – possible. Without it, we offer little more than performance and end up missing out on the very insights that empower our greatest success.
The thing that gets in the way the most? Preparation.
Now, hang with me for a minute because I’m not about to dog prep. Most leaders are deeply committed to preparation. And, for good reason. It works. I tell my clients, high quality preparation should be most of your effort – because if you do it well, it will handle the rest of the work for you.
As leaders, we prepare for client meetings, board sessions, partner presentations, hiring seasons, and difficult conversations. We research the room, build compelling decks, think through objections, and anticipate where things could go wrong.
Preparation is table stakes for nearly anything remarkable or important in business or in life. But, when we prepare for everything all the time, we can forget the most important preparation of all.
Preparing to be present.
We prepare for what the project will require, but not what we will. We prepare our team for what we expect, but don’t ask what they need from us to achieve it. We prepare our talking points, but fail to deliver them naturally to the people who need what we have to share.
When we are unable to be present, we fail to create the conditions that ensure the very success we desire.
Why We’re Not Present
To be absent from the present – is to be located somewhere else. We may be accounted for, but our minds have drifted into the past or the future – not the present. We’re still focused on our last meeting despite being in a new one. We’re scripting a conversation for later today while having a conversation with someone right now. We’re not all anywhere, because we’re trying to be in two places at once.
Hustle culture and the general busyness of life doesn’t exactly help us out here. Even with the best of intentions, our phones buzz with non stop alerts. Our back to back meetings leave no time to actually DO the work we talk about doing in them. And, our nonstop schedules mean biological needs like food and water take a backseat to spreadsheets and reports.
We even wear our ability to multi-task and task switch as a badge of honor. Like, “I’m so quick and smart, I don’t need to give you all my attention in order to keep up with you’re saying. Watch now, amazed…as I work on emails and still contribute meaningful ideas to our discussion.”
We might be physically available, we might be tracking the general sense of what’s happening. We might even be the smartest person in the room (which btw, means you’re in the wrong room) – but none of those things are the same as being present.
Presence happens when you have what you uniquely need to attend to what is actually happening…as it’s actually happening.
It means fully listening to the person speaking, noticing the conversation unfolding, locating the signal emerging, and giving your full awareness to the task in front of you. Presence is the underpinning of everything we know we need; emotional attunement, situational awareness, nonverbal cues, and strategic thinking. It is the condition that must be met before any of those higher-order leadership capacities can begin.
But, oh how we love the illusion of control that our preparation creates.
We think that if we prepare hard enough, we can make the interaction go the way we planned. We’ve got years of data supporting the idea that we can bend the world to our will through sheer force of personality.
That we can be faster, better, and more on top of everything than anyone else – ensuring our goals stay well within our reach.
But leadership is not about control. It’s about co-creation.
Great leaders don’t dominate what is happening, they interact with it. They are engaged in a non stop call-and-response of observe and respond, observe and respond; leveraging all their knowledge, preparation, and instincts as they dance with reality while it unfolds. They are, in the best possible sense, in flow.
Finding The Balance
When we’re out of balance, there are always signs. Over-reliance on preparation feels tight. It feels scripted. It creates stress the second anything diverges from the story you wrote in your head. And because real conversations almost always diverge, leaders who are overly attached to the plan often end up reacting to the change instead of responding to the moment.
Early in my own career, I was facilitating meetings between C-Suite execs at my company and high-powered executives at some of the largest health plans in the country. There were a million ways I could screw up – and I was constantly aware of them all.
Every time I was supposed to open my mouth in those discussions, I wanted it to sound informed, clear, and relevant. So, I would write out nearly every word I planned to say the night before. I’d show up to the meeting with my notebook already half full of my own detailed script for the day. I learned very quickly that meetings almost never go the way you plan and I’d have to pivot away from my perfect preparation.
That planning had helped me clarify my thinking. It helped me edit and refine. It was still important work. But, it was only part of the equation – only one beat of the rhythm I needed to establish.
What I needed to learn was how to let go. To plan like crazy and then focus all of my attention on staying attuned to the situation as it unfolded. To use the preparation to prepare myself – not the outcome I was after. Use it as support, not as a script.
This might feel like a small distinction, but it’s not. If you are too attached to how you think something should go, you stop noticing how it’s actually going. You present the deck, make the pitch, move to the next slide, and call the meeting a success because the content was delivered.
Meanwhile, half the room tuned out three minutes ago. Someone asked a question that should have altered the course of the whole conversation. And, a key stakeholder signaled concern in a subtle way you missed because you were still following your internal script.
It’s happened to all of us. How many times have you been midway through a slide deck when a client asks a question about something three slides ahead?
Now, you have to make a choice. Do you tell them to hold that question, or do you pivot and go there now?
As someone who has been presenting for twenty five years, I can say with complete confidence…there is no universally right answer. There’s not a hard and fast rule that applies to all situations where this might occur. The only way to know what to do next…is to have been so present that the path forward is an obvious one.
To have been present enough to read the room, chart the energy, and notice what is actually happening rather than what you planned.
When we lose the chance to be present, we miss everything that can only be known in the now.
The data that matters most is often not on the spreadsheet yet. It shows up first in tone, energy, hesitation, inconsistency, nonverbal cues, and relational drift. When you are present, your field of view widens. You notice more. You catch the joke. You hear the tension. You sense when someone is engaged and when they are gone.
Presence lets everything in. Then, you get to decide what to do with it.
Practical Presence
Getting into presence is not about preparing less. It’s about having a different relationship to your preparation.
Do everything you can to prepare in advance. Then, when it is time to be in the meeting, be in the meeting. When the conversation is happening, have it. When it’s time to write the email, just do that. Only that. Presence asks for your full participation in the thing that is actually happening now.
To do this consistently, you need – as with most things – an infrastructure that supports it. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
- Default your meeting times to 25 or 50 minutes. Then, actually stick to it. (That’s the hard part – but it’s the most important) Use that cushion for biological reset, mental transition, and clearing the distractions that stop presence in its tracks.
- Care for your body throughout the day. Drink water, meal prep, make 2-3 meetings a day walking ones. Untended physical needs will distract you in ways you can’t even see. They are also the easiest distractions to fix.
- Operationalize clarity. No one in your company should be sending a meeting invite without the purpose of the meeting and all the prep information included. You should be able to use your buffer time to get quickly up to speed without hunting for what you need to do it.
- Expect drift. When you notice you’re no longer in the present – which will happen all the time – know how to find your way back. Ground yourself physically by pushing your big toe into the floor. Pick a color and find it five times in the room. Breathe. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to return.
If you have big goals and even bigger dreams – you need all of yourself to achieve them. And, the people around deserve all of you as you try. Presence is a leadership practice. It’s going to take some work. But, I know you can do it. With a little intention, it can be supported, protected, and trained.
Preparation earns you the right to be present. Presence opens the door to everything else.
Mindshift Advisors is consulting for the psychology of business. If you’d like to learn how to get present in your leadership, subscribe here to get weekly insights dropped right in your inbox. Ready to up level your leadership using human psychology? Schedule a free introductory call & let’s unlock your greatest potential.
