There is a phrase that gets used against women in nearly every professional setting, and I want to name it for what it is. 👇
“EXECUTIVE PRESENCE“
Or if you are not in a corporate environment, it is explained this way:
You are too much, or you don’t speak up enough.
In either situation, it is described as you having too much of it. You do not have enough. You are intimidating. You are too quiet. You need more polish. You need to soften. The room needs to hear from you. The room needs less of you. It is a phrase that never lands at the right amount. Whatever you are being at the moment, executive presence is the shape you are not.
I want to tell you a story about the year I gave up on it.
I was in the running for the SVP and Chief HR Officer role at a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded company. The interview period lasted eight years. (No joke.) Along the way, someone gave me the specific feedback that I needed more executive presence. More polish. More presence. When I walked into a room, they wanted it to be felt.
I had no idea what that meant.
I had a trip to New York coming up. A Cornell-sponsored invitation-only event for C-suite next-generation leaders. Forty of us in the room, most from Fortune 50 companies, based all over the world with the degrees and pedigrees to match. So I did what a hard-charging woman in my position tends to do. I researched. I found a finishing school consultant in New York who worked with dignitaries at the UN. And I hired her for the day, out of my own pocket, for ten thousand dollars.
I flew in a day early. Did not tell anyone.
I had one hour to fix it. She sent me to the Coach store on Madison Avenue for a specific black structured bag, in a specific shape, with specific characteristics.
I got out of the cab and paced the sidewalk outside the store for ten minutes.
I grew up with a family motto: use it up, wear it out, make do or do without. If it was not on sale, it did not exist. I did not shop in stores where the merchandise was spaced two feet apart. I called my husband from the cab on the way there and told him I was about to spend a thousand dollars on a purse. He told me to do what I needed to do.
I stood on that sidewalk and gave myself a pep talk. I channeled everything the coach had taught me all day. I walked in as though I were her.
The Coach staff came running. I stood at the door and let the room absorb me. Made no eye contact. Pointed at a bag and said, “I will take that one.” One of them asked if I wanted to know how much it cost. I said no. Because if I knew how much it cost, I would not be buying it.
I paid seven hundred dollars for a purse. I still have it.
The next day, I walked into that Cornell room with everything she taught me loaded and ready. And I watched forty Fortune 50 executives break every single rule she had given me.
Not one person followed her script.
That was the day I gave up on executive presence.
Now, I did not become an independently liberated woman in that moment. I still took every piece of feedback for years after. But over time I have come to understand something important about the whole game. 👇
Someone else’s idea of how you should show up is not the same thing as what actually belongs to you. And the phrase executive presence is almost always someone else’s idea, delivered as if it were a universal standard.
Here is what I use instead. I call it the Protection Bubble🫧.
Every room I walk into, I get to choose what the bubble is made of. Sometimes it is made of soap. That is for the people I care about, the ones I want to see me, the ones I want to be accessible to. Sometimes it is made of steel, because I need walls and the room has not earned the full me. Sometimes it is linen, because I want air to pass through. Sometimes it is blue jeans, because I want to be casual and I do not want to think about it.
The reframe is that you are not too much or too little. You are choosing what the room gets to see. And you get to choose differently in every room, at every table, in every meeting. Executive presence tries to hand you one uniform for every room. The Protection Bubble hands you agency.
👀Want to hear me tell the story?
I shared this story at the Connection Exchange recently, and the one-minute version captures the moment I realized I could stop trying to fit someone else’s definition of executive presence.
There is one more piece of this I want to name, because a woman in one of my conversations recently gave me a reframe on the ten thousand dollars I still have not fully recovered from. She said the money did not go to waste. The lesson may not have been what I was told it would be, but I now know how to enter a room the way that coach taught me. I know how to signal a waiter. I know how to eat bread one bite at a time, buttered individually. I know which fork to use in which order.
I have those tools in my pocket. I get to decide when to use them.
That is the work. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep what is genuinely useful. Set aside what was someone else’s idea of who you should be. And know that both piles are yours to hold.
🤏TINY TWEAK Challenge
Think about the next room you are walking into this week. A meeting. A call. A dinner. A conversation you have been holding off. Before you walk in, ask yourself what your bubble is made of. Soap, steel, linen, blue jeans, or something else entirely. You do not have to explain the answer to anyone. You just have to know it before you cross the threshold.
