Presence Is a Leadership Skill
I facilitated an intimate workshop recently with successful founders on self-leadership. We spent half a day on a single question: what does it actually mean to be present?
Fully there, with another person, without the noise of everything else getting in the way of your presence.
Everyone in the room could identify recent moments in their personal and professional lives when they had been in a conversation while mentally somewhere else.
The room went quiet when the personal examples came up. The professional ones were easier to admit. The personal ones had a certain weight that resonated with everyone.
Presence is regularly confused with charisma, or the kind of intensity that fills a room. Some of the most present people I have encountered are quiet. What they have is a quality of attention the people around them can feel. When they are with you, they are with you.
In a fast-moving world where everything is competing for your attention, that quality is rarer than it should be. Most people want to be present. What gets in the way is everything that enters our conscious and our subconscious minds and never gets fully processed. The information overload that fuels the speed in which a high-performing leader operates, on auto-pilot, that affects every decision that gets made.
I spent years not understanding this about myself. I was engaged, responsive, and I asked good questions. What I understand now is that a significant portion of my attention was almost always occupied somewhere else, regardless of who was in front of me. The change started when I was introduced to mindfulness meditation. At first, I was resistant to the idea. I remember the exact words I told my teacher: "I am too busy to meditate, I don't have the time." He insisted that if I allowed myself to pause and practice presence, I would find more time for everything else in my days.
Mindfulness has become the most important tool in my life. It's also the first tool I introduce my clients to. The initial resistance is palpable. I hear the same words I used to say to myself and to my teacher. After a few sessions of practice, the shift is clear. I notice the moments of presence, the connection with what really matters inside, and the clarity that emerges from that presence.
This is why presence is a skill built from the inside. The most consequential thing you can bring into any room, at work or at home, is also the thing most difficult to manufacture. Developing it starts by letting go of your preconceived notions and giving yourself permission to just be.
