Reject Executive Presence: Empathy is Your Strength

In this episode, I explore what's truly holding us back from speaking with confidence and introduce a powerful alternative to "executive presence" that can transform how we show up in our most important moments.

What You'll Learn:

• The shocking data: 88-90% of professionals struggle speaking in high-pressure situations
• Why physical and psychological distractions during communication aren't personal failings
• How "executive presence" actually makes us less present and less confident
• The three components of Empathetic Presence: embodied confidence, harnessed empathy, and owned expertise

I've spent a decade collecting data from corporate workshops across nearly every industry, and the pattern is clear: dominant, disconnected leadership isn't helping people speak up. Even at a recent Google Developers event, only 12% of 500 engineers felt comfortable speaking in front of senior leaders.

Empathetic Presence offers a different path. Instead of overthinking how we're perceived, we can focus on being fully embodied, leveraging our natural empathy as a strength, and owning our unique expertise - even if we're junior or new to our roles.

I'm curious: What do you want to liberate your voice from? And how would you use your voice if you felt fully confident in every setting?

Join me next time as we hear from empathetic leaders who are using their voices for impact.

Want to experience Empathetic Presence in action? Join my free monthly workshop and learn tools to express yourself in every setting. Register here. 

00:00 Introduction to Empathetic Presence 

00:21 Understanding Speaking Anxiety 

00:32 The Importance of Empathy in Leadership 

00:52 Challenging Executive Presence 

01:22 About the Host: Lee Bonvissuto 

01:57 Data on Speaking Confidence 

03:36 Physical and Emotional Distractions 

05:09 Systemic and Situational Factors 

06:27 Rejecting Executive Presence 

07:27 Embracing Empathetic Presence 

08:47 Harnessing Empathy and Expertise 

11:32 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

0:05

Welcome back to Empathetic Presence, a podcast to liberate our voices. I'm your host, Lee Bonvissuto, and today I want to know what do you want to liberate your voice from? Maybe you have speaking anxiety that only shows up in certain situations. Maybe you're managing a toxic workplace. Maybe you're tired of overthinking. I started this podcast in this very scary moment because it's never been more important for us to uplift leaders who are leading with inclusion and empathy at the center. Leaders who prioritize humanity in both the products they build and the people that they serve. Today, I wanna give you an alternative to executive presence because when we lead with ease and empathy, we don't need executive presence. Especially in the age of AI, I believe that the one thing technology will never be able to replace is our human empathy. Our ability to connect, communicate, and collaborate will never be replaced by technology. Before we dive in, I want you to know a little bit about me. I'm Lee, and for the past 10 years I have helped empathetic leaders express themselves in every setting, and particularly at the executive level, so that they can be seen as the experts they are with more ease and less effort. I do this work to co-create cultures of confidence, cultures where we can all be heard. Futures that include all of us, and I care about this deeply as a trns person. Over the past 10 years, I've been collecting data and it's quite remarkable. This is from the thousands of people I've been honored to support in corporate team workshops and trainings where people are not pre-selecting to come and see me, and the data is really astounding. Now I have run workshops with some of the top companies in the world over the past 10 years, throughout nearly every industry. The percentage of people who struggle to speak with confidence when they're put on the spot in high pressure moments. I'm talking about moments with senior leaders in leadership settings and moments where they feel like there's something to prove. 88 to 90% of people report that they struggle speaking off the cuff when they're put on the spot in those moments. 88 to 90% of people this far exceeds the data around fear of public speaking, which usually lands somewhere around the 75% mark. Even this past year, I spoke on a stage at Google Developers Dev Fest in front of 500 engineers and developers, and we did some live polling at that event, and only 12% of the room felt comfortable speaking up in front of senior leaders. This just goes to show that dominant, disconnected leadership is not helping people speak with more confidence. It might even be harmful to innovation. And so what prevents you from speaking up? Maybe your distractions are physical, like the palpitations, that throat constriction, air hunger, where we suddenly start gasping for air and feeling like we can't take a deep breath. Maybe you have sweating or blushing blotchiness. Maybe your mouth gets dry or you have a shaky voice. Maybe the shakiness is in your hands or limbs. Maybe you get cold or you have to run to the bathroom with GI problems. Maybe you have a lot of tension or fidgeting, pacing or swiveling in your chair, or maybe you find that your eyes move rapidly as you search for what you want to say. Maybe your distractions are more internal or psychoemotional. Maybe you lose your train of thought as you're searching for what you want to say. You might have nervous laughter or nervous crying. That was always something for me. You might speak fast to try and keep up with your racing thoughts. You might find that your thought pattern is very circuitous and you trail off thinking of what you want to say next, or your tone might get very suggestive as you second guess yourself. You might shrink, making yourself small, filling the space, apologizing or qualifying, or maybe you find that you're holding your breath and overthinking, but what if these distractions and sensations were not a reflection of your ability to communicate. What if they were a reflection of your environment, your situation? Maybe only in certain settings you say too much or you get quiet. Maybe it's in high pressured meetings like with senior leaders where you find that you're comparing yourself to peers or over-indexing facial expressions. Maybe it's only in those high pressured moments that you're over prioritizing how you're perceived. Instead of focusing on what you want to say, maybe you dread these moments, avoid them, or get really frustrated with yourself there, and maybe you're watching yourself and having this unconscious thought pattern of, am I being clear? Am I making sense? Do I seem professional enough? And I wanna ask you a genuine question. Do you feel confident when you're comfortable? Do you feel good about your communication when you don't feel like you have to prove something? And if you do feel confident when you're comfortable, maybe it's not your voice that needs to be fixed. Maybe it's systemic, societal, situational, because in my experience, I found that when we try to fix our voices, we lose ourselves, and this is why executive presence doesn't work. This is why fake it till you make it only makes us overthink, overwork, and over prepare, leading to even more perfectionism, asking for permission or focusing on how we're being perceived. We have to reject executive presence. We have to reject dominant disconnected leadership because it doesn't work anyway, which we can see on the national stage. In this moment, this can be really hard when our empathy is being attacked, when we're overthinking because we're being told that feelings will not help us in our work settings. And this can lead to people pleasing or over prioritizing how we're being perceived. This is why I want you to have an alternative to executive presence. Executive presence is a distraction. It forces us to overthink and become less present, which makes us less confident, and I want to recommend you think about empathetic presence instead. Empathetic presence is connected. It's intuitive, it's human centered. And we get to empathetic presence by combining three areas. The first is embodying our voices, embodied confidence, and this is true presence, not executive presence, but full body focus so that we can think on our feet with less anxiety and more ease. This is not about how you're perceived. I'm talking about actually shifting your hormonal confidence, and what I mean by that is your ability to actually feel more comfortable and confident. When we feel comfortable, we know that we have more access to feel good hormones. Things like serotonin, which increases our trust and comfort. Testosterone, which increases our confidence, dopamine, which increases our ability to feel productive. And once we can really embody our confidence, embody our voices with full presence, we want to harness our empathy. And I'm a student of empathy. I learn about empathy from my clients who are thinking about empathy in terms of their users. I support a lot of product managers and user experience experts. I'm a student of empathy in terms of conflict navigation in my own personal life. This is something that does not come naturally to me, but I am working on being more aware. Not just because empathy makes us stronger leaders, but it's actually a focusing tool. When we get nervous or we feel like we're under pressure, we focus on ourselves, and this can lead to perfectionism or getting really formal or wanting to be seen as an expert. And if we can focus on empathy instead, it can actually help us get out of our own heads and focus on our audience, focus on our impact. Focus on the people we are there to serve. It's a focusing tool. Empathy is our strength if we know how to leverage it. And so after we embody our confidence and making sure we're present and we are leveraging our empathy, using empathy as a tool to engage and connect with our audiences, we want to be focusing on our expertise. How we can own our expert and see ourselves as experts in every setting we enter. And even if you're a junior in your career, you have a unique expertise. Even if you're new to your workplace, you have a unique experience that other people don't have. Helping you identify that. Use it when you introduce yourself, think about it in terms of your personal brand, but even more so in moments when you're put on the spot, using your unique perspective and expertise as a filter for how to contribute in those settings. It creates more ease and clarity. And I am learning about expertise from my amazing clients who are experts in public health, disaster management technology, and ai. People who have such deep subject matter expertise that they have to elevate out of the details when communicating at higher levels. But this work is bigger. It's about how can more of us see ourselves as experts? How can more of us see ourselves as leaders, even if we've been called sensitive or shy? Even if we have social anxiety, even if we feel super confident doing the work itself, but we get nervous talking about it. That is empathetic presence. Our ability to harness our expertise, our empathy, and our presence to show up and speak up as more fully ourselves in our most important moments. And in this podcast, I am so excited to uplift and amplify empathetic leaders who are using tools of empathy inclusion in order to lead in more future forward ways. So how do you wanna use your voice right now? How would you use your voice if you felt fully confident expressing yourself in every setting? Would you use your voice to protect your community, to advocate for people who are being silenced at work and around you? Would you use it to fight back against racism and other silencing systems around us? Would you use it to speak up in your corporate culture? I hope that you share this podcast with others who need to be heard and don't forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Join us next time as we hear from empathetic leaders who are using their voices for impact.