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Hello, I'm Jamie Lee. I'm an executive coach for smart women who don't like office politics. And I help them get promoted, get better paid without throwing anyone under the bus. How? By blending proven communication strategies with brain-shifting neuroscience techniques. In this podcast, we explore the stories and strategies of Gutsy women and allies who've braved speaking up and navigated their careers forward. We're here to de-risk the conversations that feel the most daunting. Advocating for yourself and your growth. Let's dive in. Executive presence doesn't exist. And I'm seeing it as someone who is literally teaching a workshop on executive presence next week. So stick with me, because I promise this is not a baby switch. Welcome to Risky Conversations. I'm Jamie Lee, an executive coach for smart folks who don't like office politics. And today it's just me, no guest, no co-host, and a realization that hits home. And I suspect it hits home for you too, especially if someone used executive presence to explain why you didn't get the job, the promotion, or the seat at the table. It's because when you try to pin it down, it slips away. Ask 10 senior leaders at any organization to define it, and you'll get 10 different answers. Gravitas, polish, confidence, the way someone carries themselves. You just know it when you see it. And that last one is the giveaway. When a quality is something you just know when you see it, what you're really measuring is the filter of the person doing the seeing. Executive presence is a construct that people project their best as well as their worst filters onto. I see this every single week in my coaching practice. Over the years, I coached hundreds of talented, hardworking professionals, and a striking number of them came to me carrying that same piece of feedback. The one sentence that stood between them and a promotion. Great work, strong, quantifiable results, but she lacks executive presence. Take, for example, the project manager who had the best numbers on her team. She exceeded quotas, but still got passed over for a promotion and was told to work on her presence with zero explanation of what that actually means. And here's the pattern I cannot unsee. The person receiving that feedback is very often a woman, a person of color, a child of immigrants, an indigenous person, someone who speaks with an accent or doesn't quite fit the picture of what a leader is supposed to look like. So I want to name what I think is going on. For a long time, executive presence has worked as a filter for whiteness. And I want to be careful here because I don't mean white people as individuals. Whiteness doesn't refer to having Caucasian heritage. I mean whiteness is a proximity to a very specific kind of power, the control of limited resources and decision making by a particular dominant group at the expense of other groups. Executive presence defined in this way means look and sounds like people who already run the things. And that's how the cookie-cutter mold of traditional leadership gets white supremacy written all over it. And that's the worst version of executive presence. It gets weaponized quietly and politely as a reason to hold women and underrepresented leaders back. And this holds organizations back from the growth and the evolution that they need. I've been chewing on this for a while, as long as I've been calling myself an executive coach. But what really cracked this open for me was a book I started reading recently, and it's called The Real Ones by Maya Rupert. If you don't know her, Maya Rupert is a political strategist who ran Kouliani Castro's 2020 presidential campaign, which made her the third black woman in history to run the presidential campaign. Her argument in the book is about authenticity, and it stopped me in my tracks. We're constantly told to be authentic, bring your whole self to work, just be real. But Rupert shows how, for people of color, being real has always come with a cost. Authenticity, she argues, is a privilege. And it's one that's been kept from the people who spent their whole lives calibrating, looking over their shoulders, and you know, adjusting so that other people can feel comfortable in the room. Think about what that means in practice. If you are a BIPOC leader or a woman in a room full of men, you've probably spent years adjusting your tone, your volume, your hair, your clothes, your laugh, how much you talk about where you're from. All under the white and or male gaze. And I know this one intimately. And I know it's an exhausting one. The calibration, the adjusting, the context switching is not fake. It's survival. And frankly, it's a skill. But then someone turns around and tells you that you don't seem authentic or you lack presence and you're not quite leadership material, it's a bind because you're punished for being too much yourself and then punished again for adjusting what you did to stay safe. And to be honest with you, I do this kind of calibrating all the time, mostly without realizing it. I do it unconsciously. As an immigrant woman living in America and a multicultural person who spends part of the year in Asia, I shift, I calibrate, I context switch without, you know, thinking about it. My tone, my words, what I wear, whether I put on makeup, it all changes depending on where I am and who I'm with. With my creative American friends in New York City, I'm relaxed, chatty, and casual. At a professional conference, I come across more reserved and quiet. And when I'm in Asia, I think a lot about how I look because everyone around me, men, women, non-binary alike, is put together in a way you just don't see in the West. None of those versions of me is fake. They're all me, reading the room and adjusting to it. The trouble starts when someone with power over your career decides that only one of those versions counts as leadership. Executive presence works the same way. It's another version of the same authenticity track. Here's another way to see how narrow the traditional mold is. Just last week, voters across the country sent a new wave of people into the US government. Women, children of immigrants, BICOC leaders, LGBTQ leaders, Muslim leaders, people who are about to hold real power and make decisions that affect millions of lives. Now picture them walking into a corporate promotion committee. How many of them would get the note? Great results, but lacks executive presence. If our definition of leadership presence doesn't make room for the people that voters just chose to leave them, the definition is the problem, not the people. And then I think about my mom. My mom is a former business owner, a skilled professional, and honestly a peripheral hero. My mom survived domestic abuse from my late father's family because she had three daughters and no sons. She immigrated to America with the three daughters in tow. She got divorced, and she single-handedly put three daughters through college while becoming a coveted nail technician with a devoted clientele and still speaking from good English. To me, her professional achievements are long and they are impressive. She is a leader. She is my hero. But the traditional mold of leadership, my mom would never be described. It was someone with executive presence. Nobody would put my mom on a slide, my immigrant mom, entitled What a Leader Looks Like. And yet she has led. She is a leader. She has negotiated. She has held steady under pressure that would flatten most of the people handing out that feedback. Real presence is grace under fire, uncommon courage, not just the talk, but the way you walk the talk you give when the going gets tough. My mom did all of that. To me, she embodies executive presence, even if she still cannot pronounce the English word like a native. So when I say executive presence doesn't exist, this is what I mean. The version that's been used to sort people into leadership material and not quite is mostly a measure of who looks familiar to the people in charge. But here's where I have to be honest with you, because throwing up the whole idea of executive presence would be too easy. Injustice doesn't erase the common sense of the expression. When people talk about presence, they're pointing at something real. We've all been in a room with someone who made everyone settle, who could take a hard question without flinching, whose sentiments and somehow landed more. At its best, the idea of executive presence points you toward your own but unexpressed potential, more self-trust, more ease under your own skin. Even when you're the only one like you in the leadership suite. And regardless of who in that room is being biased and wrong. My definition of executive presence comes from science, from neuroscience, not tradition. To me, it's your nervous system capacity, your capacity to handle stress, the expected and the unexpected kind. The kind of stress that comes with leading projects, people, and processes. I love this definition for a few reasons. Number one, it doesn't care about what you look like, how you dress, or you have an accent. You know, and she would fall into all of those categories. And it's treatable, which means it's not a quality you're born with or not. And it puts the power back in your hands instead of in the hands of whoever judging you from across the conference table. Here's why it matters when your nervous system reads a situation as a threat, like a curveball question from your boss or someone talking over you in a meeting, your body shifts into survival mode. Your thinking brain goes partly offline. That's when you freeze, overexplain, apologize, say the thing, and then you end up replaying it at 2 a.m. in the middle of the night, and you're all home. Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with your character. Your body is just doing its job a little bit too well. The great news is you can work with that system directly. In the workshop I'm leading on Wednesday, November 18th, I'm going to teach you three neuroscience-based tools. And each tool works with your vagus nerve to shift you into an alert, aware, and engaged state. So your thinking brain stays online just when you need it the most. I'd love for you to co-practice these tools with me. On Wednesday, November 18th, I'm hosting a free open training called Steady Voice, Strong Influence, Executive Presence Tools for Women and Underrepresented Leaders, backed by Neuroscience. We won't just talk about the tools. You'll get to experience them so you can feel the shift in your own body and know exactly how to use it the next time during a hard conversation or when you need to turn on your uncon courage. This is for you if you're ready to hold a rule without overexplaining, push back without apologizing, and manage up or advise peer leaders without freezing or shutting down. It's for you if you want to lead with curiosity and adaptability so people start trusting you with bigger decisions because of how you show up, non-traditional background and all. The link to register is in the show notes. It's free and it's open to everyone. So if this episode made you think of someone, a colleague, a friend, a sister, a mother, a daughter, send it to her. I'll leave you with this. The next time someone tells you that you lack executive presence, I hope you hear it differently. It isn't a verdict on who you are. At its words, it's a reflection of someone else's filter. At its best, it's an invitation to build capacity. You can grow one shift, one tool at a time. My mom never fit the mold. And she let anyways, and so can you. This has been an episode of Risky Conversations. I'm Ginny Lee. Take care of that nervous system, and I will see you on the 18th. Thank you for joining me today on Risky Conversations. Remember, everything worthwhile is on the other side of a risky conversation. And when done well, your self-advocacy becomes an act of service. If you're ready to de-risk your own career evolution, I invite you to book a free hour-long consultation at jcoach.com slash apply. J-A-N-I-E-L-E-E-C-O-A-C-H dot com slash apply. We'll map out your custom blueprint to confidence and get you on the path to being better paid on your own terms. Let's make your next conversation the one that changes everything. Talk soon.