Three Words

Here’s an exercise I give every leader working on executive presence.

After a high-stakes meeting — one where you were leading the room — ask yourself: if the people in that meeting had to describe how I showed up in three words, what would those words be?

Write them down. Be honest.

Then — and this is the hard part — ask someone who was actually in the room.

Just ask. “How did I come across today?”

In my experience, there’s almost always a gap between the three words you wrote and the three words they give you. Not always a big gap. But the gap is where presence work happens.

The goal is to close that gap — not by performing something different, but by actually becoming more of what you intend.

What three words do you want your presence to communicate? And how confident are you that’s what people actually experience?