What's it like?
Your Personal Executive Presence (PEP) inspires in others a sense of trust, confidence and calm. But how does PEP feel to you? How do you experience it?
Naturally, your personal experience is always unique and cannot be defined by anyone but you. However, in speaking with leaders with a developed PEP, shared themes emerge. Here are a few.
Personal Power
PEP includes the experience of personal power, which is the ability to choose your response to what shows up in the moment. You’re not caught in counterproductive patterns based in past conditioning. You don’t blame your loved ones, society, God or the market for your actions. Instead, you recognize that your actions are always your own. You choose decisive and intelligent action, and if you happen to make a mess, you accept personal responsibility and clean it up. We could call this integrity. Watching yourself in action with such integrity has a direct feedback effect on you. You know yourself as a person who takes responsibility for your actions, and this strengthens your experience of Personal Power even more.
High, Real Self-Esteem
When you know and exercise your Personal Power, one of the results is high, real self-esteem. High, real self-esteem is rare. In most people there is a major inner division between the Self who has clear, positive intentions and the inner voice that tries to sabotage that intention with a litany of criticisms, threats, fears, insecurity and shame. As a result, our intentions do not lead to clear-minded, whole-hearted, full-bodied action. And we know that, and we feel bad – certainly not full of high self-esteem. So what is this voice that stop us?
This inner voice or force is variously known as the inner critic, the inner judge, the inner saboteur, or the superego. It can feel like it is you, just talking to yourself (giving “sensible advice”) – but it is not. For now, suffice it to say that the inner critic is a survival mechanism rooted in your formative years. It served to guide you and keep you safe when you were little, but today it has long outlived its purpose. Now, it actually stymies your initiative, your actions and your growth. It seems like you stop yourself over and over - but it's really your inner critic cramping your style. And seeing the negative results greatly undermines your self-esteem.
An important element of PEP is a reduction in inner divisions, including the division between your Self and its positive intentions and your inner critic. When you begin to directly feel your Personal Power and see its results, the inner critic’s threats and judgments are shown up to be a relic from the past, useful then but no longer needed today. With the healing of this division the inner critic stops making the inner noise that attacks your actions and degrades your self-esteem.
Access to the Three Intelligences
One practical approach to intelligence is to recognize three different kinds of human intelligence: Mental/Head intelligence (often measured in IQ), Emotional/Heart intelligence (often measured in EQ) and Body/Kinesthetic/Gut intelligence (often measured in BQ). Each intelligence is associated with a particular center in the body (head/heart/gut) and each center receives and processes specific kinds of information, and produces specific kinds of actions.
A person with PEP enjoys a certain balance between the three centers. This means that i) each center does what is naturally equipped for, and does not take on work from other centers; ii) the centers do not compete with, contradict or antagonize each other; and iii) each center is fully “on-line” to participate and contribute to experiencing and functioning in each moment.
Each person has a natural tendency to rely most on one or two centers. However, too much imbalance reduces the intake of information, as well as the output of adequate responses. You can’t actually understand chess with your emotions, love your partner with only your body, or ride a bike with your mind.
Like any capacity, the three centers of intelligence are developed and balanced through first assessing their baseline state of (im)balance, followed by deliberate practice of each center, alone and then together.
Witnessing
Witnessing is usually experienced as a third-person perspective on yourself and the world around you. You are mindfully aware of yourself as you function. This mindful awareness can “stand back” a bit from your immediate experience, and remains free, observing you without getting involved, like a neutral third party. This supports the ability to remain steady in unexpected events or crises.
Leaning back in this Witness position you also find that you can more easily take a moment of pause after an incoming stimulus in order to thoughtfully choose your response. Stimulus - P a u s e - Response. Finally, Witnessing supplies you with a uniquely informative “wide-angle view” of your inner and outer experience and functioning. We find that this capacity is rarely developed without deliberate practice.
Body Awareness
This is an uncommon capacity, even in leaders with some degree of PEP. Yet it is a profound source of calm, confidence and steadiness. It also instills ease and gracefulness into your physical movements. It is particularly associated with the kinesthetic/gut center. And it feels amazing: pleasurable, vital, alive. Note that physical strength, flexibility, endurance or proficiency in a sport indicates body functionality but not necessarily body awareness; it usually needs to be developed through deliberate practice.
Inner Sensation of Self
The elements of Body Awareness and Witnessing contribute to an Inner Sensation of Self. It is the simple, direct and profound recognition that “I am here”, or “I exist”. Not in the usual sense of “I am here as opposed to there” or “Well of course I’m here – where else could I be?” But in a direct immediacy that may be felt for a moment in nature, or at the birth of a child, or during lovemaking, or in a near-death experience or other intense life event.
Most of us can count these moments on the fingers of one hand. And yet their vivid memories can last a lifetime. In these moments you experience, for a moment, your true Self. The capacity to frequently experience your true Self is rare but profoundly life-changing. Like most of the capacities discussed here, it has proved very difficult to learn from a book or on your own. It is typically developed through dedicated spiritual practice with guidance from someone who has developed this capacity themselves.
Receptivity and deep connection
Receptivity is an openness to input in the broadest sense: people, relationships, information, your five (or is it six?) senses. The inner confidence of PEP brings less defensiveness and more openness. This allows your mind, heart and gut to take in all relevant information and work together to respond effectively.
When you can be truly open to yourself, you are at ease. You know who you are and what you are here to be and do. As a natural extension, you look outward from yourself, into the world. Your openness meets others. As a truly open and interested leader who is not self-absorbed, you are a rare find and instantly magnetic. People will seek you out and connect, and you will know how to engage, and with whom. As a servant leader, the vast majority of your relationships, work-related or not, are interesting, personal and enjoyable.
To make true contact from your Personal Presence is both a pleasure and a gift. Your openness allows you to really see the other, hear them, learn from them, and respond with attunement to what's present in the moment. As a leader, your Presence can bring kindness, intelligence, calm, affirmation, witnessing, guidance, support, gravity, lightness, humor or depth to the situation - depending on what's needed. Your openness to the reality of the moment will let you know.
Inner peace, flow and joy
You're reading about several ways of experiencing a developed PEP. Together, they are positively transformative to your overall experience of living life. Words you might find yourself using to describe it could include calm, confidence, clarity, simplicity, ease, capacity, energy, friendliness, inspiration, aliveness, gratitude, love, care, peace, meaning, and pleasure.
If by now it seems that PEP means being superhuman, relax. These are qualities and capacities found in leaders with PEP; yet no human alive has fully developed all of them. More importantly, you can develop these faculties of PEP through deliberate practice: more about this later.
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