3.7 Personal presence
What’s the best way to explain presence?
I could try a quick dictionary definition. But that wouldn’t begin to tell you what you need to know.
I could give you a long list of bullet points highlighting different features. But that wouldn’t do the trick either, because…
Presence is beyond words.
That’s the genius of it. The delight of it.
So what I’m going to do is tell you stories, a bunch of them, to give you a feel for presence.
Why? Because…
Stories take us beyond the words we use to tell them.
And because…
Stories go deep.
Which matters since moral presence is sourced from the moral desire that we find in the deepest place in our hearts.
And because…
Stories make the abstract personal.
For each of us, our moral presence is very personal to us. It’s not an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all kind of thing. At least I would hope that it’s not.
And you don’t do presence in the same way you might work a math problem. First you do your moral self-development, then presence arises naturally from that. It’s something you can nurture, but you can’t force it.
And it delivers blessings…
First you work for it, then it works for you.
What does that mean? Moral presence often solves problems…
All on its own.
And takes you into a realm…
Beyond best practices.
You find yourself doing things that surprise you because they aren’t in any of the standard how-to books. And these can be very sweet surprises.
Now for the stories.
Jackie
She called me in tears about Vera, her Board president. Vera was an intimidating personality, she was a VIP in the community, and for a third time she had trashed Jackie in a public meeting.
Jackie told me, “It makes no sense. When I took over a year ago, we had a deficit of $30,000 and now we have a reserve of $20,000. Wouldn’t you be thrilled with an ED who could do that?
“And our productivity is way up and still climbing. It seems like my staff are telling me every day how happy they are that I’m here.
“I’ve tried talking with Vera. I’ve used all the skills I’ve learned in every communication class I’ve ever taken, but none of my attempts have made a dent in her attitude.
“I’m happy in this job, except every time the phone rings I brace myself wondering if it’s Vera calling with another complaint. Sometimes I think she just likes to see me jump. And Board meetings are unbearable. Sitting in the same room with that woman, keeping a smile on my face.
“I’m crying this morning, but I really feel like screaming. I have absolutely no idea what to do about Vera.
I asked Jackie to keep talking about what it was like to have Vera in her life. She went deeper into it, shuttling back and forth between anger and tears. The more she looked at it, the more she could see just how badly this situation was hurting her.
Then her sense of fight started to well up.
So I said, “I have a suggestion for you to consider. What if for the next two weeks you absolutely stop trying to figure out anything about Vera? That means that you focus entirely on yourself. Instead of trying to stop Vera, you focus only on how you need to take care of yourself given that you are under attack. What if you take a Vera vacation?”
She shouted, “Yes! I need a break!”
The Monday afternoon right before the next Board meeting, as part of this plan, Jackie went to a drop-in judo class instead of sitting at her desk in a state of dread. She rushed back to the office ten minutes before the meeting, having spent two hours throwing fellow students to the floor. Her cheeks were rosy and the judo mood was in her.
Vera arrived with her contribution to the Board potluck. She banged her Tupperware container on the table, yanked off the lid, slammed it on the counter, and barked at Jackie, “I need a serving fork. Now!”
Instead of jumping up to run and get one, which she would have done in the past to calm Vera down, Jackie replied, “They’re in the orange cabinet next to the sink.” And then she pointed.
Jackie told me later, “I was surprised by what I heard myself say and was so busy replaying it in my mind that I don’t know exactly what Vera did, but I guess she went and got the fork, because it was there on the table when the meeting started.
“And during that meeting, I found myself focusing my attention on the other Board members who I like. I heard everything Vera said, I responded to all her questions, but I was so detached from her, it was like she wasn’t there.”
The next morning Vera e-mailed Jackie: “I’m resigning. I don’t like the attitude over there anymore.”
Jackie called me and said, “Who would have guessed that when the moment of truth came, it would be over a serving fork?! One sentence, that’s all it took.”
But of course, we knew it wasn’t the sentence that made the difference, it was Jackie’s spirit. Vera could feel the shift in Jackie, knew it was the real thing, could feel how grounded she was in her moral core, and knew that bullying wouldn’t work on her anymore.
Jackie told me, “The trick was that I wasn’t trying any tricks. It wasn’t a pose or a strategy that I was trying. I wasn’t trying anything! Something in me just snapped, and suddenly I was totally calm inside. I wasn’t even conscious of what I was doing. It just felt so right and so utterly simple.”
Ginny
Sometimes you go into presence through the back door…
Ginny was at her wits end with Brad, the first director of her agency’s newest program. She called him a “puzzling pain in the butt.”
She had hired him into a great job, so why was he giving her attitude instead of gratitude? She had tried different communication techniques with him to no avail. Argghhh!
In our coaching session, I said, “I’ll be you and you be Brad and let’s see what happens. Let’s not solve anything, let’s just play.”
In a flash, she dropped her super-responsible leader persona. She got into the character of a puzzling pain in the butt. And she was good at it. She said whatever popped into her mind.
We got goofy and then goofier and in the middle of her laughter, Ginny suddenly stopped and said in a calm voice, “Oh, I get it. I bet Brad’s in over his head with this program and he’s scared and taking out on me. I bet he doesn’t even know he’s scared.
“It’s suddenly so obvious. I can look back and see so many clues over the past few weeks. I’ve been too mad at him to empathize with him, so I couldn’t really see him.
“Now I know what to do. Now I can be vigorously present to him as his ally instead of struggling with him. And I know I’ll like myself a lot better this way.”
It turned out she was right on all counts.
Evie
Sometimes presence takes the lead, and you get to relax and enjoy:
Evie, the executive director of a nonprofit doing violence prevention work, asked me to meet with her because she wanted to get free of her fear of conflict so she could deal with people in a direct, assertive way. And she was urgent about this because she had two difficult staff who were sabotaging her and sucking up way too much of her time and emotional energy.
In our conversations, she wrestled with her reluctance to set limits. She looked back into her childhood and saw she had never been allowed to say no to anyone. In the middle of our sixth meeting, as she was pushing hard to find her inner strength, she broke through.
Her face lit up with surprise…
“Oh, I’ve got it now! This moxie thing. I can feel it. Yum.”
Ten days later she called me…
“You know those two bullies on my staff who have been so mean and impossible? They’re gone!”
“Wow, what did you do?”
“Nothing. It’s just that every day since my breakthrough, I’ve been walking around the office feeling like I could burst into song. Neither of the bullies said a word to me in all this time. They slipped off somewhere whenever they saw me coming.
And this morning I found their resignation letters sitting neatly side by side in the center of my desk when I came in.”
“What do you make of that?”
“They got it just from looking at me that it’s a new day around here. They could read the writing on the wall. Or the writing on the Evie. Too bad they didn’t step up to the challenge and get on the team, but if they’re not ready to do that, then I’m happy they’re gone.
“And I’m especially happy they took care of it themselves. I didn’t have to lift a finger, just my spirit.”
Holly
Sometimes the effect your presence has on other people feels like magic. It’s not really. It comes from deepening who you are. But still it can feel like magic, as in this story Holly told me.
Holly: Back when I was a sacrificial leader I thought I was supposed to be invisible, like a ghostly presence instead of flesh and blood. So my asks were timid and apologetic.
Rich: And now?
Holly: I don’t cheat on myself any more. I show up.
Rich: And what’s that like in the actual moment of asking?
Holly: I’m kind of taken with myself.
Rich: Because?
Holly: I’m so intense. And reach so deep. I’m still not quite used to it. Maybe I never will be.
Rich: And where did this come from?
Holly: Not where I expected. I’ve taken the standard workshops on donor cultivation but that didn’t do it for me. It was my daughter.
Rich: I’d love to hear that story if you want to tell it.
Holly: I don’t tell it to many people because it’s precious to me.
Rich: I understand.
Holly: But I do want to tell you. You know how serious I am about mothering?
Rich: Yes, I do.
Holly: When I came back to work after maternity leave, I made a big shift. I had to pick up Susie from childcare by 6 p.m., no excuses. So I had to leave the office by 5:30 no matter what.
Rich: What happened?
Holly: I got ruthless about my decision making. Once upon a time, I could dawdle through my day and pick up pieces of other people’s work and do things of secondary importance, because I knew I had all those evening hours to make up for what I didn’t get done earlier.
When Susie came along, though, I couldn’t do that anymore. And when I couldn’t do it, I saw I didn’t want to do it.
Rich: And back at home?
Holly: Here was this little baby who I love more fiercely than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything and there was a moment when I was up with her in the night, nursing her, half awake, half in a dream, and I watched the two of us together as she was feeding, and this wave of feeling washed over me. I wanted to feed her with the best possible mother’s milk I could give her. Which is why I eat right and take very good care of myself.
And then I had this second flash, I wanted to feed her, as she grows up, with the best possible me.
Rich: And how did that change your asking?
Holly: If I wanted Susie to be able to ask for what she needs with her whole heart, then time for me to do the same.
Rich: Like?
Holly: I wanted Maxine to be my new Board Chair. She’s led fundraising campaigns for different Boards in our city over the years. She treats people with such kindness and at the same time she’s so serious about getting results. And there’s a depth to her that I don’t understand yet, but I love being around her.
Rich: You had your heart set on her…
Holly: I really, really wanted her. I wanted to make her my Chair and she wasn’t even on my Board yet. She agreed to hear me out, but warned me she was way too over-committed and there was a 99% chance she’d tell me no.
So I talked. Just said it straight out. Wasn’t strategic. Held nothing back. I told her how I felt about her. What I thought we could do together. I was in my middle-of-the-night mood.
Rich: And she?
Holly: Said yes. She quit two other Boards and came over here and she’s kicking butt, and I love every minute of working with her.
Rich: Do you know what made her change her mind?
Holly: I wanted to know that and she said, “Never in my life have I been asked for anything like you asked for me.”
Have you ever seen a Board recruitment book that says, “If you want to get a great Chair, first go have a baby”?
Linda
She put together a great Board, and her presence did the asking so she didn’t have to:
As a child Linda did nonstop caretaking—mother, father, sisters, and brother. So when she became an executive director, she did the same thing with her staff, Board, and clients.
It was exhausting for her. In our coaching sessions, she’d tell me about coming home at night so tired and wired that she often couldn’t eat and she was losing weight she couldn’t afford to lose.
Her saving grace was that she hated living like this. Her spirit rebelled. She spent a rigorous year and a half learning the moral-fight way of activism, piece by piece.
Then one morning she called me and said, “Nadine, my new Board chair, is like my new best friend and she’s got years of experience leading fundraising campaigns.”
How hard was it for Linda to recruit Nadine? She didn’t recruit her.
One day Nadine said, “I love being around you. Put me to work!” So Linda did.
Lucy said, “I get charged up when I’m with you.” So Linda snapped her right up.
Zack said, “I’m a better man when I’m around you,” and suddenly he was on her team.
Katie said, “There’s something about you…”
And then there was Norma and Nina and Alex.
Linda was in a state of shock. She was getting serious help without even asking. People she had long admired were coming to her.
She said, “This is so different from having to work so hard for every single scrap. I understand this is what you mean when you talk about presence. But what’s making this happen? What’s the secret?”
Then she started laughing, sweet, sweet laughter, and said with a touch of shyness, “Oh, I’ve fallen in love with myself. Is that okay to say out loud? It’s true. It’s true!”
Quiet but serious impact
When you’re in presence mode, you’re no longer just the giver of gifts, now…
You are the gift.
That may sound like New-Age fluff, but it’s very real.
And this is true, because “presence,” the way I talk about it, is not a static thing. It’s not a manufactured thing you paste over yourself. It’s not a pretend personality…
It’s not presentational.
Quite the contrary…
It’s relational.
It’s active, not passive. The word “presence” is mostly used as a noun. But when you’re in the presence of presence it feels like you’re experiencing an active verb.
And of course, on this page, I’m talking about presence that’s infused with the spirit and substance of moral-fight. Which means it’s engaging, it’s compelling, it’s got chemistry, it moves people.
And when you’ve got it going on, it’s just simply a fact that who you are now matters more than what you do. It’s not that you’ll stop doing things, but…
Your presence makes a bigger difference than the tasks you carry out.
Because what you’re doing comes from a deeper, truer, more powerful place inside yourself, so you have more power out in the world.
Presence might even feel magical sometimes. Even though it’s not magic at all. Remember it emerges from your deeply personal daily practice of moral decision-making.
But still, I hope you’ll let yourself enjoy the feeling of magic whenever it shows up.
What’s that like? Here are some snapshots of presence in action…
Whenever Judith walks in, she lights up the room. Suddenly conversations are filled with smiles and sunshine.
I can’t even say why Chloe inspires me so much, but I know that when I’m around her, I make a special effort to be at my best. Like when she’s listening to me, I reach deeper, I say more, I’m smarter.
We had a crisis at the shelter so our team met to make a response plan. But we were jangled and distressed. We were stepping on each other’s sentences, feelings got hurt, tempers were on the edge. Then Jillian came in and sat down, off to the side, just listening, but her presence was like the “Moonlight Sonata” playing in the background. Within three minutes we were calm, coherent, and doing first-class problem solving.
When Craig chairs our meetings, it doesn’t seem like he’s doing anything special, he just goes through the agenda, but somehow we meld into his sense of focus so we get five times as much work done.
Jimmie is a former client who’s now a case manager. Whenever the management team works on strategy, we ask him to join us. He knows nothing about strategic planning per se, but in his quiet way he keeps us on track. When we get too fancy or too far afield, he gently ropes us back in. He’s got the mission so deep in his bones that when he’s present there’s no chance of drift. I think of him as the soul anchor of our organization.
Your core story
When your work is rooted in a core story, your presence, arising out of that work, tends to be richer and more compelling. It’s supercharged.
It might be the story of a specific moment, a turning point, as it was with Ava…
My dad was mentally ill, and it was serious. He fought so hard against his illness. It made me hurt to see him get defeated again and again.
But he was also a sweetheart. I really, really loved him.
I remember the day. It was July 3rd and the month of my 14th birthday, when I came home from school and there was Dad in the family room, home early from work, sobbing.
And I sat next to him and asked him, Dad, what’s it like to be you? And he poured out his heart. And I was blown away by how strong his spirit was and how hard he was trying to be a stellar dad, despite the odds against him.
That’s when I realized that I couldn’t have a better dad. And that by his example he was teaching me the most important life lesson. To keep fighting for what matters to you.
And I realized that I was on his side.
In the years to come, the kids in my high school sometimes said mean things about my dad, not often, but when they did I defended him. Yet I wasn’t on the defensive. I was proud to take my stand with him.
And now what is it that I do? I work at a center for at-risk kids. Kids with all kinds of challenges, mental illness, yes, but also addiction, abuse, and poverty. But I’m not trying to save them. A couple of the staff play savior, but not me.
I tell my friends that my work is to champion these kids. Kids who are fighting against the odds. I’m their advocate. I’m on their side. And I’m proud to take my stand with them.
And this began with my dad. Though he’s gone now, my work keeps me connected to my love for him.
Or your core story might capture an underlying theme from your childhood. Here’s Alan…
I still don’t quite understand my family. It was so good in some ways: stable, functional, and basically happy. But we were none of us a match for each other. It’s like we just didn’t get each other. There wasn’t any special chemistry between us. Not positive and not negative. We rarely had fights. At dinner time I felt like I was at a boarding house with a random collection of transients trying to the make conversation flow. I care about my family, but I’m not deeply connected to them and that is my abiding sorrow.
But what do I do now? I’m an organizer specializing in statewide elections. I work with other organizers on a national level. I’m the one who brings us all together twice a year to strategize. And when we go out to eat after our meetings, it’s raucous and loving and feels like family to me. What I missed growing up, I’m making happen now, for me and for whoever wants to be part of it.
And here’s Pete…
I grew up in an extremely close family. Each of us played an instrument and we loved singing together. We did that on many evenings even if only for half an hour after all the homework was done.
Sometimes on Saturdays we’d play at local arts festivals and such. In my teen years a lot of my friends were embarrassed by their parents or their families. Not me. I was proud of being seen with them.
So what do I do now? I’m an organizer. And I’m passionate about it. I want my community to have the kind of togetherness I found in my family from the beginning. It’s my favorite thing.
These two guys do much the same kind of work. But one does it motivated by…
A core story of absence.
While the other does it from…
A core story of presence.
And it’s their core stories which make their work deeply personal and that depth generates the power of their presence as organizers.
Science helps explain it
In evolutionary terms, the most important fact about us human beings is that we are a social group species. We are social animals. And our sociality is what has given us dominion over the earth.
And what does sociality require to make it work?
The ability to read each other, and understand each other, and empathize with each other.
The ability to attune ourselves with each other, and come into alignment.
If we couldn’t do those things we wouldn’t be cable to cooperate with each other like we do.
What is it that gives us the ability to get in synch and stay in synch so we can take effective, cooperative, sustainable group action?
Limbic resonance
Which was first popularized by the book The General Theory of Love, in 2000.
The limbic system is the middle section of our brains, above the brainstem and below the cerebellum. Its parts, like the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and hypothalamus, are considered to be the core emotional center of the brain.
And limbic resonance means that over the millennia of human evolution, we have developed the very real ability to read and respond to the emotions of others. This has been reinforced, because the better we can read others, the better it is for us as individuals. And the better it is for the survival of the group we are members of.
And there’s more. Let’s take a moment to look at…
Mirror neurons.
In 2008, the neuroscientist, Marco Iacoboni, published a book called Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. In it he talks about mirror neurons and how he believes they contribute to our ability to feel empathy or each other. For example, if I’m eating a banana, and you see me doing that, your mirror neurons, will give you a very real feeling of eating a banana right along with me.
So, because of our mirror neurons, you can have a virtual experience of what I’m doing and I can have a virtual experience of what you’re doing.
There’s disagreement in the neuroscience community about how big a role mirror neurons actually play in being able to read the intent of others and how much empathy such neurons can trigger.
But whatever is finally concluded about mirror neurons, it seems evident that the whole of our brains and our bodies have developed to be able to read our fellow humans. And…
To be able to influence them.
And that being the case, shouldn’t we activists be diligently engaged in developing our talent for…
Limbic leadership.
Which is what moral presence makes possible.
Of course, limbic resonance can be blocked. For example, by childhood trauma. Although, depending on the person, such trauma can also have the effect of intensifying resonance.
Through developing our nonverbal ability to provide limbic leadership, we become better at…
Engaging, entraining, and enrolling others.
And sometimes what happens is called…
Direct transmission.
Which means you take in the moral presence the other person without the need for flip charts or bullet points or explicit teaching of any kind. There’s no struggle to learn. Instead it’s like osmosis. The other person’s moral force gets inside you and awakens your own. Yum.
Joy
When you’re in sacrificial-savior mode, you’re learning mostly from struggle, if you’re learning at all.
When you become a moral-fight activist, you get to learn from the work of moral self-development. It’s nurturing, it’s sustaining, but still it’s work.
When you cross over into the zone of moral presence…
You’re now learning from pleasure.
And…
You’re following the lead of pleasure.
How radical is that? How absolutely the opposite of sacrificial-savior activism?
Sometimes I like to say that moral presence is…
Serious fun.
Because it’s so very serious and so very fun at the same time.
It’s…
Soul-satisfying fun.
Because it touches what’s deepest in your heart.
Passion, resilience, aliveness, mastery—all fun things—I’ll set those against the exhaustion of sacrifice or the boredom of generic, impersonal leadership any day.
And it seems to me that if you’re going to do the very challenging work of activism…
You deserve to get every bit of the joy that can go with it.
