Why Presence Matters Before Words

Why do some people seem to command attention before they’ve really said anything, while others struggle to make an impact even when they know their material?

They may have attended all the usual communication and presentation courses, but somehow something is still not quite working.

In this summer reflection episode of Leading People, Gerry Murray revisits the wisdom and advice of two former guests, Kate Walker Miles and Caroline Goyder, both of whom originally trained in the theatre.

Together, they explore why presence is less about polish or performance and much more about how we actually show up.

From voice, body and breath to intention, emotional state and gravitas, Kate and Caroline offer practical insights into why people experience us before they fully process our words.

And what they reveal is encouraging: creating more presence when you enter a room, whether physical or online, may be easier than you think.

If you lead meetings, give presentations, influence others or simply want your communication to land more effectively, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Podcast Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for HR leaders, LD professionals, and senior leaders who want to bring out the best in themselves and the people around them. Every other week I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep, honest conversations about what great leadership actually looks like in practice, and how your own mindset, behavior, and presence shape everything around you. If you want thinking that challenges you, tools you can use, and conversations worth returning to, you're in the right place. One of the great privileges of hosting this podcast is that I get to sit down and have thought-provoking and insightful conversations with some of the best thinkers on the topic of leading people. So this is another of my short summer reflection episodes, where I revisit a theme that sits right at the heart of this podcast.

From Awareness To How We Show Up

SPEAKER_00 1:07

And this time it feels like a very natural follow-on from the previous reflection episode on awareness. Because once we start noticing ourselves more honestly, once we become a bit more aware of what's happening within us and between us, the next question is how do we actually show up? How do people experience us in a room, in a meeting, on a call, or in a difficult conversation? Because before our words can really land, our presence usually gets there first. So in this reflection, I want to bring together two conversations that both come from the world of theatre and performance, but have a great deal to say to leaders. The first is with Kate Walker Miles from Rada Business. And the second is with Caroline Goider, whose work many of you may know through her books on voice, confidence, and gravitas, or her TED Talk that has over 10 million views. And what links them both for me is a simple but profound idea. Leader presence is not a performance, it's a way of being.

Presence Is A Way Of Being

SPEAKER_00 2:26

So let's begin with Kate.

Kate On Embodying Leadership

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Acting is being, right? That's the first thing that we learn when we become a professional actor, or even amateur actors. It's not showing, it's not pretending. You've got to be that character. You've got to embody that character so that you're utterly credible to the audience and utterly credible to you. So you believe what you're saying. Well, that's the same for me, particularly in leadership. We've really got to be the leader, not pretend to be the leader, not not ape other leaders. We've got to be it. So how do we use this vessel of ours and this mind of ours to feel credible in ourselves and credible for other people?

SPEAKER_00 3:11

I think that's such a helpful place to start. Because a lot of leadership communication advice can quietly push us in the wrong direction. It can make it sound as though presence is about style, about polish, about performance, or learning how to look and sound like some idealized version of a leader. But Kate's point is almost the opposite. It's not about pretending, it's about embodiment. It's about whether we feel credible within ourselves, and therefore credible to other people. And that matters because our behavior is doing much more than delivering information. It's shaping how other people feel.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

I think everything is at stake. Your own resilience, but also the performance of everybody around you. I'm gonna go right back to core fundamentals and think about how people make decisions, whether to follow you, whether to do what you're trying to

Emotion And Influence In Groups

SPEAKER_02 4:15

influence them to do. And there's, as you'll know, Joey, there's masses and masses of research about how people make those decisions. And I think a huge proportion of it is emotionally. People make decisions emotionally. People buy from people, all of that good work. Advertisers have known this forever, haven't they? So if I want to help people make those decisions, if I overload them with just pure fact, they're not going to be able to make the decision in the way that they might, if I help them to feel what I need them to feel. And they're gonna feel things based on my behavior. Similarly, the other part is that we're pack animals. So if if my my behavior is bleeding through to people, I have an agenda here, I I I need my thing, it's coming from a place of fear and grip, I'm gonna be creating that in other people. So they're going to be reading themselves and they're gonna be feeling fear and tension and grip. So they're not going to make the decisions I want them to make. My behavior is everything when I'm influencing. If I'm in a state of ease, then I can think really effectively. I can create thoughts that are clear and concise, and I can give voice to them in a way that moves people. They believe what I'm saying and they're affected emotionally by what I'm saying. So they can move quickly to where I want them to go. But I don't then need to overload them with more and more and more reasons, more and more facts to push them along that line. I'm gonna pull them with the emotion, and that comes from my behavior.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

And that phrase from Kate, we're pack animals, really stayed with me because it reminds us that leader presence is not neutral. The state we lead from tends to become the state other people feel, and it's well known that states are contagious. So if I show up rushed and tight and defensive, overscripted or desperate to get through the content, people will pick that up. And if I show up grounded,

Caroline On Scripts And Pressure

SPEAKER_00 6:20

open, and genuinely connected to what I'm saying, people will pick that up too. Which brings me very neatly to Caroline Goider. Because Caroline takes this in a slightly different direction. She starts to explore what happens when someone technically has the content, but somehow still doesn't sound like themselves.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

I'm gonna go to a client I was working with yesterday, actually. She's a very senior leader, and she said to me, They've gone through a lot of transformation. I have big all hands, and I get onto the call, and I feel like I'm in an exam. I have a script and I say it, and when she walks into the room with you, she's full of presence. She's carries herself beautifully, her voice is powerful. And we we watched one of her all hands, and she was hunched over her laptop, sounding like it wasn't really her words. And it it was there's something about the pressure of a script, a performance, or being judged. It was like she had slightly shrunk. And the the journey we went through in a half day coaching session was to help her find the intention. Because I I don't know about you, Jerry, but I feel that a lot of powerful performance is about intentionality. I said, What do you want them to feel? And she was really surprised by that question because she thought, what do I want them to think? So we set her intention. We thought about story because story, I think, is a really beautiful way to tap into things that matter to you. And I said, What are the stories of the green shoots of success in this transformation? And she started to tell me a story, and I said, We

Intention And Story That Shifts Minds

SPEAKER_01 8:10

need to use that because stories will help change the audience's mindset from the pain of transformation to the potential.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

I think that's such an important shift. Not just what do I want to tell them, but what do I want them to feel? Because when we're trying to communicate something that matters, people are not just processing our words intellectually, they are responding emotionally. And if we sound as though we are trapped inside a script or hiding behind slides, or trying to survive the moment, then the message may be technically accurate, but it won't land with anything like the same force. And that for me is where presence and communication really come together. And Caroline then names something that helps clarify the difference between just being impressive and actually being trustworthy and influential.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

To me, what it means now, having written a book 10 years ago, and the depth of it is still really true, which is that it is about a grounded presence. It is about being congruent, centered, true to your values. But I think the most important thing about it is that what differentiates this grounded presence of gravitas from charisma is that it's not all about you. Common purpose. People who speak to a common purpose, something bigger than them, some serving something bigger

Gravitas Versus Charisma And Purpose

SPEAKER_01 9:50

than them, the football coach, the person who runs the school choir, you know, the community um leader, those people are often the people with the most gravitas, not the people in the public eye.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

That distinction is brilliant. Gravitas is not charisma. It's not about drawing attention to yourself. It's about becoming steady enough, clear enough, and congruent enough that people trust you to lead them towards something that matters. And that's probably one of the reasons why some of the most powerful leaders we ever encounter are not necessarily famous, polished, or publicly visible. They're just deeply present. They care, they listen, and they mean what they say, and they create the conditions in which other people can bring out their best as well. So how do we begin to do that more often? Well, Kate offered one very simple and very practical place to start.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

What we we tend to do in our

Grounding And The Breath Reset

SPEAKER_02 11:00

work is this is sort of to allow us an experience of being centered and grounded. And we hear those words banded around a lot, but that's this physically is what it means. Being grounded to the earth, being centered in the breath. What it also do, what it also does is allow us, as you said earlier when we were chatting, about what do I do when I notice I've got out of state? When I notice I've been triggered. We've got to have awareness in our body so we notice it physically. We can almost give name to it. Yeah, and I'm sure you'll have done this in your psychology work. If I can name that emotion, I'm frustrated, I'm angry, what have you, we can start doing something about it. We need to notice the feelings in ourselves first and then know what to do about it. And for me, it starts with grounding. Feel the earth beneath your feet, whether you're seating, seated or standing, lengthening your spine, expand in your body, notice where you're holding tension, and just we say in acting, just say no to that, let it go. And then center your breath. We have a great uh mantra, it's it's very short and sweet. If in doubt, breathe out. If in doubt, breathe out. So that moment when you're triggered, breathe out.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

If in doubt, breathe out. There's a lot of wisdom in that because so much of what we call presence is not really about adding something dramatic. It's about removing what gets in the way. The tension, the the rush, the over effort, the the need to sound clever, the need to get through it, the fear of being judged, and the habit of shrinking or tightening under pressure. So perhaps the

Presence Before Words Key Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 12:40

simplest takeaway from all of this is that presence begins before we speak. It begins in how we arrive, in how we breathe, in how we hold ourselves, and whether we are genuinely here. Kate Walker Miles and Caroline Goider are just two of the many thoughtful guests I've had on Leading People since January 2021. And one of the things I'm reminded of when I revisit these conversations is just how relevant they still are. So if this theme resonated with you, you can think of the Leading People podcast as a growing

Back Catalogue And Community Link

SPEAKER_00 13:20

learning library, one you can dip back into whenever you need a fresh perspective. And if you'd like to go further, you'll find this and many other leading people resources inside the leading people community. There's a link in the show notes. And that's it for this episode of Leading People.

Subscribe Share And Closing

SPEAKER_00 13:45

If you're new here and enjoyed today's conversation, I'd love it if you subscribed. It's the best way to make sure you never miss an episode. And if you are a regular listener, the best recommendation is always a personal one. So, if this episode made an impact on you, please share it with a friend or colleague. It might just be the best thing they listen to this week. Until next time.