Mastering Presence: The Key to Authentic Success with Kathryn Ficarra

What if your most powerful professional asset isn't your resume, your technical skills, or even your connections—but something far more fundamental? Kathryn Ficarra, Executive Presence Consultant, reveals that true presence emanates from within and transforms everything around you.

Breaking from conventional approaches that focus merely on outward appearances, Kathryn shares her revolutionary IMPACT framework that addresses the root of authentic presence: our internal narrative. With over 20 years of corporate experience across gaming, e-commerce, and media, she brings hard-earned wisdom about what truly makes someone command a room.

"We have 60 to 80,000 thoughts every day and typically, most people have the same 90% of those thoughts every day," Kathryn explains. This mental loop creates our life path—often limiting our potential without our awareness. Through her purpose assessment and transformative coaching, she helps professionals identify limiting beliefs and replace them with narratives that unlock their authentic power.

The conversation delves into gratitude as "the language of the universe" and how finding benefits in challenges creates quantum leaps in personal growth. For entrepreneurs specifically, Kathryn offers practical guidance on embodying your future self through intentional daily choices, from what you consume to how you interact with others.

Her perspective fundamentally shifts our understanding of presence from something we cultivate externally to something we reveal by removing internal barriers. "The energy that you emanate speaks louder than anything that you ever have to say," she notes, highlighting that our presence is simply the outward expression of our internal alignment.

Ready to transform your presence from the inside out? Text "shift" to 55444 for Kathryn's mini executive presence assessment and to be notified when her book "Your Presence is Your Power" is released. Join us in normalizing personal growth in the workplace and discovering how your authentic self creates your most powerful professional advantage.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Catherine: Executive Presence Consultant
• 3:13 IMPACT Framework and Purpose Assessment
• 6:06 Transformation Through Self-Discovery
• 11:32 Gratitude and Choosing Your Path
• 15:15 Elevating Entrepreneurial Presence
• 19:55 Intentional Daily Choices and Embodiment

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello there and welcome back to the next episode of Overcome Yourself, the podcast. As you know, my name is Nicole and I'm so excited to be here today with Catherine, and so Catherine is a presence coach. Like, can you just? I'm going to butcher it. So I want you to go ahead. Take it away, catherine. Let us know who you are and who you help.

Speaker 2: 0:21

OK, and thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here. So I'm an to be here. So I'm an executive presence consultant. So I work with organizations and you know individuals on cultivating executive presence as a strategic advantage, not just a nice to have. So you know I've had a 20 year experience in the corporate world and had a very a nice growth trajectory into three different verticals. I worked in gaming, e-com and media and what I saw firsthand was the importance of cultivating that executive presence in the boardroom.

Speaker 2: 0:56

But I have a very unique approach from the perspective of my mission really is to normalize personal growth in the workplace.

Speaker 2: 1:03

So how I teach on presence is really getting an internal alignment and having a deep understanding of your belief systems and the programs that you approach your life with, because those are those programs is your presence, and so when you're not aware of that, you know you could be operating at. You know a tenth of what you're really capable of, and so what I have found is, when I really work with people on, you know, kind of taking that step back, getting really clear on the limiting beliefs they have that are holding them back and how it impacts how they think of themselves, how they approach their work, and when you really get clear on what those are and you can cultivate a, a path forward that utilizes you know, it kind of optimizes who you truly are authentically, you have a lot more ease and success in life. So my real, you know, my big push is just eliminating a lot of the resistance that we have every day and living a life that's more in flow so that you can have that success in both your life and in your work.

Speaker 1: 2:06

I love that that is so powerful. You're not necessarily because when we think of like a presence consultant, you're like, oh, so she tells me to wear a suit, so that is not what you do. So can you tell us a little bit more about what it means to have that presence in the office? Yeah, and you know that's a little bit more about what it means to have that presence in the office.

Speaker 2: 2:25

Yeah, and you know that's a little bit of part of it, right, you have an identity and you want to embody and step into that identity. And you know, is your what you physically wear, you know, does it reflect who you truly are? I mean, that probably plays a little bit into it, but you know I peel back the onion a lot, a lot deeper than that. So I created a framework that um. I'm actually writing a book right now It'll be out in a couple of months called your presence is your power, and the framework is based on um. It's called the impact framework and it stands for identity, alignment, mindset, mastery, persona, um, authoritative and authority and confidence, communication, excellence, excellence and transformative growth. And so what I do is I start with a purpose assessment. So we do a. It's a 20 minute assessment, it's a um. It's not a personality test like you've seen, maybe in like a disc or a myers-briggs. What it does it? It actually pulls out your intrinsic motivations and gives you a 40 page report that talks all about your intrinsic motivations. That are what your purpose is and how do you tie that purpose to what you do every day. So how do you create that impact and develop a deeper impact and a deeper value with your organization based on what you bring to the table. So I love that assessment, I utilize that a lot, and so I'm working with a large organization right now that is bringing it into their all of their top departments, and what's exciting about that is you'll start to see people.

Speaker 2: 3:54

I love this. They start to talk. You know they talk to them, they talk to each other, utilizing the lingo in the assessment, like you know, what quadrant are you in? You know, are you a recruiter, are you a messenger? You know, so forth. So so we utilize that and then from there we get deep into understanding, like, what is the conversation you're telling yourself? We have 60 to 80,000 thoughts every day and, on very typically, most people have the same. 90% of those thoughts are the same thing every day. So it's like you're creating a narrative in your mind and that's creating the path, that's creating your life, and so how do we get really clear on that and then start to create a narrative that actually puts us where we want to be?

Speaker 2: 4:33

You know, I think that when you, as a human, you know, when you see fulfillment in what you do every day, when you understand your purpose and the purpose is really the best of what you have to help other people. Right, we're all here to help each other out and we do that, and it looks very different for each person, but that when you fulfill that purpose and you have that sense of fulfillment, you know that intrinsic happiness is what can keep you going forward and gives you that momentum. So I really do try and get you clear on to like who you authentically are and then, when you get to that place, we look at some of the triggers that you have in your life that are causing resistance within you and we dissolve them. And I have a couple of different methods that I work, that I work within, that we can do that with and you really get. You just want to get yourself to a place of flow so that you are the most authentic version of you, because when you are that authentic version, that is when you can start, you know, magnetizing the things that are meant for you, but not only that. It opens up the real estate in your brain so that you can start coming from a place of innovation, you know, from a place of clarity, or utilizing your parasympathetic nervous system. You are, you know, you're able to handle things in a lot from a different perspective. So it's real transformation. I want people to experience themselves in a whole different light.

Speaker 2: 5:52

You know I just came off a seven day. I can't believe I did this still, but I'm still like dealing with reentry. But I went off the grid for seven days and I'm a consistent student of my work. So you know I have a passion for this, so much so that I will. I'm always looking for opportunities to find different ways to transform so I can put it into my work.

Speaker 2: 6:12

So I went for a week in a ranch in New Mexico where we were, you know, got off the plane, drove two hours with 60 strangers, you know, to a. All that was. There was a dining hall, a cabin with 20 bunk beds in each cabin and for the women, and and then a dining hall and a classroom and that was it. And I lived there for seven days and we got up at seven and did everything as a community and sat in that classroom and we were. We worked till, you know, 11, 12 o'clock at night. It was exhausting but the most transformative week of my life. Like I did I, I did things there that I never thought I could do. I learned things I never thought I would. You know, retain so and I'm excited about that and I'm working right now on really incorporating some of those key elements into my impact container so that I can, you know, pass that learning on and help transform other people.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Wow, that is, that's really cool. And there's hold on. There's, like you know, so many different thoughts that are coming up. I think it's amazing to be able to unplug and really just focus on what it is that you're doing right, because, like in our world today, like that you know, I was like said the other day, I was like I like to unplug from the matrix and go outside in the real world and do things right. So that's really cool. Now can you tell me what part gratitude plays in all of this that you're doing?

Speaker 2: 7:48

Yeah, I mean, gratitude is so important. I think it's the language of the universe and it's really important and it's something that you know. It's how I start my day, like as soon as I open my eyes, I'm like, okay, these are the things I'm thankful for, even when I have the triggers right, even when I have bad days. The way I look at it is that you can either revolve or evolve right, and when you revolve, you're just in this cycle and you can't get out of it and you don't understand why things are happening. And you know there's not a lot of gratitude, there's a lot more resentment. And you get to a place where you're like, okay, I'm thankful for the experiences that have been brought my way, I see how it's happening for me, and when you can really come to a place of collapsing that and evolving to the next step, you know you really do have a different perspective on how to live your life and gratitude is definitely a baseline for that and having the awareness of being. You know, when you get to that place where you're like, wow, I get it. You know there's an intrinsic thankfulness to that because you realize that you're not left on your own accord here. You know you were guided and you know you're the source of your life, you're in the driver's seat and a lot of people don't realize that they come from a very reactive perspective, a little bit maybe of a victim mentality, sitting in the passenger seat of their life. And so I really want and I've been through it all I, you know I wasn't always, I didn't always have this perspective.

Speaker 2: 9:13

You know, I went, I went through my, you know I had a very successful career and then when COVID happened and my life kind of turned upside down, I walked out of my marriage and my life and really had to kind of take, take a time out and reevaluate my life because I didn't feel so internally aligned.

Speaker 2: 9:33

And coming out of that were a lot of self sabotaging behaviors that I wasn't happy with and I was like, nope, I'm, you know, I'm made for more than this. I'm going to figure this out and I it took me a good five years to get to a place where I'm like, okay, I kind of have a handle on on all of this. And so I, what I want to do is kind of compact all of that learning and give it to you in just a couple of weeks, so that you know you're really set up to be like okay, I can navigate this life with grace and with ease and with a lot less pain, and so, yeah, that's my hope for everyone of overcoming themselves, as the podcast is called, and stepping into this not new version, into this evolved version of themselves.

Speaker 2: 10:26

To to go back to what you were saying, yeah, I think, at a high level, when you can find the benefits right, if you look at your life and you go okay, this I'm. I'm going through a little bit of an evolution in my life and it's painful. Evolution is always painful, it does. It's painful if you don't understand it, but if you can find the areas in your life where you're like, ok, there's, you know, it is the matrix right, every plus has a minus, every up has a down, every benefit has a drawback. So if you can get clear on where is what is this, how is this benefiting me? And on how is this benefiting me? And then, what's the drawback here? And what do I choose?

Speaker 2: 11:01

Because you get to choose what you lean into. You have the choice to decide. Okay, I'm gonna lean into what the benefit for this is for me and I'm gonna let that be my path. And the more that you do that, the more you choose the benefit and the more you can be aware of both sides and do that. Collapsing, that's your quantum leap. So that's really where you can start to look back and go. I see how that was done for me and it creates your authentic self and it creates an internal alignment and, in essence, that's what your presence is. The energy that you emanate speaks louder than anything. That's what your presence is. You know, that's your, your. The energy that you emanate speaks louder than anything that you ever have to say, and that comes from what is within you.

Speaker 1: 11:48

So that's really cool. I wrote an article for authority magazine and it was about overcoming being a people pleaser, and one of the things that I mentioned that a lot of people in my audience were like wow, this is huge. Is that every yes, every yes that you say you're saying no to something else, just like every time you say no, you're saying yes to something else. And so really thinking about, when you say yes, I'm going to work late, what are you saying no to, like your kids, your partner, your hobby, your rest, or when you say you know no to work now you're saying yes to those things. And so really understanding, but you know, like really understanding what you know what part of the spectrum it falls on and what you're saying is like on the macro scale, like that goes. You know it goes the opposite way too, for every time that we're like, oh, this sucks, there's a silver lining right, and so it can work both ways. So I love that so much.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Yeah, you're absolutely right on and you know essentially what you're saying too is that you get to choose. You know we get to choose to every yes, that you choose what you say no to you. You're choosing, that you're making the decision, and there's a lot of power in decision and there's even more power in the intention behind your decision. So that choosing is really important, right, and that's really leading with your intention. But having the awareness of both sides, I think, is key.

Speaker 1: 13:13

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah, being able to see both sides of it right. So let us know how can we stay in touch with you, how can we follow you?

Speaker 2: 13:23

Yeah, so I work with. Like I said, I work with organizations. I do executive retreats and speaking and so forth, but I do also work one-on-one with with people. So you can find me on Instagram at the C group studio it's the letter C, the C group group studio. I'm also on linkedin. I'm very active on linkedin, um and that's just at katherine fakara. You can find me on there. And um, and I'm on facebook under, I think it's just katherine f. So, yeah, come find me, follow me. We'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 13:53

Yes, amazing um, and we'd love to hear you know. Keep up with all of your adventures, because it sounds like you have a lot of fun. Now, you did mention before we started recording that you did have a gift for the audience.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Yes, so I have a little assessment. It's if you text the word shift to five, five, four, four, four, you'll get my little mini executive presence assessment and then I can also put you on my email list for to alert you when the book comes out. So yeah, I think it's just a it's. It's a little bit of just a thought generator of, like, how do I look at my life? Or how am I you know how aware of the thoughts that I think every day, like, where am I in that, on that spectrum? And I think that's a good place to start.

Speaker 2: 14:36

You know, the personal growth trajectory can be very overwhelming and there's a lot of content out there. There's a lot of information, there's a lot of people talking about different universal laws, and you know it can, it's overwhelming, it's a lot, and so you have to. The way I guide people on this journey is you just got to find the right path for you and what resonates with you, and you know it's like. It's like you try on different hats, right, and which one looks good, you keep it and which one doesn't, you just send it back, right. You just got to have your a little bit of your own inner compass on that and you know. But I think, at the end of the day, we, you know, I think we're a lot of people who are in this field just want to, you know, assist people in their growth trajectory so that they become the best version of themselves.

Speaker 1: 15:23

I love that Now in becoming the best version of themselves. As we're wrapping up here, I'd love to hear your advice for entrepreneurs who want to elevate their presence, like on social media, right, Because that's our platform. Might not be in front of a physical group of people, but we're speaking on social media, we're making videos, we're doing blog posts. So what advice do you have for those entrepreneurs who really want to improve I don't know if improve, but elevate their presence in all that they do?

Speaker 2: 16:11

get clear on the version of you that you know. When you, when you desire something, you it's already within you, it's just waiting to be revealed. And part of the work is really saying okay, in a year from now, you know, in two years and three years from now, what is the version of me that I want to. You know that I want to step into that. You know who is that person and get really clear on who that person is Like. What does she wear, what does she drive, what does she eat for breakfast, how does she walk, what does she? You know who is she, what are the elements that makes her her. And the more clear you are on that person and the more you can, you know, step into that identity on a daily basis, that bridge starts to become a lot smaller. You know, you start to really embody that person.

Speaker 2: 16:53

And I think, in the entrepreneurial route, you know that's a very scary place for a lot of people because it's the world of the unknown right and it's very noble and it's courageous and it's risky and you know there's so much value in doing it and I love working with entrepreneurs for that reason. And I would say two things. Number one get a really good mastermind or support system of people that you can connect with. That can help you. I'm a big fan of masterminds. I'm in two of them right now and I find a lot of value in those. But and the other thing is just just have that vision. You know the vision of what change you want to create. You know what is. You know you're going to this world and you're going to go create a business. How is it helping other people? What does that change look like? And just step into every day, be really clear on the version of that person you're stepping into so that you eventually just embody it. Embody it and you just become that person.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Yes, yes, yes, and, yes, yes, yes and um, I want to just add, because you mentioned like the car and stuff, but that's not necessarily something that everyone can do right now, I just can't just go buy the bmw, right? Anything it's use your imagination.

Speaker 2: 18:03

Yeah, use your imagination, get in that car. You might be driving like a beat-up, whatever, it doesn't matter. You get in there like you are driving the Porsche of your dreams, right, the car of your dreams. And you know, because when you start to really feel that way inside you know it starts to emanate and that's just. It's just one little, you know one little trick. I guess you could say it's not going to be the end all of how you can really transform, but you can really transform. But it's a good starting point to be like okay, I know that this version of me want is wanting to be, you know, revealed, and there's just little ways that you can start doing that, where you just start to feel good and you exude a little bit of that confidence within you and, you know, not get tied up in the circumstance, in the 3d matrix that you see right in front of you. I think that's where people get really caught up. It's a hard place to be, you see, right in front of you.

Speaker 1: 18:50

I think that's where people get really caught up. It's a hard place to be. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 18:52

I was just going to mention like starting with things like what does she drink, what does she eat, what time does she wake up, how does she interact with people, does she say hello, and you know?

Speaker 1: 19:04

And starting to embody cause you can do those things right now, like you don't have to go get a new job, you don't have to get a raise, you don't need anything to start embodying her in those ways and the BMW will come, the house will come, right, but it's coming down to the smallest blocks and being well, how can I be her right now without, you know, trying, without trying to be like this person and and cause I seen the reason that I mentioned that, as I see, especially now with things that the way that they're going, a lot of these social media influencers who are doing what they're talking about, right, they're going in, they're buying all this stuff and they're trying to embody this influencer and they've got this, all this stuff. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about becoming the person that has those things and bringing them, attracting them to ourselves.

Speaker 2: 19:59

So I just want to make that really clear.

Speaker 2: 20:01

Yes, and you're right on, you got to become it before you can be it. And the reason I talk about what you drink and what you eat is because health is a big focus right, and you know that version of you that is impactful and is out there. You know, changing the world or doing whatever it is you want to do, you know there's got to be a really big health aspect to that. So you know it's like what. What do you choose every day? Are you going to pick up that big glass of Coke, or would you rather?

Speaker 2: 20:27

drink, maybe a green shake or a glass of water. You know like it's those little, tiny decisions that you make every day that keep, that push you toward whatever it is you're trying to be, and you got to think about those things. You got to live with intention and think okay, what are the decisions I'm making right now? Like, what is the decision? Is this? Is this helping me or hurting me? Is it bringing me closer to my path or not? You know and I'm not saying don't eat cookies. I'm I love chocolate chip cookies and I have two kids, so there's cookies here all the time and I will eat them. But I'm aware when I eat them I'm like I'm choosing to eat this cookie and I'm good with it. But but yeah, it's just the, it's just the intention you put behind your decisions.

Speaker 1: 21:08

Yeah, absolutely, because it's not about that cookie that you eat once. Are you eating like a package of cookies every day? Because that's a habit and that's not a good one? But having a cookie every now and then, well, you know, that's fine, like that's part of enjoying the process, enjoying the ride and just making sure that these habits that we have underneath are supporting us so that when we have the cookie, it's not you know, it's not like the last cookie. Oh, my god, that's it. This is what knocked your health over. No, you're just enjoying it.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Yeah, you gotta enjoy the ride, for sure.

Speaker 1: 21:41

Yes, and then that's where gratitude comes right back, makes you know, makes its way back around. But practicing gratitude helps us enjoy that cookie. So we, we don't have to eat, cause like you know what, like I'll be honest, when I was younger, like I could sit down and eat a whole pallet of cookies, like just the whole thing, right. And now I'm like, well, I'm just enjoying this one cookie and I don't feel the need to eat like 17 of them. You know what I mean. So, yeah, it's all part of the process. I love that, thank you, thank you, you know what I mean. So, um, yeah, it's all part of the process. I love that, thank you. Thank you so much for being here with us today, catherine. This has been absolutely amazing and we will catch you guys next time, on the next episode of Overcoming Yourself, the podcast. Bye, bye.