What Is Presence For?

What is presence for? What it boils down to is: presence is for influence. Now, some of you out there might be saying, “I don’t want to influence anybody to do anything. I’m just interested in getting my job done. I want to focus on doing what I’m doing. I want to focus on what I care about, and I want everybody else to leave me alone.” This is something that I’ve heard a fair number of introverts say, and I think there’s even a book with that particular theme in it that came out a couple of years ago. And I get it. I understand it. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do understand the impulses behind it. And I think the truth is we do all want to influence; we’re just thinking about it differently in different circumstances, and we have different relationships with the word “influence.” When you are looking to get hired into any position, you want to be chosen. You are looking to influence the decision-makers. Once you’re in a team, you want the people that you work with to like you and want to work with you and do very specific things, like get things to you by a particular time and enjoy the work that you do and give you the kind of feedback that you’re looking to get. When you sit down with your boss, you’re looking to influence your boss in a positive way. When you get to the point in your career where you have people reporting to you, you want your team to respond to you in a particular way. When you’re interacting with clients or with team members outside of your organization, you are looking to inspire a certain response from them. You want them to like you. You want them to work with you as a team. It really doesn’t matter where you are in an organization or where you are in your career; you want people to respond to you well. And a huge part of that is your presence. It’s in the nonverbal communication you are putting out all the time. It’s in how you walk. It’s in how you talk. It’s in the words that you choose. It’s in the way that you feel and you sound as you interact with other folks. It’s in the words that you choose when you type a text. It’s in the media that you choose to interact with, whether that’s text or email or video or face-to-face. It’s in everything that shows up. So presence is for influencing. And you do want to influence. What you want to do is get very clear on the results that you want to inspire in the people that you’re interacting with. And you need to recognize that despite everything that I’ve said so far, those results are outside of you. You can do stuff to inspire them. You can do stuff to increase the chances of those results happening, but you can’t own them. You can’t be 100% responsible for them. The more responsibility that you take for generating those responses that you want to inspire in the people that you’re interacting with, the more potential power you create for yourself. Now, some of you are going to say, “I don’t want power.” Power is another word for influence. It’s not about control. It’s about inspiration. The more responsibility that you accept, the farther you will go in your career.