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Presence
Presence is the state of being attuned to—and able to comfortably express—your true self, so your best qualities, your core values, your personality, and really to do so under stressful circumstances. Because when you can do that, you’re then able to kind of let your guard down and hear what’s actually happening in the situation rather than what you fear might be happening. Presence comes from knowing your story, really knowing who you are. So knowing what your core values are – what makes you, you. What’s one of the things about you that can’t be changed, no matter how you perform in this negotiation or on this math test? So it comes from knowing who you are, accepting who you are – you know, believing your story – and then being able to access those things. And sometimes people have all of that but they can’t access it, so when they go into that stressful situation they go into fight or flight mode and they basically shut down, and a wall comes up, and now they can’t access the very tools that they actually possess to do well in that situation. So they can’t be present, it’s just not possible.
Biggest Challenges
Everyone has these biggest challenges, and they are situations that we approach with a sense of dread, that we execute with anxiety and distraction – we’re thinking about what they might be thinking of us, what we should have said two minutes ago, what’s going to happen in the future – and we leave then with a sense of regret, feeling that we weren’t seen. These big challenges vary dramatically across people. So for some people it might be a job interview – well, for a lot of people it’s a job interview. For some people it might be relationship conflict at home, for other people it might be going to see the doctor and making sure you get all the information you need. So it varies dramatically, but I think that there are sort of two key elements. One is that it feels very high stakes – so it feels like whatever happens in that situation is going to dramatically affect your life – and the other is some component of social judgement, so someone is judging you on a dimension that really matters to you. Are you a good person? Are you a smart person? Are you a healthy person? So, the stakes are high and there’s social judgment. Now, what happens when you put these things together is that people feel as if they are in a really threatening situation. And so their nervous system goes into this fight or flight mode, which might be adaptive if you’re being chased by a tiger, but you’re not being chased by a tiger in a job interview; you’re just in a job interview, and you’re either going to get the job or you’re not going to get the job, that’s it. It’s not adaptive in the situations in which you see it happen in today’s world. So I kind of think it’s evolution not catching up.
The most important thing to know, I think, are what are your biggest challenges. Now, you probably could come up with some off the top of your head, but their might be some that you’re not even really aware of until you’re in them. So I think one way to get at that is to really pay attention to your body: what’s happening in the moments when you tend to slouch and wrap yourself up? What’s happening when you start to breathe shallowly and quickly? What’s happening when you start to sweat? What are the things that are happening in the situation at those moments when you’re showing physical signs of stress and anxiety and depression and powerlessness? So once you’ve identified what’s happening in the situation when those things happen, you start to become much more attuned to those bodily cues. And so when they happen in the future you can course correct earlier.