Executive presence comes up OFTEN in my conversations, and mostly with this question: How do I get more of it?

While you can argue about the exact attributes that lead to presence, there's one that hardly ever gets mentioned and I believe may have the biggest impact of them all:

Your nervous system.

In my last blog post, talked about how floored I was to find out you could negotiate the price of tires and how to figure out what you want when you don't know what the possibilities are.

I didn't, however, talk about the negotiation approach of the man who bought the tires.

It floored me just as much as the realization that you could negotiate on the price of tires at all.

In today’s blog, we’re answering one single question:

How do you respond to ambiguous feedback?

You know it...that constructive feedback that leaves you feeling bad AND with zero clue what to do with it.

Isn't it amazing when your dreams give you an exact message?

Last week mine gave me a reminder -- and it was one I knew I had to share with you.

So much so that I literally got out of bed and immediately wrote down almost all of this email!

In the dream, I was at a cabin in the summer and a big group of us was split into two teams to do a fun outdoor Olympics competition.

Can you set boundaries and still be seen as a team player and high performer? YES.

In fact, I've seen time and time again that if you set and communicate boundaries clearly, people are most often fine with it.

Even more interesting....I've seen MANY example of people being seen as a HIGHER performer after they set boundaries because they have the time and energy to focus on what's most important - and those are the things that often get recognized and rewarded!

How can you respond when you get interrupted? Take it back!

Women are 2-3 times as likely to get interrupted and that is FRUSTRATING - or maybe a few steps past frustrating to angering.

Watch the video for two phrases I've found to be particularly helpful to redirect the conversation back to what you were saying so you can get heard!

I recently presented my keynote at a large conference for women in Engineering. I opened my keynote — Discover Your Authentic Voice - And How To Use It To Create Change — with a story about the feedback I received in my corporate career that I was too direct. Because of that feedback, I started to hold back the bold, fiery side of me. I questioned my voice and began to speak more cautiously. Not thoughtfully, cautiously.Which begs the question -- should I have ever listened to that feedback in the first place?!?

I speak at events for mostly women through employee resource networks and conferences. As you might imagine, over the years I've heard A LOT of stories of the bias that women experience in their day-to-day lives. So I decided to put those stories into a blog. It's the ten most common experiences of bias I've heard from women. I decided to share this list of the bias women experience to build awareness and start conversations.

My keynote on Imposter Syndrome - And What To Do About It is my most popular speaking topic. It's real and legitimate and a ton of people experience it, including me. But I think it's incomplete. I see another, potentially even bigger, issue at play: The discomfort with taking up space.