Some of the most capable people I work with are the ones you would never pick out of a room. Deep expertise, years of hard-won judgment, and almost no way for anyone else to see it. The talent is real. It just isn’t legible. And talent that can’t be seen doesn’t compound. It stalls.
For a long time I thought the fix for that was confidence. Speak up, take more space, back yourself. I was wrong. The fix has almost nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with the person on the other side of the table.
I had this sharpened in a recent conversation with Maz Farrelly, who spent thirty years producing the biggest names in television and has thought about how people are perceived more carefully than almost anyone I have met. One line of hers has stuck with me. Try not to sell. Try to be bought.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Maz puts a single question to the executives she works with. What do you know that they don’t know they’ll give you money for?
It looks simple. It isn’t. It moves you from what you are good at, which is about you, to what someone else would actually pay for, which is about them. Most leaders can talk fluently about the first and go quiet on the second.
I see the same pattern in elite sport. The athletes who build long careers are not always the most gifted. They are the ones who understand exactly what they offer a team and make it impossible to overlook. The gifted ones who never quite land are usually not short on talent. They are short on legibility. Nobody around them can say, in one clean sentence, what they are for.
Selling is pushing your value at people until they relent. Being bought is making yourself so obviously useful that they come to you. One feels like effort. The other feels like gravity. The second is the one worth building.
Presence Is Not a Volume Problem
We tend to talk about executive presence as if it were charisma, or confidence, or the willingness to dominate a room. In my experience it is none of those. The leaders who carry real presence are usually not the loudest. They are the clearest.
Maz has a phrase I keep borrowing: your white coat. Walk into a hospital and see someone in a white coat and you extend trust before a word is spoken, because the signal has already done the work. Her question to leaders is blunt. What is the signal that marks you as the specialist, and are you actually showing it, or are you assuming people can see it?
Most senior leaders assume. They earned the expertise, so they expect it to be obvious. It rarely is. Presence is not about turning the volume up. It is about making the signal unmistakable.
There is a discipline underneath this that sits uncomfortably with a lot of Australians, because it looks like self-promotion. When people say your name, what is the sentence that comes next? Here is the catch. They can only say that line if you gave it to them first, and said it often enough that it stuck. That is not ego. It is how positioning works. Reputations travel on repetition.
The Piece I Had Been Missing
I walked into the conversation with my own model. I have long described executive presence as four things: your experience, your personal style, your standards (not just what you accept but what you refuse to accept), and your relationships.
Maz listened, and added the piece I had left out. The audience.
That reframe has stayed with me because my model was entirely inward. Here is who you are, here is what you carry. Useful, but incomplete. The leaders who read a room well do the opposite. They start with who is in front of them and work backwards. The same expertise lands differently depending on who is watching, so they shape how they show it to the people in the room, not to themselves.
Three Questions That Build Presence
Presence is not something you are born with. It is something you build, the same way you build any skill, by working on it deliberately. Here is where I would start. Three questions, and a move to make with each.
1. What do you know that the people you serve don’t know they’ll pay for? Write the answer as one plain sentence, from their side of the table, not yours. Not your title, not your years of experience. The specific value they would hand you money for. If you cannot say it simply, your audience cannot see it at all.
2. What is your white coat, and are you showing it? Decide the one signal that marks you as the specialist, then make it visible in how you speak, what you lead with, and where you spend your attention. Do not assume good work announces itself. It does not.
3. If someone described you in one sentence, is it the one you would choose? If it is not, you have left other people to write it for you. Choose the sentence, then say it out loud, in meetings, in introductions, in the way you frame your work, until other people start saying it back.
Good work does not speak for itself. It never has. The leaders who carry real presence know exactly what they offer, they know who they are offering it to, and they have made both impossible to miss.
Stop selling yourself. Make yourself worth being bought.
If this is the gap in your team, where capable people are not being seen for what they actually bring, this is the kind of work we do. Performance Intelligence helps leaders build the habits that make presence something you carry, not something you perform.
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About the Author
Andrew May is a high performance expert, keynote speaker, and founder of Performance Intelligence. Over two decades he has worked with senior leaders, executive teams, and elite athletes across Australia and internationally to build the habits, systems, and mental skills that sustain high performance over time. He is the author of MatchFit and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
