How to Strengthen Your Executive Presence

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: If you want to use neuroscience to strengthen your executive presence and lead with calm, confident impact, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I'm Kelly Callahan-Poe, and today's episode is called Executive Presence with Dr. Lizette Warner. Lizette is a Smart Rewiring Scientist and executive coach who helps leaders beat burnout, make better decisions, and accelerate their careers using neuroscience. She's the COO at Trust and Leadership and author of Power, Poise, and Presence. Welcome, Lizette.

Dr. Lizette Warner: Thanks for having me, Kelly.

Kelly: I am so excited to pick your brain. Your background is biomedical science. Can you tell us how this background really led you to learn about the secrets of executive presence based on neuroscience?

Dr. Warner: This certainly wasn't where I started out. It wasn't where I thought this would take me, a degree in biomedical engineering. I was very systems-focused, and I was so fascinated by the human system. And what I found fascinating when, after I got my degree, I entered leadership, I found that human leadership was just another biological system.

It's electrical, it's chemical, it's behavioral. I was doing a lot of work with biomarkers in my career. And when I became chief science officer, I saw brilliant people whose brains were misfiring under pressure, not because they lacked any skill. And it was my own nervous system that was misfiring under pressure.

People ask me a lot of times, "My gosh, how are you so calm when you're speaking to a room full of people?" And I was like, it wasn't always so, right? I remember being in front of a group of other PhDs and just psyching myself out—"they're going to be judging me, how can I be speaking to all of these people?" My nervous system wasn't regulated.

That is what drew me into neuroscience and neuroscience-based coaching. It's helping leaders learn to self-regulate their own nervous system so that they can lead with clarity, with confidence, and with connection. Because the people whose nervous systems are the most regulated—they're the ones whose leadership is admired.

We talk about executive presence, but it's really your nervous system regulation. When you get a chaotic leader who comes into a room, all of sudden the entire room is just chaos. People are regulating to your nervous system. So we as leaders need to understand that we need to self-regulate our own nervous systems because executive presence—it's not about posture, it's not about polish, it's about your nervous system being in sync with your leadership identity.

Kelly: You've cleverly branded this the Smart Rewiring Method. What are the stages or steps of smart rewiring that leaders can start practicing today?

Dr. Warner: Smart Rewiring is the science-based framework that we developed to help leaders literally retrain their brains for sustainable success. It has three different stages.

The first is Recognize. This is mapping out your own system, understanding what was going on with you. Afterwards we tend to catastrophize—"I did this, this was horrible, this was awful." But had I taken a moment to just ask myself, "Lizette, what was going on?" I might have been able to answer, "I was really nervous, I had butterflies in my stomach, I had these thoughts in my head of what are people thinking about me." So that's the first step—recognize your own triggers, how are you showing up.

The second is Regulate. You use micro-practices to bring your nervous system back into balance. For me, it could have been breathwork—though breathwork doesn't work with everyone. It could have been grounding, just putting my feet on the ground and feeling my posture. It could also be naming the emotion. Research has shown when we are able to accurately name the emotion, we can halt that emotion from cascading.

For example, I could have labeled it "wow, you're excited." Excitement and nervous—it's the same energy, the same pathways in the brain. So I got into the habit of telling myself, "You're just so excited to speak to this team. You're so excited to be here."

The third step is Rewire—replace those neural pathways with intentional habits. That takes time. Research shows it takes anywhere from six months to nine months for us to carve new neural pathways in our brains. We can learn something really quick in a podcast or training, but to actually put it into practice is going to take time.

Kelly: What are the steps for rewiring?

Dr. Warner: Rewiring takes the first step—recognize. You've got to recognize what happens when you're in stress response. Another part of recognizing is using assessments. I have an Oura ring. We advise leaders to have some way to measure what's going on. I use it with my leaders to go back in their day and try different experiments for dealing with their stress.

For me, when I'm speaking in front of any audience, my nervous system gets nervous even though I may not look like it. I got into the habit of telling myself, "Lizette, you're excited." With my Oura ring, I started to track when I was speaking in front of audiences, and my stress went from being very high to now I'm engaged or relaxed even when I'm speaking—just because I re-labeled that emotion from nervous to excited.

Another piece of rewiring is accountability. Coaches can do that for clients, or a buddy in your network could hold you accountable. And then feedback—did it work? Did it not work? If it didn't work, that's great—that's more data. Then I could try something else.

Kelly: On your website, you offer a Smart Rewiring Assessment. I took it and my results are "balanced but with growth areas." Can you tell us about this assessment and how we can use it as a tool?

Dr. Warner: I love assessments. The problem sometimes is—and I haven't told this story yet—I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's. It's an autoimmune disease with low thyroid. But I was diagnosed three to five years after I went to the doctor. They diagnosed low thyroid, put me on medicine, but I still wasn't feeling right.

A few years later, I got additional testing through a different organization. Lo and behold, they said, "You actually have Hashimoto's, where your antibodies start attacking your own thyroid." The assessments are good, but it's not just one assessment—it's a number of assessments that gives you a really clear picture.

The Smart Rewiring assessment is a conglomeration of several of our assessments. We tell people where they are and give some growth edges where they can start to practice. It's good to sometimes have an outside assessment from a certain point of view.

Kelly: A lot of us, especially women, suffer from burnout. You say burnout isn't a flaw, it's a system failure. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Warner: Oftentimes people think of burnout as almost a weakness. Here's how I define burnout: Burnout is when you've been brilliant for too long.

Kelly: I love that. That's amazing. I've never thought of it like that.

Dr. Warner: It's us just trying to be brilliant for too long. I always give the example of a laptop. My laptop by Friday is running so slow. I'm aggravated and annoyed when in reality what it needs is to be rebooted. It's been storing up cache. It needs to delete and clear out space.

That's what happens with us. We think we can continue to be brilliant without taking a break. We're best in the morning because we just slept all night. But you can be your best all day long. Instead of overclocking your body on stress hormones, figure out what you need to do so you can remain brilliant all day. Maybe it's not a whole system reboot, but some sort of system refresh.

Kelly: That makes a lot of sense. I'm a bit of a perfectionist myself. When you suffer from perfectionism, you feel like you operate at 100% all the time. The problem is most people can't operate at 100%, 100% of the time. You need those moments of breaks and timeouts.

Dr. Warner: Because if you don't reset, the hard and ugly truth is your body will reset. It will force you to take a break. You'll have some sort of disease. This is where disease starts cropping up.

We had a coach once sharing how when she had her exec job, she worked in a corner office, elevated to VP very early in her career. The person who had been VP prior—everyone came to their office, they had all the answers. So she stepped into that role feeling like "I have to have all the answers."

She ended up developing TMJ—locked jaw. I asked her to go back and think, what might your body have been telling you? It was like a light bulb—it was telling her not to speak. You don't have to answer a question you don't know. Her body ended up locking her jaw. She still to this day is working through it. Your body will pipe up, it'll speak. And we don't want that. We want people to live healthy, to not live in burnout. What are your reset protocols? Athletes have them. What are ours?

Kelly: Is there one science-backed action that someone can take to start rewiring themselves, something that's not necessarily going to take six to eight months?

Dr. Warner: It's your breath, but it's not box breathing where you breathe in four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. What I love about this one is that the hard part people have with breathing exercises is staying with it long enough if you're in burnout, if you're a perfectionist, you're always on the go.

It's a progressive breathing. Inhale for three, exhale for three. Inhale for four, exhale for four. Inhale for five, exhale for five. Inhale for six, exhale for six. It's ever-changing so you can stay with it. It stimulates your mind and your body so you can reset yourself. You can use it before a meeting, before literally anything. It shifts your brain from stress to strategic thinking.

Kelly: I will try that. I appreciate your insights today, Lizette. We will provide your contact and a link for the Smart Rewiring Assessment at twomarketingmoms.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.