All week I’ve been on the whole of you, mind and body as one instrument. This is where it all points.
Last week I promised you the one edge almost nobody trains. Here it is. The tightest grip in the room is the one that misses.
I found that out holding a shotgun.
Some friends had organised a shooting day, the way other groups organise golf. Magnums, clay pigeons launching at angles I hadn’t anticipated, and me, a woman who had never held a weapon in her life.
I watched the others go first. Good people, some of them experienced. Lift, aim, fire, miss. Or clip the edge. Every one of them doing the same thing without knowing it. Bracing for the recoil. Gripping harder. Pushing at the outcome, which is precisely what ruins the shot.
When my turn came I did what I do before anything that asks something of me. I breathed. I found my ground. I brought my attention into my body and out of the story my mind was writing about whether I’d embarrass myself.
The weapon is cold and heavy and built for force, and it asked me for the opposite. A quiet exhale. A soft jaw. Loose shoulders. Gentle hands. The surrender of any need to make something happen.
So I stopped trying to control the outcome and started simply being present in the second before the trigger. I didn’t pull it. I caressed it.
Bullseye.
I’m not telling you this because I’m a good shot. I’m telling you because every room you walk into runs the same test, and most of us fail it by trying harder.
· · ·
Holding is not control
Presence is not intensity. It isn’t the hard eye contact, or the power pause you rehearsed in the mirror, or the voice dropped half an octave because somebody on a course told you gravitas lives down there. A room can smell a performance from the back row.
That is the mistake I have watched sold in leadership programs for two decades. We train the outside of it. The posture. The pause. The slow walk to the front. All of it is grip.
Control is what you press on from the outside. A person managing their face while the inside is in full alarm. Everyone in the room can feel it and nobody can name it, so they call it tension and go home tired.
Holding is a different thing. It is what happens when the container is bigger than what it is being asked to hold. The pressure lands, and you are simply wider than it.
One is performed. The other is structural.
That is why the most magnetic person in the room is rarely the loudest. Volume is grip. Your people know which one you’re running before you’ve finished saying hello.
· · ·
What it looks like in a boardroom
A client I’ll call Andrea is the one I reach for when somebody tells me presence is a personality you are either born with or you are not. Fifty-six. Thirty years of leadership behind her. Formidable by any measure you would apply from the outside.
I asked what she felt in her body walking into the boardroom.
She said, “I feel like I’m nine years old.”
She wasn’t in that room. She was somewhere much older and much smaller, chairing a board meeting from there.
The first sign anything had shifted was tiny. She walked in one morning and the tightening in her chest didn’t arrive. From that fractionally steadier place she said the thing she had been deferring for six months. Plainly. No apology, none of the armour.
Afterwards she told me it felt like the first time she had actually been in that room.
You already know the difference. You have sat across from both.
· · ·
This week
Pick the moment you’ll most want to grip. The negotiation. The number. The conversation you’ve been rehearsing in the shower. When it lands, catch the grip and soften one thing. The jaw. The shoulders. The hands. Then stay.
That is why I walk barefoot on grass and sand, why I eat with my hands, why I get in the ocean. People read it as a lifestyle. It’s rehearsal.
With Love, Pauline
PS. The instructor asked afterwards whether I would train for sniper competition. I have a full life and no interest in finding out what I am capable of in a combat zone. But he had spotted the thing I want you to see. Every person on that range wanted the shot more than I did. Andrea wanted that boardroom for thirty years. She got it the morning she stopped gripping it.
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
