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140 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

Step 3: Compare how others would actually perceive you against how
you would like them to.

Step 4: Don’t sweat the results too much. During one session, a par-
ticipant came up with this list of ideals: collaborative, caring, pas-
sionate, genuine, trustworthy, witty, reliable, honest, and engaging.
These are all powerful descriptors and they indicate what this
woman wanted her presence to be. You might want to write off
such a list as unrealistic, but that doesn’t really matter. What
matters is that she aspired to being viewed this way. Working
toward these ideals enabled her to view herself this way and
boost her confidence, and believe it or not, this subtle shift was
enough to get her more of the positive attention and respect she
was seeking.

Whatever your ideal characteristics are, work on seeing yourself
in those terms and asserting that side of you, and you’ll see a change
in how you react to things and how people react to you.

The Nine Elements of Executive Presence

Many women come to our WILL program to develop their execu-
tive presence. We have a set of nine characteristics that we think
are usually associated with executive presence. They’re listed
below. Size them up and see how many you have and where you
fall short. No one will have all of them without a little work. But
cultivating these traits is something that you can work on with a
career coach or in a leadership-training workshop.