Why You Allow Yourself to be Underestimated in the Room

Executive presence Geneva | Leadership confidence | Visibility at work

You've been in the meeting. You had something worth saying. Maybe you said it — and it landed softly, didn't quite register, got picked up five minutes later by someone else and suddenly it was interesting.

Or you held back. Not from nothing — there was something in the room that made you calculate, calibrate, wait. And the moment passed.

This isn't about confidence in the way confidence is usually discussed. You're not lacking self-belief in any global sense. You've made hard calls, led teams, navigated complex stakeholder landscapes. You have a track record.

But visibility — the capacity to occupy space fully, to be seen and felt in a room — that's something different. And for many senior leaders, it's the piece that remains strangely elusive.

The curious thing about executive presence

Executive presence is often treated as a performance skill. Speak more slowly. Make eye contact. Own the room. Stand differently.

And those things can help, tactically. But they tend to work best for people who don't actually need them — people whose fundamental relationship with visibility is already relatively comfortable. For everyone else, the technique sits on top of an unresolved question, and the inauthenticity shows.

Because the real question isn't how do I appear more confident? It's what is it in me that contracts when visibility is on offer?

The injunctions we carry into the boardroom

In transactional analysis, injunctions are early, often preverbal messages we received from our caregivers — not necessarily through words, but through atmosphere, response, and implicit expectation. Some of the most common that surface in leadership contexts are:

- Don't be important — be useful, be supportive, but don't take up too much space

- Don't succeed — stay small enough not to threaten; don't surpass

- Don't be you — the acceptable version of you is the adapted version

- Don't show what you know — visibility invites envy, scrutiny, exposure

These messages don't arrive as statements. They arrive as feelings — a faint unease at the prospect of being noticed, a slight contraction before speaking in a high-stakes meeting, a tendency to qualify your statements before anyone else has the chance to question them.

They are not the truth about you. But because they were absorbed early, before critical thought was available, they operate as if they are.

And here's the subtle, important part: they don't prevent you from succeeding. Many people with strong injunctions against visibility build impressive careers — often precisely by being excellent in ways that keep them slightly behind the scenes. They become the person behind the leader. The indispensable technical expert. The trusted advisor who never quite steps forward.

Until the moment when stepping forward is exactly what's required.

The identity shift that promotion can't provide

There's a particular tension that arises at transitions — from senior practitioner to director, from director to C-suite, from founder to leader of a scaled business.

The title changes. The responsibilities change. But the inner landscape doesn't update automatically. You can find yourself in a significantly more senior role, still carrying the old relationship with visibility — still hedging, still deferring, still performing a quieter version of yourself in the rooms that matter most.

This is why executive presence work that focuses only on behaviour tends to have a limited shelf life. You can train someone to project authority in low-stakes conditions. But under genuine pressure — in a difficult board conversation, in a crisis, in a room where your credibility is being actively assessed — the deeper pattern reasserts itself.

The deeper work is an identity question: do I have permission to be this person?

Not in any external sense. Internally. In your own system.

What's on the other side

I want to say something about the leaders I've worked with who've genuinely shifted in this area, because it's worth being specific.

It's not that they become louder, or more assertive in a conventional sense. In fact, many of them become quieter in certain ways — less driven to fill silences, less concerned with how they're landing in real time. What changes is the quality of their presence: a groundedness that doesn't require external validation to remain stable.

They become people who can be fully in a room without being captured by the room's dynamics. They can disagree without needing to win. They can hold space for others without disappearing in the process. They can be curious rather than defended.

This is the paradox of genuine executive presence: it's not about taking up more space. It's about being so securely yourself that space organises around you.

The cost of waiting

One thing I notice in this work is how often the visibility piece gets deferred. Once I have more credibility. Once I'm in the right role. Once I've delivered this project.

But the injunction doesn't expire with the next achievement. The inner voice that says not yet, not quite, not fully doesn't update based on external validation — because it's not responding to external evidence. It's responding to a felt sense of safety that has to be worked on from the inside.

The leaders who make the most significant shifts are the ones who stop waiting for conditions to be right and start getting curious about what's holding the pattern in place. That curiosity, sustained and supported, is the beginning of something genuinely different.

A reflection

When you're most visible at work — when all the attention is on you — what's the first thing you feel?

Not what you think. What you feel.

If there's any contraction in that — any small withdrawal, any bracing — that's not a weakness. That's information. And it's worth following.

Fleur Jaworski-Richards Executive Coaching

Fleur Jaworski-Richards is an executive coach and psychotherapeutic counsellor based between Chamonix and Geneva. She works with senior leaders in creative, digital, and technology sectors, bringing over 25 years of industry experience together with ICF coaching certification and UKCP psychotherapeutic training.

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