Episode 93: Why Your Executive Presence Falls Apart Under Pressure

Episode Summary 

Most leaders think executive presence is about confidence, control, and having the right answers. It’s not.

In this episode, Coach Mo and Shaun Mader break down the real reason your executive presence drops under pressure—and it has nothing to do with how you “look” as a leader. It’s the internal battle: overthinking, decision fatigue, imposter syndrome, and the pressure to carry everything alone.

You’ll learn why leaders become the bottleneck, how reactive leadership kills team performance, and the simple shift that restores clarity in real time. This conversation connects directly to the S.W.A.G.™ framework and reveals how presence is built from the inside out—not through tactics, but through self-awareness and intentional pause.

If you’ve ever felt “off” in key moments, this episode will show you exactly why—and how to reset.

Key Takeaways

• You Became the Bottleneck Without Realizing It
  High performers get promoted, then default back to doing instead of leading—creating burnout and overload. 
• Executive Presence Drops When You Stay in React Mode
  Constant firefighting kills clarity, confidence, and trust across your team. 
• The Pause Is the Power Move
  Presence isn’t control—it’s your ability to slow down, reset, and respond intentionally in real time. 
• Powerful Questions > Having All the Answers
  Leaders who ask better questions activate their team’s thinking and reduce decision fatigue. 
• Your Inner State Sets the Team Standard
  Your energy, awareness, and habits silently train your team on how to operate.

Transcript

Meet Sean Mader In Brooklyn

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the last stick of my podcast. We're highlighted to start performing and start transforming. I'm coaching out. Found on the inner leader and creator of the twin cleaner. And when I'm here, including your mindset, challenge your limits, and transfer into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Swann Coaching. So let's get your reds in. Welcome to another episode of the Let's Think About It podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo. And I'm here with another amazing guest. And his name is Sean Mater. Sean, what's good, man? What's good? Great to be here, Mo. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Where are you checking in from? I'm in Brooklyn, New York. Okay. Yeah. Tell us who you are, what you do, and the type of value that you bring. Okay.

Film Sets As Leadership Bootcamp

The Pivot From Pain To Purpose

SPEAKER_02 1:25

My name is Sean Mader, as I'm in Brooklyn, New York. I work with leadership and teams. And what we work on primarily is how to get leaders performing better as well as the teams so that they're building the best conditions for high performance, but also developing the quality of the work that they're dealing with day to day. I did just allude to it. I originally moved to New York to pursue film, and that was my first crash course in leadership, was when I started running film sets of 70, 80, 100 people. And under that kind of situation those set of circumstances, I was a prime candidate for burnout. And I was good at it. But doing it in that kind of environment where you're burning$50,000 an hour or more, and every decision has huge implications on the teams around you was a really great training ground. But it was sometime after that where I really made leadership and teams and strategy for companies more of a focus. But those were the early training days. And so from that to dealing with my own health issues with chronic pain and migraines to periods of time of living like a monk in India, to tons of modalities and leading large transformational leadership programs before officially making a career pivot.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

So what caused the pivot? Was it the burnout that you personally experienced and you wanted to teach people? But how did you make that pivot into getting into leadership and doing what you do for leaders?

Why Companies Need Teamware Now

SPEAKER_02 2:57

Yeah, I feel like anybody who ends up in this area has an unconventional story, right? Very few people took a bunch of courses and set out to do this. So it was definitely impacted by my personal history with chronic pain and migraines and some of the things I did where I personally healed. But what I got out of leading these large transformational leadership programs was seeing a paradigm of leadership across demographic, across race, across socioeconomic level, where people came alive when they discovered the quality of their life is directly tied to improving the quality of life of those around them. And when people discovered their capacity to do that, a lot of their personal problems went away. And what happened was I would have a lot of executives and CEOs in my programs. And at the time, I was a little curious as to why they were asking me to help them out in their companies, if it was financial services or insurance. I didn't think I had any qualifications to consult for them on that. But once I got inside the doors, I realized, oh, these are actually fundamentally human system issues, how people communicate, how people organize, how people even talk about their work, hold each other accountable. And that part I realized I was pretty good at. So some of the business education came along the way. And now we've been really focused on an industry agnostic approach to developing leaders and teams called teamware, that we think is even more necessary now as the conditions out there are changing so fast. Burnout is still a real top issue for a lot of people, turnover in companies. So we really look at how do you get leaders directly engaging people so that their best efforts are being put to best use and that the company is getting the best out of each of their employees.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

So what exactly does teamware do to help leaders re-engage with their staff and employees?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, we found that coaching people had some impact, obviously, but that it's really hard to scale that. On the flip side, we saw a lot of leadership programs where I love leading them, I find them very enjoyable, but we saw a fall off a few weeks after when people go back out into their teams where a lot of their ambitions return back to baseline. What we realized is there wasn't really a system out there to give the leader a systematic way to engage their team in the most important aspects of team development and also how the quality of their day-to-day work, and that the team wasn't being brought along on the journey. So what we developed was a practice. And uh teamware is just a play on the words that if you had your hardware and your software systems that were breaking down the way our people sometimes break down, it would be a five-alarm fire. But because humans are messy and that we oftentimes assume that you can't do anything about that, we tend to avoid that layer. So teamware was developed as a way to directly address that layer. And we've just seen really remarkable results. And just take a real personal point of pride in looking at people in their life and their work. We spend so much time there. It shouldn't be miserable. People want to use their time and their efforts and feel like it's being put to good use. And so that's at the core of what we do.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Give me some testimonials. Because on this show, we my audience a lot are burnt out, dealing with maybe some decision fatigue, yeah, being a high performer, a high achiever, right? Carrying the weight for so many other people. But in time, you're leaking these this energy. And I call them energy leaks. And the energy leaks come from, like I mentioned earlier, decision fatigue, overthinking, overfunctioning, the inner critic, that punk ass inner critic, by the way. Imposter syndrome, all of that creates this draining type feeling in certain moments that affects executive presence. How did specifically, when you talk about teamware, what is it that you guys do? Is there a formula that you use or approach to it's not a formula, but it is a practice.

Team Flow Architecture And Questions

SPEAKER_02 7:21

And I think you've put it really well that all of these symptoms become balled up together and compounding. You know, you talked about burnout, you're talking about decision fatigue, imposter syndrome, people being promoted into positions where, you know, what made you good at your previous job doesn't necessarily make you good at getting performance out of other people. And so a situation right there where you get promoted because you were good at a job, and then you get into this new position where you're supposed to be getting performance out of other people. That previous skill set is bound to have some breakdowns. But what we do when we're not being effective is we default back to whatever we were good at. So what you find is a lot of leaders struggling, they feel burned out, they've become the bottleneck, not because they really wanted to, but it just happened that way. And then they're dealing with all of this compounding effect, and they're also trying to control outcomes, get performance out of people, and nobody ever really gave them a systematic way to do that. Hence the energy leaks, hence the lack of executive presence when you're not feeling very confident, you're feeling overloaded, burned out, of course, right? So I would say that sense of all of those conditions is really at play for a lot of people. So the way we take our approach with teamware is actually a process called team flow architecture. So these are all how do you actually execute on this idea of teamware? How do you build it amongst your team? How do you create the conditions for other people to give their best performance? And what we found was a practice between the leader and the team of really strategically designed questions over time as a practice. So one of those big topics you raised is that the leader feels like they have to hold it all. I've got to hold all the decision making, people are constantly coming back to me. I don't know if I can hold it all. We train them to practice something that we call the cognitive handoff. And it's a recognition that I cannot hold it all. But when I start to ask people questions and I direct the team's attention to different topics, I suddenly activate their brain over there to do the critical thinking, to have them consider how they see a situation. Some of the questions we might ask in the beginning would be where do you find your time spending a lot of time and energy that you feel is wasted or isn't productive?

unknown 9:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

You'd want to start to train your employees to look out at their environment as to wait, what's the friction here that we're dealing with? And is there something we can do about it? Yeah. So just in that little bit right there, you start to realize wait a second, this condition of being the bottleneck and holding all the thinking is causing a lot of these other symptoms. If I start to master asking questions and create a practice with my team, I'm not only going to start to train their attention. We're in a very attention-fragmented setting right now, where between digital devices and other stressors. So these questions galvanize people's attention around these key themes that they might not be considering on a day-to-day basis. And then it prompts new conversations. So some of them might just be weekly alignment, like a questionnaire that goes in on Monday. What are your top priorities this week? What challenges do you foresee in being successful? And what support can I give you?

Cognitive Handoff To End Bottlenecks

SPEAKER_01 10:59

I mean, ask you this though, in real time, because what you're saying makes sense, being intentional and all of that. But in real time, when a person is triggered and they're accustomed to being in react mode, yeah, to put out the fire, whatever that looks like. But how does teamware help them in real time understand the trigger and act accordingly, respond accordingly?

SPEAKER_02 11:28

What's that method looks like? Yeah, so that's a really great question. On one hand, teamware is built to be the structure that would get you out of that constant reactive mode, right? Because if you're in constant reactive mode, we can give a lot of coaching around how I'm sorry, let me back up. This is actually where teamwork came from, is that we realized a lot of our coaching was devolving into simply coaching leaders to be better at responding to crisis. But that's not actually the condition that they should stay in. So we created that as a structure to alleviate that pressure, to change the nature of the conversations. But to your point, stuff is gonna still pop up anyway, right? People get triggered, people there's disagreements, there's differing views on things. Once we start working with people and we give them a structure, then we can give them a little more fine-tuned coaching on those moments where they don't feel like they're at in a constant state of reactivity. And in that, I think you and I have spoken about this a little bit. One big approach is teaching people the difference between when their body is in survival mode, or fight or flight, as you might call it, and being able to tap into the parasympathetic nervous system. We could go down the whole, there's a whole bunch of accesses and ways to do that. I don't know if you want to go into it. Look at it from the other side of it.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

You're the employee and your boss or supervisor or management, doesn't matter. And they come in the room and their executive presence is off. What I mean by that is you can just feel that they're unsure, overthinking in the moments and things like that, right? How does one learn to shift that and become aware that they're carrying that type of energy and in key moments?

Triggers In Real Time And Regulation

Executive Presence Means Being Present

SPEAKER_02 13:26

You kind of set it up really interestingly because you can see in that scenario, this situation is going to look very different if you're the leader walking in versus the employee observing the leader and having to interact with them, right? And oftentimes we're coaching the executive, we can be straight about that, right? And a lot of the work we do is just giving that leader that pause, like training them just to check in and take that breath. Yeah. And one of the most simple things is really checking in with your breath. If my breath is shallow, if I'm speaking from kind of up here in my throat and them noticing that I'm speaking fast, yeah, or if you and I are speaking and I'm jumping and kind of cutting you off, yeah. From an energetic level, you can kind of feel like, oh, it's kind of rising up here. I'm trying to move forward, I'm trying to handle something, and just taking that pause, letting things for anybody who doesn't think energy and thinks that's a little woo-woo, just imagine things dropping down in your body, expanding the scope of your breath. You can do a little bit of light. Can I feel my fingertips? Can I actually put my attention there? And then that first that just gets the body cue. Hey, I can actually now check in a little bit. And I think the other conversation we were talking about is we throw this term around authenticity a lot. And of course, it's a great term, it's an ideal. We all yeah, be authentic, but what does that actually mean? And for a lot of people, what they miss is that the only way you can be authentic is to really get authentic about where you're inauthentic. Like that imposter syndrome you talk about. It's like, how many people are going into a room trying to act like their TV idea of what it looks like to be a boss when really they're just trying to keep up, but they don't even take a moment to admit that to themselves.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

I like to correlate this with sports, talking about executive presence. Stay on that because everything that you said is spot on. And I correlate it, let's just say on a basketball court, when you're watching a game, and then you can just feel the momentum swing within the game. And typically what happens is there's different reasons why momentum swings, but when a player's confidence becomes shot, it's like a downhill ball that you can't stop, right? And that's what happens with executive presence sometimes, where we go into a meeting and we get crushed, and now all of a sudden we're carrying the this doubt, or we're taking on a new role and we're trying to overprove ourselves because of the fear of failure. And you're constantly showing up, fighting to please the ego and the inner critic because it's telling you you got to work harder, you got to work harder, you got to do more, you got to do more. And you can't trust anybody right now because you have to prove that you're right, you have to prove your worth in this role. And so there's a lot of micromanaging in these moments that's widening the gap around trust. Right. Oh, it makes it so much worse. It makes it so much worse, right? And so you're fighting that, and it's an internal battle that you're fighting, and it goes back to what you said. Just pause, take a deep breath, re-examine the climate, because that's what athletes do, right? When stuff hits the fan, and even times when confidence is shot and they got to go to that free throw line, just take a deep breath.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

It's interesting, it's such a great analogy, and it's the free throw line is perfect because I I think in visual metaphors, so for anybody listening, if this helps, you can be interacting with the basket, or you can be interacting with your thoughts. I need to make this basket. And so, like you're my boss and I'm looking at you in the face, and I feel like either maybe I screwed up, or I just want to do right by you. I'm new in this position and I want to impress you. I don't want you to judge me. I could be looking you dead in the eyes, but never hearing or seeing you. Because I'm engaged in the conversation of I gotta impress this guy, I gotta do this, don't do this. Oh my God, he's gonna find out I did this. And you got to see that as a barrier between you and reality. Because in reality, you're out here. Most of us are going through life unconscious that we are engaged in a whole bunch of thoughts that are almost like that uh what was the Charlie Brown character with the little cloud over its head? Oh, yeah, yeah. We're sitting there giving commentary on the cloud, and we miss what's going on out here. And to your point of executive presence, I think we get that a little bit balled up sometimes, where we think it's about puffing our chest and looking right and this projection of a of an image. Yeah, that all comes from TV, that all comes from watching courtroom dramas and whatever. But real executive presence is being present. Come on, tune into this crowd and find out what they're actually dealing with and not run away from it. You could just say, Hey, let's talk about this really hard thing. I don't even have an answer to it. And that could be more executive presence than any well-written speech delivered from a pulpit.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

But what's your operating system so that you can correlate to being in executive presence? That's the question. Because most of us are just an autopilot and we're showing up, we got to put out this fire, gotta prove this. What's your operating framework and how you're showing up in executive presence? And that's the key. And I don't think most don't really think about that. And for me, I love what you described about Teamswear and what you guys do there, and it kind of mirrors swag, self-awareness, white power, aligned action, and grit. I love it because it's really simple. It's so simple, bro. Because when that imposter syndrome shows up, and it does show up in all of us, in one aspect of our lives, one way or another, it shows up in a moment when we're not as confident. And you feel that though. You feel it. You feel doubtful. Maybe you feel worrisome about a particular decision that you anticipate that's going to happen. And sometimes that does naturally affect our executive presence in that moment. 100%.

SWAG And Inside Out Confidence

SPEAKER_02 20:25

You know what I mean? And I was thinking about it with SWAT. So I was at somebody else's workshop, and I feel like this is like the buckets that I would put this in. We talk about teamware, team flow architecture. That's a practice and a structure to get people out of constantly being in reactive mode, right? And then what you're talking about with swag is why I love it so much is that you're drawing the attention now that you can get a little freedom from just constantly being being under assault and holding it, then you're talking about self-mastery. And self-mastery is developing the muscle for turning the attention inward, which is really challenging for people. And so I I have to share, I didn't tell you this before. I went to a workshop that somebody else was putting on called owning the boardroom. And I was very interested to see somebody else facilitate. And they were nice, they were, they did, but what they were doing was here's the angle you hold your arms. This is how you hold your head. And she gave about 30 or 40 tips and tricks that if I was actually trying to be powerful and own the boardroom, I would be so in my head trying to remember all these tips and tricks that it would make me seem way less present and give me way less presence. So, yeah, there's some good tips and tricks in there, but what you're getting at is from the inside out with swag, like getting people to actually go inward. And when they when you get that, oh, the outward stuff becomes much more inconsequential.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Because think about it when your swag is off or your

SPEAKER_02 22:00

confidence is shot when you're hesitant when you're overthinking when you're over functioning whatever confidence yeah it doesn't feel good no you feel the nervousness you feel the hesitation and swag is the trigger that lets you know damn i'm off right now i'm off something's off my swag is off how do i get back on maybe i have a thought what's important right now that i need to do what's one action i can take right now that can move me out of this nervousness feeling that i may have how true is what my ego telling me how true is it how true is it lying what is the inner critic really saying right now do I have the emotional stamina to withstand this difficult moment that I'm in right now so I can continue to press forward see that's swag and that's how you re-enter to get it back that's and that's what it's so funny with with swag I think some people when they hear that euphemistically they think it's just about the clothing and the or the external right but anybody who's seen somebody they might look the part but they come off as still wildly insecure they know that you can have whatever external adornment you want you can have the most expensive this or that but unless your inner world unless you become like you say can I actually get in there and do some real work on myself can I have some hard conversations with myself about what's actually going on in there now of course it's where a coach comes in really handy to help you navigate that but that inner work to me is the most fundamental part of all this if you're going to be a leader if you're gonna have any power if you're gonna be able to sleep at night and not be a crazy person trying to be in that position.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

I also believe that it mirrors what you do the work that you do and how you help leaders because it all starts with self-awareness always starts there right you have to be able to lead self first before you can lead others.

A Client Story That Changed Culture

SPEAKER_02 24:26

Even to recognize that this is I don't you've had this happen too where you could have a leader who's yeah they're really great they are but they're struggling in some area and it might never occur to them that the people around them might be intimidated by them or just because of the rank and the role that they have that people are taking all of their cues from them. And it's really have a high level of empathy for leaders who have a real sense of duty and responsibility and they miss the forest for the trees they can't see that wait a second I'm setting the tone for this entire group here if my integrity's out and I'm not dealing with my stuff they're gonna take the cue that's okay here or people talk about people not showing up for meetings on time but the leader's always 10 minutes late and they actually sometimes don't realize that wait a second everybody's taking their cue from me and that can be a real big burden if you're not doing that inner work like you're talking about but it becomes the keys of the kingdom when you see that wait a second I have a lot more power here than I realize when I see that my inner game is the access to wielding it. That's a success story of any client that you've worked with and you help them make that shift. I love that so I told you with Team Flow architecture we put out these structured questions we create a practice between the leader and the team right sometimes people could complain hey you're asking that question multiple times in a row it's like yeah we know we're guiding your attention there as a practice but one client I was working with they were coming out of a bankruptcy and they had terms of a bankruptcy that was the staff couldn't do certain things they could do other things but at this point when we started the project I was talking to the executive about what's going on with the team and what's top of mind. He said we're coming out of this bankruptcy everybody's been really stressed working really hard and I haven't had time to really check in with them. So I said don't worry about it. We'll put that in as we'll make some questions around that. In the first week we started this one of the questions was just that we've been through a really challenging time. You've all been working really hard I really appreciate it. I want to check in on how you're all doing on a scale of one to 10 how stressed out are you and what could I do to help? The answers start coming back to the leader and somebody put a nine out of 10. And so when I met with him on our call I said what did you do? He said went right to her and I said how did that conversation go? He says first off she said thanks so much for even asking and so he said he said we had this amazing conversation I got to find out she was dealing with some personal stuff as well with childcare and we were able to do something with that. It was an amazing conversation and she was just the fact that we asked the question and that conversation was worth its weight in gold said but then later that day she comes back to me she says I've been thinking about that conversation this morning I have a hunch that I start a lot of that stress all by myself. So first we gave her that insight and that's not where the story ends but even if you just had that you start to talk about what does it mean to really care for your people and just in these ways that open up new conversations and the kind of willingness and loyalty and the way that people would actually work for each other when you show just a basic level of care. Two months later we were on a group call with the team and the same leader dealing with what she was dealing with was just a like a different person. And then she let the cat out of the bag she says actually I didn't ask you and I probably should have asked permission but I've been copying and pasting your questions and giving them to my team that's right and I said she's like first off boy has it changed how we function and boy it's so amazing my people are so engaged they're just they're bringing me ideas and all that so for me to just it hit all the marks of the structural things the interpersonal things people learning by example and discovering their own leadership in inside of it for me that's a triple win.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

You know what's amazing about that story it demonstrates just exactly what we were talking about. Those powerful questions give people the ability to pause and think that's coaching one-on-one and that's why I love this work and I really thank you for bringing it up because when we're talking a lot about executive presence and part of executive presence is the ability to pause and ask open-ended questions whatever that is yeah leaders are so quick that I have to know everything I have to put out the fire I I have to think of the solution and in those moments there's no pause and without the pause you're doing and as you're doing your inner critic that punk ass inner critic by the way it creates this narrative that you can't slow down because if you slow down XYZ whatever that negative narrative is that's all it affects how we show up.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

And I think you you do experience this too where if you actually said what that worst case scenario is, it would probably sound crazy to say it out loud but it wouldn't make sense but the re there is a real experience people will when you really get somebody present to what happens if this doesn't work out I guess it's just gonna be this yeah but your experience is I'm gonna die because it's just it's your when we real you're talking about that it's I need to do this I need to be this oh who's this all about oh oh my attention is here there's no way to be present with people out here oh when you unpack that you people start I think you were talking about this people experience I've got X amount of energy and I'm wasting all of it thinking about me. No one's showing up as present nobody's getting anything from me out here.

Leading Without All The Answers

SPEAKER_01 30:46

But boy that shift that's that can be really challenging for people to let go of some of those hidden fears and I also believe that the powerful questions aren't just for asking other people it's for self too you have to ask yourself these questions and that helps you navigate through the limiting beliefs you may be carrying the assumptions the interpretations the ego the inner critic all of that it's part of helping you to pause. So I'm gonna stop there and as we get ready to wrap up are there any lasting thoughts that you would like to share with the audience and then also share how they can get a hold of you.

Where To Find Sean And Closing CTA

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Sure. I thought you just hit on a great point right there which is contrary to the leader's oftentimes belief that I'm supposed to have the answers I'm supposed to if you model that behavior your people will be paralyzed because they're going to assume that they also need to have all the answers. Yep and they need to have it all together and when they don't they're gonna hide it from you and when a leader can show that vulnerability to be like you know what I've got a hunch here but I'm actually don't know the answer here. What do you think? Oh you model a completely different behavior for your people and you start to communicate hey there are no real answers out here. There are just approaches there are experiments there are lessons to learn and you create that environment as a leader oh suddenly you can get rid of a lot of that extra stress and start to be out here with the people and you will find out that they're very different people when you create that environment that to me is just if you can man if you can master that as a leader you're gonna be having a very prosperous and and satisfying career. So true man how can audience get a hold of you? Yeah LinkedIn's always good it's S-H-A-U-N-M-A-D-E-R our consulting site is friction to flow consulting and if anybody's interested in learning more about teamware we have a guide on our site called get teamware.com and you can download a guide and that'll give you a really good primer on this approach we were talking about. That's great. I appreciate you thank you for your time today. Mo such a pleasure thanks for having me on and I've really enjoyed chatting with him.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

That's another rep in the inner arena you didn't just listen you leveled up your swag self-awareness why power aligned action and grit if this hit home share it subscribe to the Let's Think About It podcast and lock in with me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. Until next time stay aware lead with your why act in alignment and keep your grit stone