Transcripts

Richard Strozzi-Heckler, author of the book The Leadership Dojo, says in order to be perceived as credible you have to appear credible.

So we have this distinction we call being centered and it means this: you drop your breath down to the abdomen. Because when you're uncomfortable and you're not sure of yourself, you're anxious. One of the things that happens is your breath will rise and it will quicken. So, you relax yourself, relax your eyes, let your jaw go, let your shoulders drop, let the stomach relax. If you do that, it is clinically impossibly to be anxious. What anxiety is, the breath quickens and rises, the body goes into low grade chronic contraction and you run this obsessive circularity of thoughts.

And those circular thoughts tend to be things like…

How am I going to do? What are they going to think of me? I'm not prepared? All kinds of that self-talk that leads to a downward spiral of self-doubt and not knowing and uncertainty.

It takes practice to get good at this but Richard says it does work.

So with this whole notion of centering is that you find as many opportunities as you can to produce that centered presence. So that when you're in the fire of things, what you will do is you will have trained yourself to come back to centered.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.