Kate's Nuggets

The Most Compelling Version of You
Episode 12

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Do you know what makes you compelling to other people?

What makes other people want to listen to you, pay attention to you, be around you?

People talk about charisma and leadership presence. Do you know what those are? That's what I'm going to talk about today.
I'm sure you've been in rooms with people where they just catch your attention. You just want to be with them. You want to be around. You want to see what's going on in the space near them.

Most of us discovered this on the playground as kids. There was just a cool kid or group of cool kids, and for those of us who weren't the cool kids, we often came up with misguided interpretations of what made these kids compelling.

In some cases, it was because they were beautiful and we interpreted our lack of being the center of attention as we are not attractive on a physical level.

It may have been that they had great clothes, or they looked like they were having super fun because they were traipsing off with their families to Disneyland and fancy amusement parks and travel and international locations.

If you look around now at adults, this is the attraction of the people with yachts and vacations and tropical islands and jet-setting.

We may think that those outside trappings are what we are attracted to in people, and we might think that having those outside trappings will make us attractive in that way to people, but we all know people who have fancy clothes and the expensive car and awesome vacations, and we still think we don't want to spend any time with them. We find them arrogant and boorish or offensive or just not nice. What's the difference?

The difference is that the people who are really compelling are alive and not self-conscious.

The difference between classy wealth and the nouveau riche is that the nouveau riche are trying to prove to you how important they are because they've got money, and old money is just comfortable being who they are, which happens to include money.

What's really compelling is people who are comfortable being who they are, who have put who they are in service of something that really matters to them.

That's the most compelling.

People who are being who they really are without trying to perform for an audience are alive without a filter, and that is very compelling.

I'm an actor by training, and actors are taught flippantly not to perform with children or animals because children and animals always do what is known as upstaging the actor. Upstaging means drawing focus even if focus is not called for.

And the reason that children and animals draw focus is that they're just playing. They're not worried about how they are coming across to the audience.

Animals in plays are convinced to do the work and be where they're supposed to be by playing, by being enrolled in wanting to do what is called for by the play or the film.

The actors we love do one of two things. They either always play the same character, which is essentially themselves in the roles, and when this is done well, we love them. We get antsy when the role and who they are don't quite match.

The other actors we love are actors who lose themselves in a role, who become, at a really profoundly deep level, merged with the character for the duration of the performance.

Actors who do this have done an incredible amount of work on getting their egos out of the way. They have done an incredible amount of work letting go of their need to be seen as themselves, letting go of their need to be seen.

They have sacrificed their ego for the role and it's incredibly difficult work, which is why in any generation, there are only a few actors who consistently manage to do it, and we love them.

If you've ever been to a play where you've noticed something that clearly wasn't supposed to happen, it's probably the part of the play that you remember the most, it's probably the time when things felt most alive.

It's what as a director, I call the ashtray moment, and here's what an ashtray moment is. If there's a scene that's going on that people are smoking in, or even if they're not smoking, if there's an ashtray on the table and the ashtray moves so that it's on the edge of the table and part of it is off the table and it looks like it might fall if the table moves, if somebody pushes the table during the scene, that the ashtray might fall, at least half of the audience is going to have at least half of their brain watching the ashtray to see if it falls rather than whatever is going on in the scene.

The real, live question of whether the ashtray is going to fall or not is compelling in a way that no fictionalized drama can be.

The reason that reality competition performance shows show so much backstage footage is that people are more compelling when they are not performing for the camera, not performing for the audience, and are just doing the business of doing the business.

You are most compelling when you stop performing for other people.

You stop trying to be seen a certain way. You stop worrying about what other people are thinking about you, and you just commit to doing what matters to you and doing it well.

You are the most compelling to other people when you stop thinking about how they are seeing you and you just commit to doing the things that are important to you, to the best of your ability.

End Theme and Credits:
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To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.