Influence… in what?
That is the question I always come back to whenever I’m asked to talk about this topic. How do I influence more in meetings? How do I project authority? How do I give that image of security I don’t quite feel?
And the answer, for everyone, is the same: if what you want is to be more influential, you’re probably not. If you want it to look like you have authority, neither. If you want to seem confident, you’ll end up showing the opposite.
Because the real question isn’t “how do I influence.” It’s another one. It’s what I’m here for.
Let me explain it from theater, which is what I know. When an actor enters a scene, they don’t walk on to see what happens.
They arrive with something very concrete that in my craft we call the theater for which I’m here of the character. What is Hamlet trying to accomplish in this scene? To convince his mother? To make her doubt? To hurt her? That “for what” changes everything. It changes how he walks, how he looks at the other person, where he sits, when he decides to speak and when he decides to stay quiet.
Without a clear “for what,” the actor is lost. They perform gestures, say lines, but the scene doesn’t breathe. The audience senses it, even if they can’t quite say why. They sense that something is off and disengage.
And the same thing happens in a meeting…
Imagine Marta entering the mid-year budget review.
Version one. Marta arrives just on time, with a coffee in hand, “sorry, I’m coming from another meeting.” She greets everyone at once without making eye contact. She sits wherever. Opens her laptop to answer two emails as the meeting starts and, as she goes, goes through a loop: “I want to be heard in this meeting.”
Version two. Marta, the following month, in the same meeting. She arrives two minutes early. She greets calmly. Picks a seat. Puts her phone face down. Opens a notebook. And waits.
Be careful here, because it’s easy to misread. What changes between Marta-One and Marta-Two isn’t a presence technique; it’s the result of something that happened before you crossed the threshold. Marta-Two has asked herself a 30-second question: what am I here for exactly in this meeting? And when you arrive with that question answered, the body stops being in flight. It doesn’t have to look like anything. It just has to be.
Being present may seem like a small thing, right? With all the techniques out there for everything, to be told to simply “be present”… It can feel like nothing, doesn’t it? Yet I genuinely think there’s nothing harder than “being.”
In the film Dead Man Walking, there’s a scene where Sean Penn is recounting something brutal. And the camera, at a moment, shifts to Susan Sarandon. She doesn’t say a word. She’s reflected in a glass, listening. And suddenly the scene is carried by her. Even though he’s the one speaking, it’s so powerful how she listens, every look without a single movement, that you can’t take your eyes off her. There’s no technique there, but an actress who “is” and is affected by what the other says.
That’s what an actor does when they know what they’ve come for: they listen as if their life depended on it. Because the life of the scene, literally, depends on it. They’re not waiting for their turn. They’re not rehearsing their line. They are fully present, letting what the other says affect them. It’s the big difference between the actor who, not knowing why they’re there, does a hundred things at once and the one who knows exactly what they’re there to do and simply listens, letting everything that happens affect them.
Most people in a meeting don’t know how to do that. They’re waiting for their turn. Building momentum. Glancing at the boss. And when it’s their turn to speak, they say their piece, almost always disconnected from what was said before. Because they haven’t listened.
The one who is truly present listens truly and wins two things at once.
- Information. They know more when it’s their turn to speak.
- Weight. Because the rest, somehow, senses that this person is there, whole.
And that, in a room full of half-present people, eager to influence, to have their authority seen, or to appear very self-assured, is worth more than a thousand words.
So next time you walk into a meeting, don’t rehearse the posture of the one who’s in charge — although another day we’ll discuss how important that is — simply mimicking postures doesn’t work. Ask yourself just one question, thirty seconds before you step through the door: what exactly am I here for in this meeting? What do I want to understand? What do I want to contribute? What do I need to come away with?
If you arrive with that question answered, everything else falls into place on its own. The body. The gaze. The listening. The calm. Not because you did a technique, but because you’re finally not elsewhere. And if you’re able to know what you’re here for and you can stay present, you’re very likely to influence.
Coté Soler, CEO of BeLiquid
