🗒 Summary
Bonita walked us through a practical "recipe" for personal presence, covering the ingredients that help people leaders show up with more confidence and influence. The session tackled what gets in our way (self-doubt, overthinking, anxiety), and gave concrete tools to address it: a framework for structuring your message, language swaps that shift how you're perceived, and a simple self-review method to understand your own impact.
🧠 The 5 Ingredients of Personal Presence
Bonita's recipe framework breaks personal presence into five components - each one a dial you can turn up or down depending on the situation:
- Personal Awareness - knowing how you show up and the impact your language and presence has in the moment
- Audio Branding - your tone, pace, energy, and the way your body tells the story. Everyone has a communication signature, whether they know it or not
- Structure - getting the busy thoughts out of your head and into a delivery that sounds as good out loud as it did internally
- Language - the words you choose and the conscious (or unconscious) impact they have on you and your audience
- Adaption - reading the room and adjusting your recipe for the environment, audience, and situation
🚧 What Gets in the Way
The live poll showed a pretty even split: self-doubt (41%), overthinking (31%), anxiety (20%). Bonita's reframe: these are situational, not permanent. And they're not imposter syndrome - they're imposter thoughts. Knowing which one tends to show up for you is the first step to working with it.
🎙 Your Audio Brand - Have You Actually Thought About It?
You invest in how you look. Businesses invest in visual branding. But your audio brand - the way your voice lands when everything visual disappears - gets almost no attention. On a phone call, a voice note, a talk on a bad connection: all that's left is your audio signature.
Bonita broke it down into six elements:
- Pace - how fast or slow you speak, and whether it shifts to signal importance or urgency
- Pitch - the high/low range of your voice. Ending statements on a high pitch reads as uncertain or questioning, even when you're not asking anything
- Pausing - used well, pauses create emphasis and give people space to absorb. Too few, and you lose them. Too many, and you lose momentum
- Rhythm & musicality - the overall flow. Monotone delivery drains engagement fast, even if the content is great
- Emotion & authenticity - people have a finely tuned BS radar. If you sound scripted or detached, they disengage immediately. Genuine passion creates instant connection
- Body language & storytelling - yes, even on audio. How you use your body affects your delivery, and weaving in stories creates the visual that your words alone can't
The question to sit with: what does your voice communicate about you - and have you ever actually checked?
📋 The PREP Framework - Calm the Squirrel
When your brain goes off on tangents, use PREP to structure any message in the moment - or to build a presentation from scratch:
- P - Point (your clear opening statement)
- R - Reason (why it matters to them)
- E - Example (story, data, real-life illustration)
- P - Prompt (close with a question or reflection, not a summary)
🚫 Stop Apologising for Taking Up Space
Small language habits quietly undermine how you're perceived. Swap these out:
- "Sorry, I'll be really quick" → "Thank you for the time"
- "This might be a stupid question" → "I'd like to explore something I've been thinking about"
- "Does that make sense?" → "How does that sound? / What were your key takeaways?"
- "I think..." → "In my experience..." / "Where I've seen this work..."
The underlying principle: stop creating safety blankets. When you hedge, people question the value of what you're sharing before you've even finished.
📱 Try This: 90 Seconds of You, For You
💡 Mini Exercise
Grab your phone. Pick a topic you know well and genuinely care about - a favourite holiday, a dish you love, a project you're proud of.
Hit record. Talk for 90 seconds. No script, no rehearsal. Just you.
Then review it three ways:
- Listen only - face down, loud. Focus on words, pace, and how much space you're taking up
- Watch on mute - what is your face and body saying?
- Watch with audio - does the visual match the message?
Do it with kind eyes and kind ears. This is data, not a roast.
Bonus round: record a second 90 seconds using the PREP framework and notice what changes.
🎛 Adapt Your Recipe to the Room
The same ingredients, different dials:
- Leadership meetings → more conviction, stronger structure, "in my experience"
- Team conversations → dial up empathy, warmth, and prompting questions
- Presentations → lean into clarity and energy
- Difficult conversations → slow the pace, focus on self-control and calm delivery
💬 Bonita's Closing Challenge
Pick one thing. Just one. Practice it this week - you'll probably end up doing all three. What we practise becomes a permanent state of how we communicate. Not perfect. Permanent.