Leading from Your Best Self: Develop Executive Poise, Presence, and Influence to Maximize Your Potential

Proven techniques for building self-confidence, making personal connections, and developing a professional presence that’s powerful, authentic, and effective.

Increase your poise, presence, and influence for more dynamic leadership

Are you showing up as the best version of yourself? Are you aware of how others experience you? By cultivating executive poise and presence, we not only improve how others see us but enhance our capacity to lead a life of our choosing. While leadership styles may vary, all great leaders are able to connect with others while staying true to themselves. By remaining true to the best aspects of your personality, you too, will be able to lead effectively in every situation.

Leading from Your Best Self delivers a roadmap for developing the poise, presence, and influence needed to succeed at work and in life. As a theater professional, Rob Salafia cultivated a mindset of excellence and learned how to truly connect with his audiences by tapping into and developing his own intrinsic gifts as a performer. He realized that these skills could be put to great use in the business world where it is just as important to build authentic connections with key stakeholders―in this case, employees, bosses, and customers. Now, he shares his insights with you, making this book the next best thing to having your own personal executive coach.

Through specific techniques, activities, and personal stories, Salafia illustrates how to tap into your own inner resources and experiences, show up with greater self-confidence, and make the shift to more inclusive modes of leading. He shares exercises and narratives from real-life clients who have struggled and succeeded to break past their self-imposed limitations.

Leading from Your Best Self shows you how to:

• Be present and open
• Discover your Signature Stance
• Maintain poise under the most stressful of situations
• Create a solid foundation of self-confidence and your own genuine leadership style
• Develop a System for Learning, a Platform for Failure, and a Mindset of Excellence
• Connect authentically with others and build lasting relationships based on trust
• Use storytelling and metaphor to make your messages meaningful and memorable
• Understand the sources of influence and power within organizations
• Create a culture of learning within your own team and organization

Everyone has the capacity to be extraordinary by appreciating and nurturing their best qualities and gifts. This book will help you uncover yours and reach your true potential as a leader and communicator.

About the Author

Rob Salafia combines two decades of experience as a top leadership development executive with a well-established career in the performing arts. He has a passion for coaching leaders to develop their presence, tell compelling stories and establish authentic connections. He assists leaders to build emotional and narrative intelligence and share vision and strategy in a compelling and relevant way.

For the first half of his career Rob was a performing artist where he traveled the globe delivering his unique, one-person variety show. He was first captivated with the art of storytelling in 1977 when he attended The National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling Conference in Jonesboro, TN. He studied the art of tap dance with Gregory Hines and many other tap dance legends; and in 1989 was awarded a residency with the renowned dancer, Honi Coles. When cast as the lead in a Boston-based musical, Rob was asked by the director to learn wire walking for the show. Always a quick study, he went to task and within 2 months made the art form a part of his repertoire. At the heart of Rob’s approach to performance was the relationship he built with his audience. He projected a sense of warmth, confidence and light-heartedness that permeates his work to this day.

In his work as an executive coach, Rob finds great satisfaction in guiding leaders through transitions to more senior roles, as well as coaching senior executives and leadership teams in preparation for strategic presentations. As a keynote speaker, he enjoys stepping onto the main stage at leadership conferences. Some highlights include Gallagher, CREW, YPO/YPO Gold, Sony Music Entertainment Amplify, ING Bank’s Annual Leadership Conference, Wharton Business School’s Leadership Conference, USC’s Marshall School of Business Building Leaders Forum, Schulich School of Business and The Association for Training and Development.