Leadership Presence: The Ballad Between You and Your Brain
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
How slowing down can help you think clearly, communicate confidently and speak with greater presence.
Walking into the lobby of the Royal Society of Arts, an illuminated installation stops me in my tracks.
It reads: THE BALLAD OF ME AND MY BRAIN.
The words are striking, funny and unexpected in such a beautiful historic building.
And they prompt me to think about two things: negative self-talk, and one of my favourite ballads, Bullet Train.
Sung by American jazz singer Stacey Kent, with lyrics by Nobel Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Bullet Train is a song that I love for many reasons.
The way it starts with station announcement chatter; the way the arrangement echoes the rhythm of a local train on the tracks; and the clarity and emotional depth of Kent’s voice - still with me after hearing her live at Ronnie Scott’s last year, and repeatedly through my AirPods on the bullet train from Tokyo to Shin-Fuji (not Nagoya) last April.
What stays with me most, though, is the song’s central tension: the feeling of not moving, while travelling way too fast.
Modern Leadership: The Perils of Moving Fast
Many of the leaders I coach recognise this feeling immediately.
They are travelling at speed: meetings, decisions, targets, restructures, strategy days, difficult conversations, inboxes, interruptions...
From the outside, they look composed and capable.
Inside, their brain is racing: replaying what just happened, rehearsing what might happen next; rarely letting them arrive fully where they are.
That inner speed can show up in their leadership presence and communication too.
In the breath they don’t take.
The point they over-explain.
The pause they avoid.
The idea they dilute.
The question they don’t ask.
The challenge they soften until it almost disappears.
The issue is rarely lack of confidence. More often, it is the speed and noise in their brain that make it harder to access what they already know.
How Slowing Down Builds Leadership Presence
In organisations, speed is often rewarded.
Fast replies. Fast decisions. Fast delivery. Fast adaptation.
But when our brain moves too fast, we risk speaking before we have thought clearly; rushing important conversations; avoiding difficult ones; or arriving in the room physically present but mentally absent.
Slowing it down lets us:
Think more clearly.
Listen more fully.
Challenge more constructively.
Say more, with fewer words.
A simple way to do that, is to pause and ask yourself, before speaking:
What is needed here — speed, or presence?
That question matters because a leader’s pace affects the quality of conversations around them: decisions, feedback, challenge, collaboration and trust.
In short, leadership presence is not about slowing everything down.
It is about slowing down enough to choose how you show up.
What Is the Ballad Between You and Your Brain?
A ballad can put us back in a room, a relationship, a city, a train carriage, a version of ourselves we had forgotten. It can slow us down enough to notice what we are moving too fast to see.
That is what Bullet Train does for me.
And perhaps that is what the illuminated words in the RSA lobby did too. They reminded me that we all have a ballad between ourselves and our brain.
A private soundtrack.
A familiar rhythm.
A set of thoughts, doubts, questions and stories that shape how we speak, lead and make our mark.
Pacing Yourself for Strong Leadership Presence
So, what helps you slow down?
Not to lose pace, but to recover presence.
Not to say less, but to say more with fewer words.
Through my Make Your Mark workshops, coaching sessions and online self-study course, Make Your Mark for Teams, I help individuals and groups pace themselves so they can communicate with stronger leadership presence, clearer thinking, greater resilience and better performance when it matters most.
To build these capabilities in your organisation, get in touch to discuss how Make Your Mark coaching could support your people.
The Business Voice Coach
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