Most of all presence is about looking and feeling comfortable in a space. It suggests readiness. This is not quite the same as happy high status, which suggests availability to lead or to command.

You can’t get around fear. You can only go through it.

‘There is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.’

Presence draws other people towards you because you seem open, engaged and fully, well, present.

As the novelist Philip Roth said of his work: ‘Over the years what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness. And patience with your own crap, really. Belief in your crap, which is just “stay with your crap and it will get better, and come back every day and keep going”.’

Leadership no longer necessarily comes from strength – let alone physical strength. It comes instead from those who are more intelligent, more creative, more innovative: ‘And there are no hormones for those attributes,’

This is not a time to be quiet, keep your head down and hope that someone might hear your modest, interesting whisper.

although they all have moments of levity and humour, which are designed to raise the mood of the room. They don’t project the intensity or direct leadership of a Michelle Obama speech, but they are just as commanding in their own way.

It’s easy to forget that in the situations where Michelle Obama and TED Talkers are presenting, the speakers often have access to speech writers, voice coaches, notes and autocue. There is often a whole support system behind them. Just as it would be wrong to compare your hair, make-up and grooming with the standard in a Beyoncé video, these speech