Presence Instead of Performance

Don’t show me how you’ve changed, embody it in the un-narrated.

When you walk into a room, are you trying to be impressive or are you being in relationship?

There was a time I measured my growth by how well I could talk about it. I had words for everything—what I was moving through, what I had learned, what I now believed. I could trace the narrative arc of my healing like a well-told story. I sounded clear. I felt seen; what I processed felt seen. But there was a distance, too. Between what I knew and what I was living. Between the words I offered and the places in me still aching for contact.

It took a while to notice that distance. I had grown so used to performing change that I mistook it for embodiment. I didn’t lie. I didn’t exaggerate. But something in me was still curating each moment, molding it into the ideas and words I knew that reflected growth, transformation, and change. Trying to make the story land just right—to be honest, but not too raw. I was reflective, but not too uncertain. I was present, but not completely. Emotional intelligence routines—naming, regulating, reflecting, and accepting—created a healthy process, but I was over-using it.

In Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes about The Star card as a kind of homecoming to what’s already inside us. She speaks of healing not as something to narrate, but to inhabit. “It’s not about explaining your experience,” she writes. “It’s about staying with it.” That line lingered. It felt like a mirror. How often had I paired healing and explanation? How often had I stayed just long enough to describe what I was feeling, but not long enough to feel it fully?

I started to notice how often my growth showed up in my mouth before it arrived in my body. I wanted to be awake in my process; I spoke too soon. I’d talk about what I was learning in real time, using the language of someone who had already integrated it. Not to deceive anyone—just to hold myself together. Because if I could say it, maybe I could thrive through it.

But presence doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t protect us from the mess. It invites us into it. Presence doesn’t ask us to be articulate. It asks us to stay. Not to perform being okay, but to show up exactly as we are—unresolved, unguarded, undone. And this, I’m learning, is what makes change real. Not that we can explain it. But that we can bear to live inside it.

Brené Brown speaks of connection as the energy that exists when people feel seen, heard, and valued. But feeling seen isn’t the same as being impressive. And being in relationship isn’t the same as being admired. It’s possible to be visible and still not be present. To be understood and still not be in contact. The kind of presence I’m speaking of is harder to trace. It’s not loud. It doesn’t draw attention to itself. It isn’t polished. It just doesn’t leave.

In moments when I’m truly present, I don’t sound like someone who’s arrived. I sound like someone who is still arriving—and has decided that’s enough. I sound incoherent, babbling about experience in metaphor that need too much context to make sense. Now I don’t feel the need to name every shift. I don’t rush to explain what I now know. I can sit in the middle of the sentence. I can trust that what is real will come through—not because I crafted words for it, but because I let it.

John Hayes, in his work on change management, talks about the importance of engaging people where they are—not as a step toward a goal, but as the very condition for transformation. And while he’s writing about organizations, the insight holds. Presence isn’t something we bring to get somewhere else. It’s the very soil in which change takes root.

I think about that now when I’m tempted to summarize myself. When I feel the pull to narrate my growth in ways that feel just a little too finished. I pause. I ask: What would it mean to simply be here, without the story? Do I need to look for a conclusion to a chapter of my life to feel like its lessons are complete or can I drop the analogy to be without a tidy moral or ending.

There’s something raw and sacred about showing up without explanation. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because you trust yourself enough to not need to say it all. You trust that presence—real presence—is the most honest thing you can offer.

So I return to that question:

When you walk into a room, are you trying to be impressive or are you being in relationship?

One performs. The other listens. One shapes perception. The other offers contact. And when I forget—which I still do—I come back to my body, to the breath that doesn’t need an audience. I come back to the moment and try again to stay.

Just breathe.

Reflection

• Where in your life are you still trying to be seen as a specific identity?

• What would it feel like to stop explaining yourself—and simply live it?

Let the room meet you. You don’t have to introduce yourself first.