The Real Test of Composure Isn't the Stage. It's the Stumble.

I've been speaking in corporate and conference settings for several years now, and while I have a genuine talent for delivering keynotes that move people to create real change in practical ways, that doesn't mean I've perfected the craft to the point where I'm unscathed by nerves.

It was almost two years ago when I found myself backstage before a keynote, in one of those high-stakes rooms where the energy is highly charged, and I realized my nerves (I always call them my excited nerves) were starting to take over the narrative playing out in my mind. They began catastrophizing the fact that I was delivering a sixty-minute keynote not once but twice, back to back, with barely a break in between. This is no small feat under any circumstances and something I had never attempted quite like that before.

In the quiet chaos of those few minutes before stepping on stage for round one, I noticed something about myself that I had been assembling for years without ever naming it. It wasn't a checklist and it wasn't quite a warm-up either, but more of a private sequence that involved a particular way of breathing, the way I speak back to my inner critic with acceptance and conviction simultaneously, and the belief that I would touch the hearts and minds of the people in that audience exactly the way I was meant to that day.

The interesting part is that I've never deliberately told myself I have to run through this before every engagement, and I don't. These are simply tools I've learned I can reach for in the moments I need them most. I sometimes wonder how much more presence, authenticity, and conviction I could have brought to even the smaller corporate presentations earlier in my career if I'd recognized and built these tools sooner.

Watching Victor Wembanyama during the NBA Finals brought all of this into sharper focus. He had just delivered one of the most electric seasons in recent NBA history and earned Conference Finals MVP along the way, and then, in the middle of the biggest stage of his career so far, he made a costly mistake in a game his team needed to win. The mistake played out in front of millions of people, with absolutely nowhere for him to hide, and the Spurs went on to lose the series in five games. In any traditional sense, that's where the story should have ended, with the stumble as the headline and the media having a field day with it.

It didn't end there, and the reason is worth sitting with longer than the mistake itself. Standing in front of reporters after elimination, with every incentive to deflect or minimize the situation, he simply said that he was learning more in that stretch than at any other point in his life. There was a steadiness in his words that told me far more about his leadership than any highlight reel could.

A young athlete who had just failed on the largest possible stage chose reflection and humanness over excuse and defensiveness, and that choice didn't happen by accident in the heat of the moment. It happened because he had spent real time building his mental, emotional, and spiritual awareness to a point sturdy enough to hold that fall.

What rarely gets discussed is the actual work behind a response like that, since self-awareness at that level doesn't show up the moment you need it most. It gets cultivated behind the scenes, when no one is watching, over years of catching yourself in smaller versions of the same instinct... noticing the flash of defensiveness before it becomes a sentence out of your mouth, recognizing the urge to explain yourself before anyone has even asked you to, and choosing, again and again, to sit with the discomfort of being wrong instead of jumping to resolve things too quickly.

That kind of awareness has very little to do with toughness, confidence, or authority. It has everything to do with developing enough of a relationship with your own internal voice that you can finally tell the difference between the part of you trying to protect your ego and the part of you actually trying to learn something. Then practicing, on purpose, listening to the softer and more intuitive voice even when the louder one is faster, more convincing, and far more familiar.

This is also where real executive presence begins to take shape, and it has very little to do with posture or polish. People feel presence in the moments that actually test it, like when a leader doesn't make a tense situation about protecting their own image, when they don't project their own nerves or fear of failure onto a team that's simply trying to do good work, and when they can say "I got that wrong" or "I don't know yet" without the room feeling like it's about to fall apart.

Honesty reads as strength, not weakness, and it tends to build more trust in a single moment than years of carefully managed facades or appearances ever could. The leaders people genuinely want to follow are rarely the ones who never falter. They're the ones who let themselves be human about it, in front of others, without flinching.

Elite performers rarely get to practice any of this in private the way most people do. This is exactly why the ones who can absorb a failure, or even the possibility of one, without flinching tend to be the ones who have spent years choosing to show up fully human and grounded in belief in their own path, whether that path reveals itself as an opportunity for growth or as outright success, in the eyes of the public as it was for Wemby, or simply in the eyes of the person living it, or both. Either way, the most important person taking it all in is you, since you're the only one who gets to decide what you do with the experience afterward.

Those who sustain real performance across years, rather than a single hot streak, are almost always the ones who built that private practice long before they needed it... the same way Wemby's composure after the loss almost certainly wasn't invented in that press conference, but drawn from something he had already been practicing all season and then some.

It may not be in front of a stadium full of people televised around the world, but the internal experience of 'dropping the pass' is remarkably familiar in leadership. It's the deal that collapses in front of the board, the decision that doesn't land the way it was intended, the botched growth objectives. What determines whether these moments are a setback or a collapse has very little to do with talent and almost everything to do with whether there's a ritualized way of being to help you catch yourself before you project the pain onto someone else.

A small aside: I'm grateful to Vicki Salemi of Tribune for interviewing me for her column, picked up by Yahoo! Life: How to Create Rituals to Boost Your Daily Focus. It felt like the right thread to weave into this piece, since so much of what I shared with her connects directly to what I'm exploring here.

A reflection worth carrying into this week: When something goes visibly wrong in your own life or leadership, what's the ritual that brings you back to center and clarity? Does the way you show up in that moment build trust with the people around you, or does it ask them to carry something that was never theirs to hold?

—

If you’re thinking about executive presence, authentic communication, and how your team navigates change and high-pressure, I'd love to discuss how I can help as an advisor. And if for you personally, here are a few digital resources: Mastering Your Mindset guidebook and The Alignment Method.

I Can Fit That In, was selected by J.P. Morgan for it's NextList 2026, recognizing standout books sparking big thinking in an era of transformation. Get your copy today wherever books are sold. For discounted bulk orders reach out to my team at info@erincoupe.com.