From Perfect Attendance to Imperfect Presence
Three years ago, I traded my executive spot for something far more expansive: a collection of new experiences, including part-time university teaching, writing, and diving into unfamiliar territories through deep collaboration. The transition wasn't just about changing locations; it was fundamentally about shifting how I showed up in life.
After four decades of meeting demands, first in military service, then in corporate America, I'm finally learning what it means to be truly present.
Throughout my career, I mastered the art of attendance. Military service taught me that attendance meant something profound: selfless commitment to country, team, and mission. Every moment served something larger than yourself. The clarity of purpose was absolute; you knew why you were there, even during the most challenging assignments.
When I transitioned to the corporate world, I carried that disciplined attendance with me, but something fundamental shifted. The clear purpose of service became entangled with metrics, personal advancement, and stakeholder management. I excelled in these environments, remained perpetually available, and delivered results quarter after quarter. Yet something essential was missing. While attending to everything, I wasn't truly present for anything.
The journey from military to corporate life revealed how attendance can masquerade as presence. In uniform, presence meant vigilance and readiness: your full self aligned with a purpose. In the corporate arena, I discovered that excellent attendance could actually prevent genuine presence. You could hit every metric, please every stakeholder, and climb every ladder while your authentic self remained oddly absent from the proceedings.
This realization didn't come suddenly. It emerged gradually through moments of disconnect, sitting in meetings where everyone was attending but no one was truly present, delivering presentations that impressed but didn't inspire, achieving goals that satisfied spreadsheets but not souls.
Writing has been the most ruthless teacher about presence of all my new pursuits. The blank page strips away uniforms, titles, and pretense. You can't fake presence when you write. Every hollow phrase, every autocorrect line, every attempt to attend rather than engage, the page reflects them all back mercilessly. Writing has become my practice in vulnerability. Each morning, I sit not as the former officer or executive with answers, but as someone exploring questions. This shift from knowing to seeking has transformed my writing and my entire approach to being in the world.
Perhaps the most liberating discovery has been the joy of collaborating where expertise trumps hierarchy. Working with data scientists, students, artists, and researchers, fields where my past credentials mean little, I've rediscovered the power of genuine curiosity. In these spaces, I can't hide behind military bearing or executive presence. Instead, I must show up authentically, asking basic questions, embracing confusion, and celebrating small insights. This vulnerability creates channels for learning and connection that no amount of attending ever could.
Here's what decades of structured behavior teach you about presence: it's simpler and more demanding than attendance. Attendance requires showing up physically, following protocols, and meeting expectations. Presence demands something more, bringing your whole self, embracing uncertainty, and remaining open to being changed by the encounter. The paradox is that presence often looks less impressive than attendance. The attending executive commands the room; the present person might sit quietly, truly listening. The attending professor delivers polished lectures; the present teacher creates space for genuine discovery, including their own.
Through teaching, writing, and collaboration, I've discovered that presence creates channels and pathways for meaningful exchange that attendance alone cannot open. In the classroom, presence transforms information transfer into collective exploration. At the writing desk, presence allows truth to flow through rather than from you. In collaboration, presence builds bridges between different worlds of expertise. These channels operate on a different frequency than the formal communication networks of military or corporate life. They're messier, less predictable, but infinitely more alive.
The journey from attendance to presence isn't about rejecting past experiences but integrating them. Military discipline informs my writing practice, and corporate thinking enriches my teaching. Both help me navigate collaborative confusion with patience and purpose. But integration requires releasing the need to maintain separate professional personas. The officer, the executive, the professor, and the writer are all facets of the same presence, not different costumes for different stages. Making this shift requires constant awareness. I still catch myself slipping into attendance mode, the automatic responses, the professional distance, and the need to appear competent rather than curious. But increasingly, I recognize these moments and consciously choose presence instead.
Some practices that help: starting each interaction with genuine curiosity rather than prepared positions, embracing not-knowing as a gift rather than a liability, listening to understand rather than to respond, creating transitions between activities that allow full arrival in each new moment.
The shift from attendance to presence fundamentally reframes ambition. Traditional ambition focuses on accumulation: ranks, titles, achievements, recognition. Presence-based ambition seeks depth, richer connections, deeper understanding, and more authentic contribution. This doesn't mean abandoning excellence or impact. Rather, it means pursuing them through presence rather than performance, through being rather than seeming. When you choose presence over attendance, something remarkable happens: it becomes contagious. Students engage more deeply when they sense your genuine presence. Collaborators open up when they feel truly seen and heard. Even your writing resonates differently when readers sense the presence behind the words. This ripple effect suggests that presence isn't just a personal choice; it's a gift we offer to every interaction, every relationship, every moment.
I offer this invitation for those feeling the gap between their attendance and presence: start small. Choose one interaction today where you'll be fully present rather than merely attending. Notice the difference in yourself, others, and the quality of what emerges. The path from attendance to presence isn't always comfortable. It requires vulnerability, patience, and the courage to show up without all the answers. But it opens doors to fulfillment that mere competence never could.
Now, as this article makes its way into the digital universe, I can already see the response pattern forming. LinkedIn will light up with thumbs-up emojis from well-meaning professionals who scrolled past the title while attending their third concurrent Zoom meeting. Former colleagues will comment, "Great insights!" having skimmed just enough to maintain networking etiquette. The metrics will show "engagement," that modern corporate prayer word that often means anything but.
And that's perfectly fine.
Because I've learned that presence can't be measured in likes, shares, or even readership statistics. If these words cause just one person to pause during their next meeting and ask themselves, "Am I present or just attending?" Suppose someone chooses to truly listen to a colleague instead of formulating their response while appearing to pay attention. In that case, these ramblings from a recovering attendance expert will have served their purpose.
After all, the deepest irony of writing about presence is accepting that many will attend to this article without being present for it. They'll add it to their reading lists, save it for later, or excerpt quotes for their own thought leadership posts, all forms of sophisticated attendance that miss the entire point. So here's to the few who read this presently, who recognize themselves in these words, who feel that gentle discomfort of truth. You're the ones I'm writing for. The rest? Well, their thumbs-up still counts toward my engagement metrics, which I'm totally present enough now to find amusing rather than affirming.
Welcome to the practice of presence. Fair warning: it ruins your ability to take attendance seriously ever again.
