The Presence Stuff: John Vautier on the Communication Skills Nobody Coaches You On

Reading time 3 minutes

John Vautier coaches communication skills for a living, in a family business his dad started in 2004. He’s been doing it since 2011. He breaks executive presence into things you can actually control.

Eye contact

Stop scanning the room. Scanning looks nervous and out of sorts. Instead, deliver one thought to one person, pause, shift your eyes to a new person, deliver the next thought. In a big room, do the same thing to sections. Back left gets a thought. Pause. Front right gets a thought. Pause.

On video, look at the lens

Not the gallery. The moment your eyes drop to the bottom of the screen or slide to the right, your audience watches you disengage. Vautier keeps a bright sticky note behind his camera with a smiley face and two words: look here.

Your notes are fine

Read them in silence, during your pause. Then look up and speak. Nothing has to be memorized, and memorized doesn’t sound authentic anyway.

Hands

Use them. Above the waist if you’re standing, outside the body when you have the room. Open hands rather than pointing or fists. When you’re not gesturing, let them rest at your sides rather than clasping them in front of you, which reads as a barrier. On camera, keep them in roughly the bottom third of frame so they’re visible.

Posture

You don’t have to move to be effective. Start balanced, weight even, and move only when you have a reason: to engage a section, to reference something, to facilitate. On video, remember the camera doesn’t move with you, so extra movement just reads as distraction.

Volume is the one everybody gets wrong

On a scale of one to ten, most of us live at four to six, which is our one-to-one voice. Speaking to a group takes a seven or eight. It will feel uncomfortable. Vautier says that’s the point, and in fifteen years of coaching he has spent far more time getting people to turn it up than down.

The reason he pushes on volume is that it drags everything else along with it. Louder voices gesture more naturally. Inflection increases on its own. Articulation improves, because soft speakers mumble and blend words. And it forces you to slow down and breathe.

Pause instead of “um”

Vautier’s claim is that ninety-plus percent of filler words land in transitions: between thoughts, between bullets, between slides, after a period. Get comfortable with silence in those gaps and the ums have nowhere to go. The pause feels long to you. It doesn’t to the audience, and it gives them a second to absorb what you said.

On nerves

He references a Simon Sinek clip about Olympic athletes, who get asked constantly whether they were nervous and consistently answer that they were excited. The physical signals are the same: racing heart, clammy hands, visualizing what’s ahead. Elite athletes learned to read those signals as excitement rather than fear. Sinek tested it on himself during bad turbulence by saying out loud that it was exciting, and then used it before speaking to three thousand police chiefs.

Three things Vautier wants you to remember when the nerves hit:

Your audience doesn’t know what you haven’t told them and can’t read your mind. They only get what you give them.
They’re rooting for you. Nobody in an audience wants to watch a speaker struggle.
If they can’t see it and can’t hear it, it doesn’t exist. Steady eyes, active hands, balanced posture, elevated voice. All four of those mask the tells.

And Vautier’s acronym for when it goes sideways anyway: FAIL, meaning Fantastic Attempt In Learning. He’d rather you chase effectiveness than perfection, because he doesn’t think perfect exists in this.

Adapted from the TalkLPnews webinar with John Vautier, Vautier Communications.