Dave KashenStartup CEO Coach / 2x founder

Leader's Guide to Mastering Presence Amidst Challenges #leadershipskills #innergame #workculture

1 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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This content was created by Dave Kashen. This content was uploaded by Dave Kashen. This is a YouTube talk titled "Leader's Guide to Mastering Presence Amidst Challenges #leadershipskills #innergame #workculture" (posted Jan 1, 2026). The excerpt is a leadership monologue by Dave Kashen discussing how leaders lose presence — distinguishing external triggers (loss of customers, team conflict, resignations) and internal patterns (mind drifting, longing for the future) that move them into a threat state and reduce effectiveness. The clip appears to be instructional/coaching content on presence and the inner game of leadership.

Chapters

ask yourself as a leader is what are the kinds of situations— but there's two, there's internal and external kind of reflection. The external one is what are the kind of situations and setbacks that currently take me out of presence? I.e., like, I'm— I, you know, I can be, you know, yeah, in a state of presence, creative, curious, energized, until and unless this happens. Oh, we lose a customer, someone on my team complains, you know, some of my team quits, yeah, people are, you know, having conflict. Like, there's usually, um, patterns of types of situations that leaders, um, resist basically, and that resistance takes you below the line, takes you out of present into a state of threat. And then you're not as effective as you could be, you know, operating from that state. So that's external. And then internally, we, we seem to have patterns whereby, um, like our mind will just drift, you know. We'll start out all excited about our desired future, but then our mind will drift to like, oh, I wish I was already there, you know, or