Absent while present
What it costs when you’re in the room but your attention isn't
When I first started training as a coach, I took notes in my coaching sessions. Like, a lot of notes. I didn’t want to miss anything: a key phrase or a telling word, or the exact sentence a client used to describe something. Throughout this I was trying to look like I was listening, while scribbling furiously and struggling to remember what they’d just said. I was so busy capturing the conversation that I wasn’t really in it, and I certainly had no space to think.
These days, in many meetings (not coaching, at least not for me) AI note-takers have solved the practical problem – you don’t need to write everything down any more. But they haven’t solved the real one. Because the issue was never really about the notes; it was about what I was paying attention to.
Presence isn’t only about what you’re physically doing. You might be busy with something – notes, your phone, your inbox – or you might be doing nothing at all, and simply thinking about something else entirely. Either way, presence is about where your attention actually is.
I’ve touched on presence a number of times before – in how we listen, how we build relationships, how we think before we speak – but it’s important enough that it deserves its own space. So this week, let’s dig a bit deeper.
When you’re not all there
Presence isn’t a switch that’s either on or off. Its absence is more usually partial: you’re doing or thinking something that either looks like attention from the outside, or feels like attention to you, when in fact it isn’t.
These are the small, familiar ways our attention often slips without us really noticing – you might think of them as presence leaks:
Rehearsing what you’re going to say next, rather than actually hearing what’s being said now
Noticing someone looks tired and drifting into “I wonder if they’re okay” instead of listening to what they’re actually saying
Clocking whose camera is off and spinning up a small story about why
The email that pings, and the “I’ll just have a quick look” that follows it
Mentally drafting the agenda for your next meeting while you’re still in this one
We tend to be less prone to these in one-to-one meetings. However, in a group – especially online – I’d bet most of us have done most of them at some point.
Let’s be clear: it’s rarely done in bad faith. Sometimes we do it because our mind wanders, unbidden. Sometimes we do it because we’ve quietly decided this conversation only needs half our brain. Either way, it’s less about malice and more about efficiency, or simply the mind doing what minds do.
Nobody complains. Everybody notices.
In all honesty, I’m not sure there’s a polite way to say “I don’t think you were actually listening to me.” So people mostly don’t say it. But they do notice, and, they remember.
Your attention, or the lack of it, radiates whether you mean it to or not. You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon – emotional contagion – yourself: the boss whose mood you could read the second they walked in, the colleague whose energy shifted the room before they’d said a word. Emotional contagion means we pick up and mirror the state of the people around us, especially those with authority over us.
At a senior level, this becomes a signalling problem. If you’re only half there in a conversation, the message you send – albeit unintentionally – is that this person, right now, isn’t the priority. Say “your development matters to me” while visibly checking your phone in the same conversation, and you’ve created one of the most common, and most damaging, incongruences a leader can fall into: your words and your actions telling two different stories.
No single missed moment sinks a relationship. But it accumulates, moment by moment, until one day it’s the reason someone leaves.
The reverse is just as real. When people experience someone actually paying attention, trust builds faster. They say more, not less, because they sense it’s safe to. And their thinking improves too – when someone feels they’re genuinely being heard, they think more clearly, not just speak more freely.
But be careful: none of this works if you fake it.
The upside of actually being there
This isn’t about performing engagement – the nodding, the eye contact as technique. If there’s a mismatch between how present you look and how present you actually are, people trust the gut feel over the performance, every time.
However, presence is trainable. It’s something you can practise, not a trait you either have or don’t. If you’ve picked up some bad habits, more intention – and sometimes some support from your environment – can shift it.
The bonus is that the payoff is disproportionate to the effort. A short burst of genuine attention tends to be worth more to someone than a long stretch of half-attention ever will be.
How to actually arrive
None of this requires a personality transplant – just a bit of structure, and a habit of noticing. Try these in your next meeting:
Name your leak.
Which of the patterns above is most often yours? You can’t interrupt something you haven’t first noticed.Set up your environment before you need to.
If you know you’re prone to distraction, close the email tab, put the phone in a drawer, shut the notebook, before the conversation starts.Reset in the moment.
If you notice yourself drifting mid-meeting, that’s not a failure – it’s an opportunity. Quietly bring yourself back.Treat video calls as needing more intention, not less.
Fewer cues means it’s easier to hide distraction from others, and easier to fool yourself that you’re still tracking the conversation.Keep buffer time in your calendar.
A back-to-back day makes arriving anywhere close to impossible – that’s a structural problem worth solving, even briefly.If you must capture something, say so.
“I’m going to jot a couple of things down so I don’t lose them” turns a covert half-listen into something transparent, and keeps you honest about what you’re doing with your attention.
Where did you go?
What looked like diligence, in my early note-taking days, was actually the opposite of it. I thought I was capturing the conversation; I was actually leaving it.
Take a moment to reflect: what’s your version of the notebook? What’s the thing that looks productive, or feels efficient, but is costing you your presence?
Before your next meeting, take two minutes. Actively choose to pay attention, and set yourself up so that you can. Phone away. Notebook closed. One deep breath. Ask yourself: what does this person need from me today? Then go in.
Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know: what’s the thing your attention drifts to most in meetings? The phone, the next agenda item, your own notes? Or something else entirely?
Restack
Consistently a good read, this week I enjoyed this from Bruce Daisley on how a bad apple really can ruin a team.
Meme of the week
This made me laugh (and perfectly sums up my childish humour…😂).
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Thanks for reading. See you next week!
Sarah