You're Impressive. But Are You Magnetic?

In the past, my brother called me cold.

I didn't see it coming. I'm easy-going. People like me. I'm told I'm easy to talk to. I've built a life and a career around helping people. Cold was not a word in my self-concept.

But it stung — which told me something. Because things that aren't true don't sting quite like that.

I sat with it and realized there was some truth to it. Not coldness exactly, but something that had started to look like it from the outside. My obsession with productivity. My drive to optimize everything. My efficiency. All the things that made me good at my work — and that probably led to my role as Director of Operational Excellence — had possibly started making me less enjoyable to be around.

I use a tool in my coaching work where I ask clients to name three words they want people to use to describe them. When I turned that tool on myself, my answers were immediate: warm, vibrant, approachable.

And my brother had just called me cold.

Looks like I had some work to do.

Impressive and magnetic are not the same thing

High achievers are very good at being impressive. The credentials, the track record, the titles, the output — we know how to build a case for ourselves. What we're often less practiced at is being the kind of person others feel drawn to.

Magnetism isn't about being more. It's about being less — less guarded, less performative, less efficiency-obsessed in moments that call for humanity. For high achievers, that's a harder shift than it sounds.

Here's the distinction that reframed it for me: most people try to be the most interesting person in the room. The magnetic ones focus on being the most interested.

I see this in my clients constantly. We've been conditioned to lead with our credentials and our accomplishments because we think that's what makes us worth talking to. But what I didn't realize about myself was that my drive for efficiency had turned me into someone who was always optimizing conversations rather than inhabiting them. Moving toward the point. Getting to the outcome. My brain was always three steps ahead, which meant I was rarely actually there.

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires a conscious slowdown. It means asking questions that open doors instead of questions that stop conversations. Not "where did you grow up?" but "what made you end up in Chicago?" Same topic, completely different invitation. One closes. One hands the other person the floor and genuinely means it.

For someone wired like me, choosing the second question is a deliberate act — a decision to value the moment over the momentum.

Presence is the rarest gift

I thought I was listening. I wasn't. I was processing. Categorizing. Planning my next move. My efficiency drive doesn't clock out just because I'm at dinner with my family or in a conversation that doesn't have an agenda.

Real listening — not waiting for your turn, not scanning the room, not mentally drafting your response while someone else is still speaking — is harder than it sounds for people like us. Our brains are trained to run ahead.

But here's what I've learned, both in myself and in my work with clients: the antidote to self-consciousness in social situations isn't better preparation. It's fuller presence. When you're genuinely focused on the other person, there is simply no room left for the inner critic to run commentary. The self-consciousness quiets. You stop performing and you start connecting.

Full attention is the rarest gift you can give. It's also the thing most likely to make you feel like yourself again.

The internal commentary nobody talks about

A lot of the energy drain I see in high achievers isn't the complaining they do out loud. It's the running commentary inside. The ongoing inner monologue about the meeting that shouldn't exist, the situation that's been frustrating for months, the person who doesn't pull their weight.

That internal noise has the same effect as venting: it keeps you locked in a posture of reaction rather than agency. And it leaks — into how you carry yourself, how present you are to the people in front of you, whether the room feels warmer or cooler when you walk in.

Magnetism and internal complaint are incompatible. You can't be genuinely warm and engaged with the person in front of you while simultaneously running a grievance loop in the background. One of them wins. You get to decide which.

(I wrote about the shift from complaint to design in more depth here — the four questions that change the frame.)

The shift that changed everything

Here's what finally moved the needle for me: you can't expect other people to be drawn to you if you aren't drawn to yourself.

For me, this reframed everything. Because the move from cold to warm wasn't about smiling more or asking better questions — though both of those matter. It was about coming back into relationship with myself. Recognizing that the efficiency machine I had become was protecting something. And that underneath it was a woman who actually is warm and vibrant and approachable. She was just buried under a relentless drive to perform.

Taking yourself seriously isn't about arrogance. It's about showing up like you matter. Moving slowly and deliberately. Making eye contact. Letting yourself be seen rather than managing how you're perceived.

The three words I wanted — warm, vibrant, approachable — weren't qualities I needed to manufacture. They were qualities I needed to stop suppressing.

That's the shift. And it's available to anyone willing to look honestly at the gap between who they are and how they're actually showing up.

My brother gave me a gift when he called me cold, even if it didn't feel like one at the time. What I found on the other side of that conversation was a version of myself I actually wanted to be.

If there's a gap between how you see yourself and how you're landing in the world — that's information. And it's worth paying attention to.

The gap between who you are and how you're showing up is one of the most important things to close — and one of the most specific kinds of work I do with clients. Book a strategy session and let's look at it together.