How to present your professional value when you are over 50 – Part 1
Regardless of the situation, you are being judged the minute you’re seen — especially in a job interview situation. Appearance is a small part of that judgment. Your presence is the key factor in your favor for presenting your professional value for a win/win.
What do I mean by presence is the key factor? Dictionary definitions of presence boil down to “the ability to project a sense of ease, poise or self-assurance, especially the quality of matter of a person’s bearing before an audience.”
It’s tough to project ease, poise or self-assurance when you have been out of work for six months to a year or more while drawing down your savings and discovering, in this fast-paced, go-go economy, age trumps experience. Now with all that pressure, you ask yourself is your presence at the interview looking like a deer caught in the headlights 
or a tiger-at-the-gate.
Over the past year, at meetings, networking events, and seminars, who has caught your attention and why? What was it that made those people stand out from everybody else? Was it their presence?
Presence can be the deciding factor in getting past the over 50 syndrome plaguing so many senior professionals seeking job opportunities. Presence is having the mind, the voice and the body in sync from moment to moment.
Presence is going from looking like a deer caught in the headlights to a tiger at the gate. 
Viewers tend to overlook the age and hair coloring of tigers. You can develop the “stage” presence to pull your audience in with you.
We are always selling something as Dan Pink points out in his book “To Sell is Human.” It’s time for you to learn how to sell yourself. Practice with the tiger in your tank.
As a coach, trainer and consultant, Larry Blumsack partners with people and organizations on the move and those already there to accelerate their communication, presentation and speaking skills to be on par with their ambition. Through one-on-one coaching and group training Larry helps leaders and aspiring leaders elevate their presence and communication skills to influence more people, sell more products-services-ideas and inspire others more successfully than they ever imagined.
Larry is the bestselling author of Face-to-Face is The Ultimate Social Media and founder of Zoka Institute and Zoka Training®. Zoka Training® — Mind/Voice/Body/Mindfulness in sync — is the result of Larry’s 45 years as a coach, acting teacher, actor, voice-over artist, theater and TV director/producer, radio & TV commentator and show host, speaker, trainer, serial entrepreneur, and syndicated columnist. Larry was a founding member of the theater department at Northeastern University.
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