Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair.

Tom Hanks walks into a room as the relatable dad next door. Jason Momoa does not. Neither one is better. They’re just different, and knowing which one you are is the whole trick.

That idea comes from Presilah Nunez Davis, a former actor turned confidence and etiquette coach, and it cracked something open for me this week. Because the skill she’s talking about, knowing who you are and having the presence to walk into a room as yourself, isn’t a nice-to-have for kids. It’s the exact same skill that separates the mom who builds a thriving business from the mom who quietly underprices herself for a decade. It’s not talent. It’s not luck. It’s a skill. And most of us were never taught it on purpose.

About the Guest: Presilah Nunez Davis

Presilah is a mom, performer, and founder of The Finer Points, a coaching practice that sits at the intersection of performance psychology, neuroscience, and modern etiquette. She spent over a decade as a working actor in film and television before motherhood shifted her focus, and she now teaches presence, communication, and confidence to teens, adults, and corporate teams alike. She lives and works from a restored 18th-century farmhouse on Maryland’s Eastern Shore (if you’re rethinking your own workspace, we’ve got you covered on home office setups for moms). You can find her on Instagram or at discoverthefinerpoints.com.

The Word She Doesn’t Love

Presilah teaches etiquette. But ask her about it and she’ll tell you the word doesn’t sit right with her.

“That whole term, etiquette, it has that negative connotation. Which fork to use at the dining room table. But really it’s centered around this quote by Emily Post: it’s the hyper-awareness of the feelings of others.” — Presilah

That reframe is the whole episode in one sentence. This isn’t about manners for the sake of manners. It’s about teaching kids, and honestly ourselves, to notice other people. To make someone feel seen. Please and thank you are just the surface. Underneath it is respect, and respect is what actually opens doors.

The 2 A.M. Idea That Became The Finer Points

Presilah didn’t plan this business. She was nursing her son at two in the morning, scrolling Instagram, and came across a woman teaching etiquette classes out of her home in the South.

“Something in it just clicked. The following morning I told my husband, I think I want to teach etiquette classes to kids, but reinvent theater games and teach it that way.” — Presilah

She’d spent over ten years as an actor. She knew how to read a room, sell an idea, and recover when something went wrong on stage. And she realized those same skills, the ones she’d built for auditions and pitch meetings with studio executives, were exactly what kids needed. Not the sit-up-straight version. The why does this work version.

She started with younger kids and quickly figured out her real sweet spot: ages 12 to 18. That’s the age where kids start asking why, and where you can still get to them before the world convinces them they have to be someone else to be liked.

Ask for the Ketchup

Here’s where the conversation got personal for me. My daughter will barter for anything. She’ll walk up to a vendor at a convention and ask, “Do you have anything for free?” My son is quieter, but he still shakes hands and looks people in the eye, because that’s what we’ve trained into both of them since they were toddlers.

I’ve told my kids for years: you ask for the ketchup. You go get what you need. Because the alternative, the version where you wait to be offered things, where you shrink so nobody has to say no to you, is exactly how so many moms end up running a business that pays them five dollars an hour. They never learned they were allowed to ask, and they definitely never learned they were allowed to become unapologetically rich doing it.

Presilah sees the adult version of this constantly.

“They don’t know how to command the space. They don’t know how to set any boundaries, because they feel like they won’t be loved or worthy if they don’t just say yes.” — Presilah

That’s not a personality flaw. That’s a skill gap. And it’s one we can close for our kids decades before it costs them anything.

The Trick, Explained

Presilah teaches “knowing your zero” in her corporate sessions, and it’s a bigger idea than the Tom Hanks example makes it sound. It’s not about type-casting yourself. It’s about knowing your natural presence well enough that you stop performing a version of confidence that was never built for you.

“You’ve got to know that about yourself. I’m not telling you to change who you are. But if you’re invited to a party, you at least have to go to the host and thank them for having you and say hi.” — Presilah

That’s the balance. You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room. My husband will make five best friends at a party before I’ve finished my first conversation, and that’s fine, because I’m not him. But there’s a floor. You say hi. You look people in the eye. You let them know you see them. Everything past that is just style.

The Perfectionism Trap

This is the part of the conversation I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Presilah told me about an acting class early in her career where she performed a scene completely word perfect. No mistakes. She sat down for the critique feeling proud, and her teacher said, “No mistakes, and it was boring.” He told her nobody wants to watch perfect. They want to watch you stumble, catch yourself, and keep going, because that’s what being human actually looks like.

Early in her acting career, before she’d walk into an audition room, she’d do something on purpose: pretend to trip or fumble something small, just to catch herself in front of the room.

“It’s really for me, to get out of that perfectionist brain. If anything, when people relate to you, those flaws, that insecurity, that’s when they start to lean in.” — Presilah

This is why I want my kids to mess up in public, on purpose. Not because mistakes don’t matter, but because watching someone recover from one, out loud and without shame, is one of the most useful things a kid can see modeled. It teaches them a mistake isn’t the end of the story. It’s just the part right before the interesting part.

I think we reject perfection now more than we ever have. The fourth grader is king. Nobody wants to be taught by the person who has it all figured out. They want the person who’s a few steps ahead, still figuring it out in real time, willing to let you see the mess. That’s true for a fifteen-year-old girl walking into a room full of strangers. It’s true for a mom launching her first offer. And it’s true of self-development and business in general: it’s supposed to be messy. It’s the same skill wearing a different outfit.

This Is a Business Skill, Not Just a Parenting Skill

I want to be really clear about why this episode matters for your business, not just your kids.

Reading a room. Knowing when to talk and when to shut up. Being persuasive without being pushy. Recovering gracefully when something goes sideways. These are the exact skills that make someone a great salesperson, a great messaging expert, a great community builder. I’ve built a huge part of my own work around reading people, and it’s not a gift I was born with. It’s a skill I built the same way Presilah’s students build it: by practicing it in low-stakes moments until it becomes who you are. It’s honestly not that different from how moms have the best time management skills of all, we just don’t always give ourselves credit for the skills we’re already using.

So when you’re teaching your three-year-old to shake a hand or your ten-year-old to ask a vendor if anything’s free, you’re not just raising a polite kid. You’re raising confident kids who will eventually run a business, negotiate a rate, or walk into a room they weren’t sure they belonged in and stay anyway.

How to Start This Today

You don’t need a curriculum. You need repetition. (If you want a system for carving out the actual time to do this, 3 time management skills every BossMom needs pair well with this practice.)

• Practice the greeting. Handshake, eye contact, a real hello. Presilah’s son has done this since he was two.
• Let them ask. For the free sticker, the better seat, the thing they want. Don’t ask it for them.
• Let them barter. Even over something as small as Pokemon cards. It’s the same muscle as a sales conversation.
• Normalize the stumble. Let them see you recover from a mistake out loud instead of hiding it.
• Name what you notice. If someone’s unkind to your kid, talk through why it probably has nothing to do with them.

None of this requires a script. It requires you deciding, out loud and on purpose, that this is a skill worth building before anything else on the list.

Your Next Step

If this got you thinking about the skills nobody handed you, and the ones you get to hand your kids on purpose:

• Follow Presilah on Instagram for more on presence, communication, and confidence.
• Explore The Finer Points at discoverthefinerpoints.com for one-on-one coaching, corporate sessions, and teen curriculum built around one belief: don’t adapt to the room, influence it.
• Come into the free BossMom Community. This isn’t just a place to hang out. It’s where we help you clarify your goals, build the focus and confidence skills to actually reach them, and do business differently when your time is limited. Inside, you get free networking events, mindset workshops, daily mindset audios, real connection with other members, and a dedicated app that’s completely off social media. It’s free.
• When you’re ready to level up, BossMom+ is where you go. This is where we build the right growth plan for your business and give you the ongoing support to actually implement it, so you hit your financial goals.

Presilah, thank you for this one. I’ll see you next week.

xo, Dana