The Two-minute Power Pose That Can Boost Your Performance
Her 2012 TED talk on the topic has been viewed
more than 31 million times – and is the speaker circuit’s second most popular
video of all time. In the talk, Cuddy asked the audience to take two minutes in
private to strike a “power pose” before entering into a high-stakes situation
to improve their confidence and chances for success.
Her research shows that our body language not
only affects how others see us, but how we see ourselves. By holding our bodies
in a position of power, our hormones react immediately — our testosterone goes
up and our cortisol goes down — resulting in calm confidence that we feel and
others experience. Power posing is just one aspect of what she calls
“presence,” the subject of her new book, Presence:
Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.
In the following excerpt from the book, Cuddy
explains what led her on the path to writing the book and why it’s critical
to “fake it until we make it,” or better yet, until we become it.
Tears in my eyes, I asked, “What’s your name?”
“Fetaine,” she said.
This kind of interaction happens far more frequently than I’d
ever have imagined: a stranger shares a personal story about successfully
coping with a big challenge and then simply thanks me for my part in it.
They’re women and men, old and young, timid and gregarious, struggling and
wealthy. But something binds them: all have felt powerless in the face of great
pressure and anxiety, and all discovered a remarkably simple way to liberate
themselves from that feeling of powerlessness.
I get a little teary every time I hear from one of them.
For most authors, the book comes first, then the responses.
For me, it was the other way around. First I wrote some
scholarly articles, which no one (well, hardly anyone) ever read; they inspired
a talk I delivered at the TEDGlobal Conference in 2012. In it, I discussed
research I had done that yielded an odd and unexpected finding about how our
bodies influence our brains. As a result of this research, I was able to
describe a technique — that Wonder Woman–in‑the‑bathroom thing Fetaine
mentioned … that can quickly increase our confidence and decrease our anxiety
in challenging situations. I didn’t know whether the topic would resonate with
people. It surely spoke to me. Immediately after the 21‑minute video of the
talk was posted on the Internet, I began hearing from people who had seen it.
Of course, my speech didn’t magically give Fetaine the knowledge
she needed to do well on the MCAT. She didn’t miraculously acquire a detailed
understanding of the characteristics of smooth‑strain versus rough‑strain
bacteria or how the work-energy theorem relates to changes in kinetic energy.
But it may have released her from the fear that could have prevented her from
expressing the things she knew. Powerlessness engulfs us — and all that we
believe, know, and feel. It enshrouds who we are, making us invisible. It even
alienates us from ourselves.
The opposite of powerlessness must be power, right? In a sense
that’s true, but it’s not as simple as that. The research I’ve been doing for
years now joins a large body of inquiry into a condition I call presence.
Presence stems from believing in and trusting yourself — your real, honest
feelings, values, and abilities. That’s important, because if you don’t trust
yourself, how can others trust you? Whether we are talking in front of two
people or five thousand, interviewing for a job, negotiating for a raise, or
pitching a business idea to potential investors, speaking up for ourselves or
speaking up for someone else, we all face daunting moments that must be met
with poise if we want to feel good about ourselves and make progress in our
lives. Presence gives us the power to rise to these moments.
The path that brought me to that talk and this breakthrough was
roundabout, to say the least. But it’s clear where it started.
*
* *
What I most remember were the silly drawings and sweet notes on
the whiteboard, left by my friends. I’m a sophomore in college. I wake up in a
hospital room. I look around — cards everywhere, and flowers. I’m exhausted.
But I’m also anxious and agitated. I can barely keep my eyes open. I’ve never
felt like this. I don’t understand, but I don’t have the energy to try to make
sense of it. I fall asleep.
Repeat many, many times.
My last clear memory before waking up in that hospital was of
traveling from Missoula, Montana, to Boulder, Colorado, with two of my good
friends and housemates. We’d gone up to Missoula to help organize a conference
with University of Montana students and to visit with friends. We left Missoula
in the early evening, around six, on a Sunday. We were trying to get back to
Boulder for morning classes. In retrospect, especially as a parent, I now see
how incredibly stupid this was, given that the drive time between Missoula and
Boulder is thirteen to fourteen hours. But we were nineteen.
We had what we thought was a good plan: we would each drive a
third of the trip; one passenger would stay up to help the driver stay awake
and alert while the other passenger would sleep in the back of the Jeep
Cherokee, seats down, in a sleeping bag. I drove my shift; I think I went
first. Then I was the active passenger, keeping an eye on the driver. And it
was a really nice memory. Really peaceful. I loved these people I was with. I
loved the openness of the West. I loved the wilderness. No headlights to count
on the highway. Just us. Then came my turn to sleep in the backseat.
As I learned later, here’s what happened next. My friend was
driving the worst shift. It was the time of night when you feel as though you
might be the only person in the entire world who is awake. Not only was it the
middle of the night, it was the middle of the night in the middle of Wyoming.
Very dark, very open, very lonesome. Very little to keep you awake. At around
four in the morning, my friend fell asleep. She nodded off, veered, and hit the
rumble strip. That woke her up, and she overcorrected. The car rolled three and
a half times, landing on its roof. My friends in the front seat were wearing
their seatbelts. I, who had been sleeping in back with the seats down, was
ejected from the car and thrown into the night. The right‑front side of my head
slammed into the highway. The rest of me remained in the sleeping bag.
I sustained a traumatic brain injury. More specifically, I
suffered a diffuse axonal injury (DAI). In a DAI, the brain is subjected to
“shearing forces,” usually from severe rotational acceleration, which is quite
common in car accidents. Imagine what happens during a high‑speed car crash:
with the sudden and extreme change in velocity upon impact, your body abruptly
stops but your brain continues to move and sometimes even rotate within the
skull, which it is not meant to do, and even bangs back and forth against your
skull, which it is also not meant to do. The force of my head slamming into the
highway, which fractured my skull, didn’t help matters.
The brain is meant to exist in a safe space, protected by the
skull and cushioned by several thin membranes, called meninges, and
cerebrospinal fluid. The skull is the brain’s friend, but the two are never
intended to touch. The shearing forces of a severe head injury tear and stretch
neurons and their fibers (axons) throughout the brain. Like electrical wires,
axons are insulated by a protective coating, or buffer, called the myelin
sheath. Even if an axon isn’t severed, damage to the myelin sheath can
significantly slow the speed at which information travels from neuron to
neuron.
In a DAI, the injury occurs throughout the brain, unlike a focal
brain injury, such as a gunshot wound, where damage strikes a very specific
location. Everything the brain does depends on neurons communicating; when
neurons throughout the brain are damaged, their communication is inevitably
damaged as well. So when you have a DAI, no doctor is going to tell you, “Well,
the damage is to your motor area, so you’re going to have trouble with
movement.” Or “It’s your speech area; you’re going to have difficulty producing
and processing speech.” They won’t know if you’ll
recover, how well you’ll recover, or which brain
functions will be affected: Will your memory be impaired? Your
emotions? Your spatial reasoning? Your small-motor skills? Given how little we
understand about DAIs, the likelihood that a doctor can offer an accurate
prognosis is dismal.
“Presence stems
from believing in and trusting yourself — your real, honest feelings, values,
and abilities. That’s important, because if you don’t trust yourself, how can
others trust you?”
After a DAI, you are a different person. In many ways. How you
think, how you feel, how you express yourself, respond, interact — all of these
dimensions are affected. On top of that, your ability to understand yourself
has probably taken a hit, so you’re not really in a position to know
exactly how you’ve changed. And no one — no one —
can tell you what to expect.Let me give you an explanation of what happened to my brain as I
understood it then.
Okay, so there I was in the hospital. Naturally, I had been
withdrawn from college, and my doctors expressed serious doubts about whether I
would ever be cognitively fit to return. Given the severity of my injury and
statistics on people with similar injuries, they said: Don’t expect to
finish college. You’re going to be fine — “high functioning” — but
you should probably find something else to do. I learned that my IQ
had dropped thirty points — two standard deviations. I knew this not because a
doctor had explained it to me. I knew because the IQ was part of a two‑day
battery of neuropsychology tests they’d given me, and I’d received a long
report that included that result. The doctors didn’t think it was important to
explain this to me. Did they think I wasn’t intelligent enough to understand?
Or that it wasn’t important enough? I don’t want to give the IQ more credit
than it deserves; I’m not making any claims about its ability to predict life
outcomes. But it was something that I believed quantified my intelligence. So,
according to the doctors, I was no longer smart, and I felt this acutely.
I received occupational therapy, cognitive therapy, speech
therapy, physical therapy, psychological counseling. About six months after the
accident, when I was home for the summer, a couple of my closest friends, who’d
noticeably pulled away from me, told me, “You’re just not the same anymore.”
How could two of the people who seemed to understand me the best tell me I was
no longer myself? How was I different? They couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see
myself.
A head injury makes you feel confused, anxious, and frustrated.
When your doctors tell you they don’t know what you should expect, and your
friends tell you that you’re different, it certainly amplifies all that
confusion, anxiety, and frustration.
I spent the next year in a fog — anxious, disoriented, making
bad decisions, not sure what I would do next. After that, I went back to
school. But it was too soon. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t adequately process
spoken information. It was like I was listening to someone speaking half in a
language I knew and half in a language I didn’t know, which only made me more
frustrated and anxious. I had to drop out because I was failing my classes.
Although I’d broken many bones in the accident, I looked
physically whole. And because traumatic brain injuries are often invisible to
others, people said, “Wow, you’re so lucky! You could have broken your neck!”
Then I felt guilty and ashamed for being frustrated by this response.
Our way of thinking, our intellect, our affect, our personality
— these aren’t things we expect will ever change. We take them for granted. We
fear having an accident that will make us paralyzed, change our ability to move
around, or cause us to lose our hearing or sight. But we don’t think about
having an accident that will cause us to lose ourselves.
For many years after the head injury, I felt like I was passing
as my former self . . . although I didn’t really know who that former self was.
I felt like an impostor, an impostor in my own body. I had to relearn how to
learn. I kept trying to start school again because I couldn’t accept people
telling me that I couldn’t do it. Telling me I can’t finish college? You’re
just asking for it.
I had to study circles around others. Eventually, to my
unspeakable relief, my mental clarity began to return. It took two more tries
before it finally stuck. I finished college four years after my pre‑accident
classmates.
One of the reasons I persisted was that I’d found something I
liked to study: psychology. After college, I managed to enter a profession that
required a fully functioning brain. As Anatole France wrote, “All changes . . .
have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must
die to one life before we can enter another.” Along the way, not surprisingly,
I became a person for whom all these questions of presence and power, of
confidence and doubt, took on a great deal of significance.
*
* *
My injury led me to study the science of presence, but it was my
TED talk that made me realize just how universal the yearning for it is.
Because here’s the thing: most people are dealing with
stressful challenges every day. People in every corner of the world and in all
walks of life are trying to work up the nerve to speak in class, to interview
for a job, to audition for a role, to confront a daily hardship, to stand up
for what they believe in, or to just find peace being who they are. This is
true of people who are homeless and people who are by traditional standards
wildly successful. Victims of bullying and prejudice and sexual assault,
political refugees, people dealing with mental illness or who have suffered
grave injuries — all of them face these challenges. And so do all the people
working to help those people — the parents, spouses, children, counselors,
doctors, colleagues, and friends of those who are struggling. It’s hard for me
to even explain without getting a little choked up.
All these people — the vast majority of whom are not scientists
— have forced me to look at my own research in a new way: they simultaneously
take me away from the science and bring me closer to it. Hearing their stories,
I became obliged to think about how social science findings actually play out in
the real world. I started to care about doing research that changes lives in a
positive way. But I also started coming up with basic questions that may never
have occurred to me if I’d stayed inside the lab and steeped myself in the
literature.
In the beginning I was overwhelmed by the response to the TED
talk and by the sense that I might have made a big mistake in sharing my
research and my personal story. I had no expectation that so many strangers
would watch it and no idea how incredibly vulnerable and exposed I’d feel. It’s
what happens to anyone whom the Internet scoops up and then blasts all over the
world all at once. Some people will recognize you in public.
That’s strange and requires adjustment — whether it’s someone
asking me to stand like Wonder Woman for a selfie or hearing someone yell from
a pedicab (as happened in Austin), “Hey! It’s TED Girl!”
But mostly I feel incredibly lucky — lucky to
have had a chance to share this research and my story with so many people, and
even luckier to have so many of those people share their stories with me. I
love academia, but I find so much inspiration outside the lab and the
classroom. One of the nice things about being at Harvard Business School is
that I am encouraged to cross that researcher-practitioner divide, so I had
already started talking to people in organizations about how research is
applied, what’s working, where the kinks are, and things like that. But I
didn’t anticipate how this enormous world of thoughtful people would open up to
me after the TED talk was posted.
I love these people and I feel very connected and loyal to them.
I want to honor them, to honor their willingness to try — to keep getting back
in the saddle or to help other people keep trying — and their willingness to
sit down and write about their struggles in an email to me, a stranger. Or to
tell me about it in an airport, or a bookstore-café. Now I see how a talk can
work like a song — how people personalize it, connect with it, feel validated
knowing that someone else has felt as they feel. As Dave Grohl once said,
“That’s one of the great things about music: you can sing a song to 85,000
people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.” I was speaking
at a youth homeless shelter and asked the residents to tell me about the
situations they found most stressful. One teenager said, “Showing up at the
doorstep of this shelter.” At another shelter, a woman said, “Calling to ask
for services or help or support. I know I’m going to wait a long time, and then
the person on the other end will be rude and judgmental.” To this, another
woman at the shelter responded, “That’s funny, because I used to work in a call
center, and I was going to say, ‘Taking calls from people who you know are
going to be frustrated and angry, who’ve been waiting a long time while I’m
trying to manage a thousand other incoming calls.’” Exactly.
All the responses I’ve gotten to the TED talk were an
unanticipated gift, because they helped me better understand how and why this
research resonates. In short: the stories helped me understand how to writePresence and
motivated me to do it.
Excerpted from the book Presence,
by Amy Cuddy. Copyright © 2015 by Amy Cuddy. Reprinted with permission of
Little, Brown and Company.
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