Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

by Amy Cuddy

“fake it till you become it.”

“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.”

We can’t be fully engaged in an interaction when we’re busy second-guessing ourselves and attending to the hamster wheel in our heads —

Alan Watts wrote in The Wisdom of Insecurity, “To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, ‘I am listening to this music,’ you are not listening.”

What I’m saying here is that first impressions based on the qualities of enthusiasm, passion, and confidence might actually be quite sound — precisely because they’re so hard to fake. When you are not present, people can tell. When you are, people respond.