Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

by Amy Cuddy

“fake it till you become it.

Presence stems from believing in and trusting yourself — your real, honest feelings, values, and abilities.

looking foolish.

Before we even show up at the doorstep of an opportunity, we are teeming with dread and anxiety, borrowing trouble from a future that hasn’t yet unfolded.

Exactly when we most need to be present, we are least likely to be.

Next time you’re faced with one of these tense moments, imagine approaching it with confidence and excitement instead of doubt and dread. Imagine feeling energized and at ease while you’re there, liberated from your fears about how others might be judging you. And imagine leaving it without regret, satisfied that you did your best, regardless of the measurable outcome. No phantom to be chased; no spirit under the stairs.

The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm. Those who succeeded did not spend their precious moments in the spotlight worrying about how they were doing or what others thought of them.

They were signaling how much that person truly believed in the value and integrity of her idea and her ability to bring it to fruition, which may in turn have signaled something about the quality of the proposition itself.

There’s another reason we tend to put our faith in people who project passion, confidence, and enthusiasm: these traits can’t easily be faked. When we’re feeling brave and confident, our vocal pitch and amplitude are significantly more varied, allowing us to sound expressive and relaxed. When we fearfully hold back — activating the sympathetic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response — our vocal cords and diaphragms constrict, strangling our genuine enthusiasm.10

Presence, as I mean it throughout these pages, is the state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values, and potential.

Presence emerges when we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned to our most sincere selves.

Through self-nudges, small tweaks in our body language and mind-sets, we can achieve presence.

Presence stems from believing and trusting your story — your feelings, beliefs, values, and abilities.

Presence isn’t about pretending to be competent; it’s about believing in and revealing the abilities you truly have. It’s about shedding whatever is blocking you from expressing who you are. It’s about tricking yourself into accepting that you are indeed capable.

Presence mattered to the judges because it signaled authenticity, believability, and genuineness;

the manifest qualities of presence — confidence, enthusiasm, comfort, being captivating — are taken as signs of authenticity, and for good reason: the more we are able to be ourselves, the more we are able to be present.

focus less on the impression you’re making on others and more on the impression you’re making on yourself.

Some people who claim to have a positive self-image do indeed have one. But others are expressing something known as fragile high self-esteem — their seemingly positive view of themselves depends on continuous external validation, a self-view that’s based less in reality than it is on wishful thinking. They are intolerant of people and feedback that might challenge their brittle high opinion of themselves. While they may appear confident in some ways, people with fragile high self-esteem quickly become defensive and dismissive of situations and people they perceive as threatening.21

On the other hand, the source of secure high self-esteem is internal. It doesn’t need external validation to thrive, and it doesn’t crumble at the first sign of a threat. People who have a solid sense of self-worth reflect that feeling through healthy, effective ways of dealing with challenges and relationships, making them both more resilient and more open.

Paradoxically, anxiety also makes us more self-centered, since when we’re acutely anxious, we obsess over ourselves and what others think of us.

It turns out that there’s no “Pinocchio effect,”27 no single nonverbal cue that will betray a liar. Judging a person’s honesty is not about identifying one stereotypical “reveal,” such as fidgeting or averted eyes. Rather, it’s about how well or poorly our multiple channels of communication — facial expressions, posture, movement, vocal qualities, speech — cooperate. When we are being inauthentic — projecting a false emotion or covering a real one — our nonverbal and verbal behaviors begin to misalign. Our facial expressions don’t match the words we’re saying. Our postures are out of sync with our voices. They no longer move in harmony with each other; they disintegrate into cacophony.

The self is: 1. Multifaceted, not singular. 2. Expressed and reflected through our thoughts, feelings, values, and behaviors. 3. Dynamic and flexible, not static and rigid. It reflects and responds to the situation

Roberts guides people through the process of creating this portrait by helping them to identify enablers and blockers — the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that help and hurt their ability to summon forth their best selves.

What three words best describe you as an individual? • What is unique about you that leads to your happiest times and best performance? • Reflect on a specific time — at work or at home — when you were acting in a way that felt “natural” and “right.” How can you repeat that behavior today? • What are your signature strengths and how can you use them? But it’s not enough to identify the values, traits, and strengths that represent your authentic best self — you must then affirm and trust the answers. You must believe them. They tell an important part of your personal story, and if you don’t believe your story, why would anyone else?

The TSST experience in general, across many, many studies, has been shown to cause a cortisol spike.

before heading into a situation where we may be challenged, we can reduce our anxiety by reaffirming the parts of our authentic best selves we value most. When we feel safe with ourselves, we become significantly less defensive and more open to feedback, making us better problem solvers, too.16

In essence, self-affirmation is the practice of clarifying your story to yourself, allowing you to trust that who you are will come through naturally in what you say and do.

it’s looking at the youth not as the problem but as partners.

We don’t have enough intellectual bandwidth to perform at our best and simultaneously critique our performance. Instead we’re caught in a faulty circuit of trying to anticipate, read, interpret, and reinterpret how other people are judging us, all of which prevents us from noticing and interpreting what’s actually happening in the situation. This dynamic, which psychologists refer to as self-monitoring, is significantly higher for people who experience impostor fears. It takes us out of ourselves. It stands in the way of our presence.

Social psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues shed light on how this cycle works: they propose that power activates a psychological and behavioral approach system. When we feel powerful, we feel free — in control, unthreatened, and safe.2 As a result, we are attuned to opportunities more than threats. We feel positive and optimistic, and our behavior is largely unrestricted by social pressures.

On the other hand, powerlessness activates a psychological and behavioral inhibition system, the “equivalent to an alarm-threat system.”3 We are more attuned to threats than to opportunities. We feel generally anxious and pessimistic, and we’re susceptible to social pressures that inhibit us and make our behavior unrepresentative of our sincere selves.

Power makes us approach. Powerlessness makes us avoid.

Power affects our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and even physiology in fundamental ways that directly facilitate or obstruct our presence, our performance, and the very course of our lives. When we feel powerless, we cannot be present. In a way, presence is power — a special kind of power that we confer on ourselves. (Recall Julianne Moore’s observation when I asked her about presence: “It’s power. It’s always about power, isn’t it?

powerlessness is at least as likely to corrupt as power is.

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

Social power is characterized by the ability to exert dominance, to influence or control the behavior of others. Social power is earned and expressed through disproportionate control over valued resources. A person who possesses access to assets that others need — food, shelter, money, tools, information, status, attention, affection — is in a powerful position. The list of things this type of power can gain is endless, but social power itself is a limited resource. The constant is that it requires some kind of control over others.6

Personal power is characterized by freedom from the dominance of others. It is infinite, as opposed to zero-sum — it’s about access to and control of limitless inner resources, such as our skills and abilities, our deeply held values, our true personalities, our boldest selves. Personal power — not entirely unlike social power, as I’ll explain — makes us more open, optimistic, and risk tolerant and therefore more likely to notice and take advantage of opportunities.

In short, social power is power over — the capacity to control others’ states and behaviors. Personal power is power to — the ability to...

“Personal power is all about having the confidence to act based on one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and values, and having the sense that one’s actions will be effective.” Effective, in this context, doesn’t mean we will always get the result we desire; instead it means that we will come away from every interaction feeling that we fully and accurately represented who we are and what we want.

What I’m getting at here is this: whether we feel powerful or powerless has huge consequences in our lives.

“Power . . . transforms individual psychology such that the powerful think and act in ways that lead to the retention and acquisition of power,” wrote

have demonstrated in their research that power often operates at a nonconscious level, meaning that it can be activated without our knowledge — turned on like a switch — and can affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in ways we’re not even aware of. That’s good news.

This is one of the ways that social psychologists conduct research into power: by using various devices and exercises to make subjects feel powerful or powerless. Then, once the participants have been primed, the study itself can be carried out, and in this way we can see the differences between the ways powerful and powerless people respond.

Powerlessness and the anxiety that results from it undermine what psychologists call executive functions — high-order cognitive tools such as reasoning, task flexibility, and attention control, all of which are critical to coping well in challenging situations.12 With impaired executive functioning, we become less effective at updating mental information, inhibiting unwanted impulses, and planning future actions. Anxiety also wallops working memory — our ability to recall old information while simultaneously taking in, integrating, and responding to new data — which relies heavily on executive functions.

First published by psychologist John Ridley Stroop in 1935, the Stroop test essentially measures how cognitively agile we are when trying to block interfering signals.

Put simply, the anxious subjects were unable to get out of their own heads and see things from another person’s point of view.

The link between anxiety and self-absorption is bidirectional; they cause each other. In a review of more than two hundred studies, researchers concluded that the more self-focused we are, the more anxious — and also the more depressed and generally negative — we become.16 Self-focus even makes us more sensitive to physical difficulties, such as stomach upset, nasal congestion, and muscle tension.

The reality is that people just aren’t thinking about you as much as you think they are — even when you actually are the center of attention. And if they are, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. All you can do is hit the ball. This is called the spotlight effect, and it’s one of the most enduring and widespread egocentric human biases — to feel that people are paying more attention to us than they actually are . . . and usually in a bad way, not a good way.

In an early study on power and management, supervisors who felt powerless used more coercive power — threats of punishment or even being fired — when dealing with a “problem worker,” whereas supervisors who felt powerful used more personal persuasion approaches, such as praise or admonishment.26 In another study, managers who felt powerless were more ego-defensive, causing them to solicit less input. In fact, managers who felt powerless judged employees who voiced opinions more negatively.

In the fan study, all the subjects were first primed in the ways I described earlier to feel either powerful or powerless.32 While 69 percent of the powerful participants redirected or turned off that annoying fan, only 42 percent of the powerless participants did. The rest just sat there and took it. After all, no one told them they could touch the fan. In the absence of power, they needed the permission of someone with authority to act.