Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

by Amy Cuddy

The feeling that arises from personal power is not the desire to have control; it’s the effortless feeling of being in control — lucid, calm, and not dependent on the behavior of others. This kind of power, as I hope to show you, becomes self-reinforcing. The thinking, communication, and action that proceeds from it can only enhance it.

People who feel socially powerless are, by definition, dependent on powerful others to lead the way. This causes the powerless to endorse the unfair systems that reinforce their state.

The processes we identify are likely to perpetuate inequality insofar as the powerless justify rather than strive to change the hierarchical structures that disadvantage them.

Referred to as the “dominance hormone” or the “assertiveness hormone,” testosterone tracks with dominant behavior in humans, chimpanzees, baboons, lemurs, lambs, birds, and even fish and reflects changes in an individual’s status and power.41 High-status individuals — i.e., those who possess social power, the alphas — tend to have high levels of basal testosterone. In

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky found that individuals with high testosterone were more likely than others to engage in competitive, “status-seeking” behaviors when opportunities arose to ascend the hierarchy and assume the top rank (e.g., when an established alpha is injured).42 And this relationship between status and testosterone is reciprocal: not only is basal testosterone a good predictor of who will rise to the top, but rising to the top also increases an individual’s circulating levels of testosterone. As status is gained, testosterone rises.

Less intuitive, and more interesting, is the role of a second hormone, cortisol, commonly referred to as the “stress hormone.” Cortisol is secreted from the adrenal cortex in response to physical stressors, such as running to catch the train, and psychological stressors, such as fretting about taking an exam. Its primary function is to mobilize energy by increasing blood sugar and helping to metabolize fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Two leading social neuroendocrinology researchers, professors Pranjal Mehta and Robert Josephs, have proposed that testosterone is related to power only when cortisol is low, which they refer to as the dual-hormone hypothesis.46 Just as powerlessness saps our executive function and makes us anxious, so, too, does high cortisol. So when cortisol is high, high testosterone does not relate to powerful feelings and behaviors.

Again, high testosterone levels correlated with these traits, but only for people who also had low cortisol.

The people most likely to cheat were those who had both high testosterone and high cortisol. As study coauthor Robert Josephs explained, “Testosterone furnishes the courage to cheat, and elevated cortisol provides a reason to cheat.

All too often, social power creates the kind of asymmetric interdependence that breeds inequity, injustice, and antisocial behaviors such as stereotyping.

“Steepling communicates that we are one with our thoughts, we are not wavering, we are not vacillating. At that precise moment when we steeple, we are communicating universally that we are confident in our thoughts and beliefs, sure in our affirmation, trusting of ourselves.”10

In a famous 1988 paper, Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper went even further, describing the results of a study that tested what had by then come to be known as the facial feedback hypothesis.

As researchers discovered in the decades that followed, facial feedback is not limited to smiling and good moods: it also drives negative emotions.

Feelings are the consequences . . . of emotional behavior and bodily response.”19

And, as we’re about to discover, the evidence seems to agree: where our bodies lead, our minds and emotions will follow.

veterans

Our bodies speak to us. They tell us how and what to feel and even think. They change what goes on inside our endocrine systems, our autonomic nervous systems, our brains, and our minds without our being conscious of a thing. How you carry yourself — your facial expressions, your postures, your breathing — all clearly affect the way you think, feel, and behave.

The way you carry yourself is a source of personal power — the kind of power that is the key to presence. It’s the key that allows you to unlock yourself — your abilities, your creativity, your courage, and even your generosity.

The high-status person is looking out at the world and the low-status person is looking at himself.

Movement, like posture, tells the brain how it feels and even manages what it remembers. As walking becomes more open, upright, and buoyant, our memories about ourselves follow suit.

As I mentioned in chapter 6, when we feel powerful, even our voices spread out and take up more space than they do when we feel powerless. Stanford University psychologists Lucia Guillory and Deborah Gruenfeld refer to this as “a way of claiming social space.” We don’t rush our words. We’re not afraid to pause. We feel deserving of the time we’re using. We even make more direct eye contact while we’re speaking. Guillory and Gruenfeld suggest that slow speech demonstrates a kind of openness: “When people speak slowly they run the risk of being interrupted by others. In speaking slowly one indicates that he or she has no fear of interruption. People who speak slowly have a higher chance of being heard clearly and understood. They also take up the time of those with whom they’re communicating.

That is, the more slowly they read the sentences, the more powerful, confident, and effective they felt afterward. In a sense, speaking in an unhurried way allows us time to communicate clearly, without runaway social anxieties inhibiting us from presenting our true selves.

In other words, temporarily holding powerless poses increased the negative thoughts people had about themselves, which squashed their drive to face challenges and dulled their creativity.

People in neutral poses were not ruminating about all their bad qualities; they were thinking about the tasks at hand.

What I most want you to understand is that your body is continuously and convincingly sending messages to your brain, and you get to control the content of those messages.

How you carry your body shapes how you carry out your life. Your body shapes your mind. Your mind shapes your behavior. And your behavior shapes your future. Let your body tell you that you’re powerful and deserving, and you become more present, enthusiastic, and authentically yourself.

In later years, I realized two things. First, slowing down is a power move. Just as speaking slowly, taking pauses, and occupying space are related to power, so, too, is taking your time to figure out how to respond and slowing down your decision-making process in high-pressure moments.

Second, and this may sound kind of weird: doing nothing was doing something.

This idea is akin to William James’s well-supported hypothesis that we acquire our feelings from our expressions.

This is how self-fulfilling prophecies work: we have an expectation about who someone is and how she’s likely to behave, then we treat her in a way that is likely to elicit those behaviors, thus confirming our initial expectations . . . and so on.

The more you reframe your anxiety as excitement, the happier and more successful you may become.

Composing the reflected best-self portrait: Building pathways for becoming extraordinary in work organizations.

Composing the reflected best-self portrait.