Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

by Amy Cuddy

“fake it till you become it.”

self-assured enthusiasm is an impressively useful indicator of success.

When we try to fake confidence or enthusiasm, other people can tell that something is off, even if they can’t precisely articulate what that thing is. In fact, when job applicants try too hard to make a good impression through nonverbal tactics such as forced smiles, it can backfire—interviewers dismiss them as phony and manipulative.11

It was popularized in the West in the mid-twentieth century by British philosopher Alan Watts, who, Popova explains, “argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction,”

The kind of presence I’m talking about comes through incremental change. You don’t need to embark on a long pilgrimage, experience a spiritual epiphany, or work on a complete inner transformation. There’s nothing wrong with these things. But they’re daunting; they’re “big.” To a lot of us, they’re elusive, abstract, idealistic. Instead, let’s focus on moments—achieving a state of psychological presence that lasts just long enough to get us through our most challenging, high-stakes, a-lot-is-on-the-line situations, such as job interviews, difficult conversations, idea pitches, asking for help, public speeches, performances, and the like.

Susan Cain, Harvard Law School graduate and author of the culture-shifting bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, explains, “By their nature, introverts tend to get passionate about one, two or three things in their life… [a]nd in the service of their passion for an idea they will go out and build alliances and networks and acquire expertise and do whatever it takes to make it happen.” One need not be loud or gregarious to be passionate and effective. In fact, a bit of quiet seems to go a long way toward being present.18

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.

Presence manifests as confidence without arrogance.

So, as Majid wrote, presence is “when all your senses agree on one thing at the same time.” Presence manifests as resonant synchrony.

Our challenges give us insights and experiences that only we have had. And—I don’t want to be glib about this—they are things we need to not only accept but also embrace and even see as strengths. While we may not have chosen to include them in our concepts of ourselves, they are there. And what more can we do but own them?

The kind of self-affirmation I’m talking about—the kind whose effects Steele and others have studied—doesn’t have anything to do with reciting generic one-liners in the mirror, nor does it involve boasting or self-aggrandizement. Instead it’s about reminding ourselves what matters most to us and, by extension, who we are. In effect, it’s a way of grounding ourselves in the truth of our own stories. It makes us feel less dependent on the approval of others and even comfortable with their disapproval, if that’s what we get.

By finding, believing, expressing, and then engaging our authentic best selves, especially if we do it right before our biggest challenges, we reduce our anxiety about social rejection and increase our openness to others. And that allows us to be fully present.

hers, the general feeling that we don’t belong—that we’ve fooled people into thinking we’re more competent and talented than we actually are—is not so unusual. Most of us have experienced it, at least to some degree. It’s not simple stage fright or performance anxiety; rather, it’s the deep and sometimes paralyzing belief that we have been given something we didn’t earn and don’t deserve and that at some point we’ll be exposed. Psychologists refer to it as impostor syndrome, the impostor phenomenon, impostor fears, and impostorism.

When we feel like impostors, we don’t attribute our accomplishments to something internal and constant, such as talent or ability; instead we credit something beyond our control, such as luck.20 Rather than owning our successes, we distance ourselves from them. We deny ourselves the very support we need in order to thrive.

Inevitably, there are people out there who are going to withhold their approval from us, assert their superiority over us, even actively try to undermine us, and we have to protect ourselves from negative voices like theirs.

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. In representative samples, economic powerlessness in the United States was correlated with greater perceived legitimacy of political agendas and policies that reinforce the subjects’ powerlessness.

And lack of personal power can be as dangerous as possession of social power. Claremont Graduate University professor of behavioral and organizational sciences Tarek Azzam and his colleagues showed, in a series of studies, that the more powerless people believed they were, the more they felt anxiety about—and aggression toward—outsiders and immigrants. (This effect was even stronger for men who felt powerless.)57

In 1872, Charles Darwin proposed that many expressions of emotion are biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive, signaling important social information. He argued that expressions of emotion serve us by prompting an immediate action that benefits us, given our environmental circumstances. If we see an angry face coming at us, we flee. But to know that the face signifies anger, we first have to recognize that particular expression. In other words, Darwin was suggesting, certain expressions of emotion are universal—recognized in virtually all cultures.

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 we carry ourselves from moment to moment blazes the trail our lives take. When we embody shame and powerlessness, we submit to the status quo, whatever that may be. We acquiesce to emotions, actions, and outcomes that we resent. We don’t share who we really are. And all this has real-life consequences. 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. It doesn’t give you skills or talents you don’t have; it helps you to share the ones you do have. It doesn’t make you smarter or better informed; it makes you more resilient and open. It doesn’t change who you are; it allows you to be who you are. Expanding your body expands your mind, which allows you to be present. And the results of that presence can be far-reaching. Taking control of your body language is not just about posing in a powerful way. It’s also about the fact that we pose in a powerless way much more often than we think—and we need to change that.

Carrying yourself in a powerful way directs your feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and body to feel powerful and be present (and even perform better) in situations ranging from the mundane to the most challenging.

power is embodied, or grounded in bodily states. To think and act like a powerful person, people do not need to possess role power or recall being in a powerful role.” In short, a simple bodily posture, held for just a couple of minutes, produces bigger feedback effects than being assigned to a powerful role.…

When people receive negative feedback while holding an expansive posture, the criticism is less likely to undermine their belief that they—not others—control their own destiny.

the more often people say “I,” the less powerful and sure of themselves they are likely to be.

As Pennebaker explained in a Wall Street Journal interview, “There is a misconception that people who are confident, have power, have high-status tend to use ‘I’ more than people who are low status.… That is completely wrong. The high-status person is looking out at the world and the low-status person is looking at himself.”

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.”

Expanding your body language—through posture, movement, and speech—makes you feel more confident and powerful, less anxious and self-absorbed, and generally more positive.

Expanding your body causes you to think about yourself in a positive light and to trust in that self-concept. It also clears your head, making space for creativity, cognitive persistence, and abstract thinking.

powerless, closed postures not only undermine persistence, they also increase learned helplessness—the process whereby people avoid challenges they’ve previously struggled with, assuming they are not capable of effectively handling them. They may have helped us to hide from predators or to convey submissiveness to dangerous and volatile alphas in primitive times, but it’s hard to find evidence that they continue to benefit us today, in the twenty-first century. Expanding your body frees you to approach, act, and persist.

Expanding your body physiologically prepares you to be present; it overrides your instinct to fight or flee, allowing you to be grounded, open, and engaged.

People who are present become less focused on how others might be judging or threatening them. We should be able to attend and respond to others, but focusing on them too much isn’t just counterproductive, it’s also destructive, undermining our self-confidence and interfering with our ability to notice what’s being exchanged in the moment. Even in the imagined power pose condition, people were able to fully inhabit the moment—noticing without judging their environment, feeling neither threatened by nor dominant over the strangers coming in and out of the room.

“Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few and powerlessness in the hands of so many.” This is true of personal power as well as social power. Too many of us suffer from pervasive feelings of personal powerlessness. We have a terrible habit of obstructing our own paths forward, especially at the worst possible moments. Too often we acquiesce to feelings of powerlessness. We consent to them, which does nothing but reinforce them and take us away from the reality of our lives.

Although our body language governs the way other people perceive us, our body language also governs how we perceive ourselves and how those perceptions become reinforced through our own behavior, our interactions, and even our physiology.

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.

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

I could sleep on it (which, psychologists have demonstrated, often improves the quality of our decisions, something I’ve written about in the past1).

“Perfectionism,” wrote Anne Lamott, “is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”

presence is not about winning. It cannot be motivated by desire for a certain outcome—although the outcome is likely to be better when you are present. It’s about approaching your biggest challenges without dread, executing them without anxiety, and leaving them without regret.

Around 2005, a group of economists and psychologists began to explore the notion, based on the results of many studies, that the best way to change people’s behavior for the better might not be to request or demand big changes in attitudes and preferences but to subtly, almost imperceptibly, nudge people in a healthful direction. The tactics of this approach are neither dramatic nor bold, and the changes produced are, in the beginning, conservative. But over time, the changes spread and fortify. They incrementally build upon themselves, ultimately changing not only behavior but also attitudes and even social norms, which reinforce and extend behavioral changes throughout and across communities. They become the new status quo. In 2008, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein published the bestselling book Nudge, which inspired policy makers around the world to reexamine their assumptions about human behavior. In

normative influence (deciding how to behave based on what’s socially appropriate)

informational influence (deciding how to behave based on an assessment of objective reality).

Although many people find it unsettling, the fact is that as much as we like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, we’re deeply concerned about fitting in.

Body-mind nudges avoid the key psychological obstacles inherent in mind-mind interventions, such as verbal self-affirmations of power (e.g., telling yourself “I am confident!”). Why do those approaches often fail? Because they require you to tell yourself something you don’t believe, at least not in the moment. While you’re in the throes of doubting yourself, you’re certainly not going to trust your own voice to tell you that you’re wrong to doubt yourself (even if you are, in fact, wrong to doubt yourself).