Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

by Amy Cuddy

The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm.

When you are not present, people can tell. When you are, people respond.

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.

passion, confidence, and comfortable enthusiasm.

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

True confidence stems from real love and leads to long-term commitment to growth. False confidence comes from desperate passion and leads to dysfunctional relationships, disappointment, and frustration.

Who or what exactly is our authentic best self, and how do we find it when we need it?

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?

Questions for journal

self-affirmation theory.

you can make your deepest self accessible just by spending a little time reflecting on—and perhaps writing about—who you think you are.

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.

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.

Presence with others is first about showing up.

The lesson is that trust is the conduit of influence, and the only way to establish real trust is by being present. Presence is the medium through which trust develops and ideas travel.

Getting to Yes with Yourself,

belief that we have been given something we didn’t earn and don’t deserve and that at some point we’ll be exposed.

Although men experience impostorism to the same extent women do, they may be even more burdened by it because they can’t admit it. They carry it around quietly, secretly, painfully.

They cause us to criticize ourselves relentlessly, spin our wheels, choke at the worst possible moments, disengage—thereby virtually ensuring that we will underperform at the very things we do best and love most.

You never figure out how to write a novel; you just learn how to write the novel that you’re on.

Power makes us approach. Powerlessness makes us avoid.

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.

the spotlight effect,

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

“We’re taught Lord Acton’s axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don’t believe it’s always true anymore. Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.”58

power causes us to see ourselves as taller than we actually are and others as smaller than they actually are.

Change the images and stereotypes that kids are exposed to. We don’t need

to tell women to be like men. But we do need to encourage girls not to be afraid to express their personal power.

Decisions create confidence.

where our bodies lead, our minds and emotions will follow.

When your mind is racing, when something unexpected happens in a social situation, when you don’t know what to do, you know you can calm yourself by controlling your breathing.”

Our bodies speak to us. They tell us how and what to feel and even think.

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.

speaking in an unhurried way allows us time to communicate clearly, without runaway social anxieties inhibiting us from presenting our true selves. 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.

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.

Expanding your body toughens you to physical pain.

It’s about approaching your biggest challenges without dread, executing them without anxiety, and leaving them without regret.

In each challenging situation, we nudge ourselves: we encourage ourselves to feel a little more courageous, to act a bit more boldly—to step outside the walls of our own fear, anxiety, and powerlessness.

Nudge,

Reframing an emotion, making friends with a picture of your future self, wearing clothing that fits the role—these are just a few of the ways in which we can change the future by slowly, incrementally changing how we interact with the present.

“Don’t fake it till you make it, fake it till you become it.”

William James, told us: “Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”