PRESENCE by Amy Cuddy

• Presence stems from believing in and trusting yourself—your real, honest feelings, values, and abilities. That’s important, because if you don’t trust yourself, how can others trust you?
• most people are dealing with stressful challenges every day.
• We all want a do-over. But we’ll never get one.
• 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.
• 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.
• Presence emerges when we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned to our most sincere selves.
• Our search for presence isn’t about finding charisma or extraversion or carefully managing the impression we’re making on other people. It’s about the honest, powerful connection that we create internally, with ourselves.
• Presence is not all or nothing. Sometimes we lose it and have to start again, and that’s okay.
• 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.
• In short: 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. And that makes us convincing.
• 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.
• Keep in mind that in all interactions, both parties are judging and both are being judged.
• focus less on the impression you’re making on others and more on the impression you’re making on yourself.
• Sadly, confidence is often confused with cockiness.
• A truly confident person does not require arrogance, which is nothing more than a smoke screen for insecurity.
• A confident person—knowing and believing in her identity—carries tools, not weapons. A confident person does not need to one-up anyone else. A confident person can be present to others, hear their perspectives, and integrate those views in ways that create value for everyone.
• True belief—in oneself, in one’s ideas—is grounding; it defuses threat.
• Presence manifests as confidence without arrogance.
• If our actions aren’t consistent with our values, we won’t feel that we’re being true to ourselves. If our emotions aren’t reflected in our physical expressions, we don’t feel real.
• It turns out that there’s no “Pinocchio effect,” no single nonverbal cue that will betray a liar.
• Simply put, lying—or being inauthentic—is hard work.
• Deceptive individuals must maintain their duplicity by falsifying emotional expressions concordant with the lie, and suppressing “leakage” of their true emotions.
• It turns out that we are not much better than chance at accurately detecting lies, although most of us think we excel at it.
• Truth reveals itself more clearly through our actions than it does through our words.
• The less present we are, the more poorly we perform.
• Physical and psychological adversity shape us. Our challenges give us insights and experiences that only we have had.
• The key to effective self-affirmation is that it is grounded in the truth.
• 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.
• And the way you tell your story to yourself matters.
• “The key to presence—and this is the one thing they tell you in school—the key is relaxation,”
• preparation is obviously important, but at some point, you must stop preparing content and start preparing mind-set. You have to shift from what you’ll say to how you’ll say it.
• “When you are present and available, people have a desire to offer you their authentic self. All you have to do is ask. No one keeps a secret. No one. And they might be resistant initially to telling you something, but eventually they’ll give you their whole life story,”
• Presence doesn’t make you dominant in an alpha sense; it actually allows you to hear other people. And for them to feel heard. And for them to become present.
• Presence with others is first about showing up. Literally, physically, showing up.
• But, more specifically, presence is about how we show up—how we approach the people we hope to connect with and influence.
• Usually we think that a person we’ve just met is either more warm than competent or more competent than warm, but not both in equal measure. We like our distinctions to be clear—it’s a human bias. So we classify new acquaintances into types. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.
• Occasionally we see people as incompetent and cold—foolish jerks—or as warm and competent—lovable stars. The latter is the golden quadrant, because receiving trust and respect from other people allows you to interact well and get things done.
• So we want others to be warm and trustworthy, but we want them to see us as competent and strong.
• 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.
• Revealing your true self frees others to reveal theirs.
• Why is it so hard for us to shut up and listen? There’s a simple answer. When we encounter someone we’ve never met before, we immediately fear that we won’t be taken seriously.
• Giving up control is scary. It’s taking a step into the unknown. Who does that? Only the foolish. Or the brave.
• Listening is crucial to presence.
• Real listening can’t happen unless we have a sincere desire to understand what we’re hearing.
• The paradox of listening is that by relinquishing power—the temporary power of speaking, asserting, knowing—we become more powerful.
• When people contribute to the solutions—when they are co-owners of them—they are more likely to commit to and follow through with them.
• People are also much more likely to accept even a negative outcome when they feel that the procedure that got them there was fair.
• When people feel heard, they are more willing to listen.
• part of presence is accepting the possibility of disappointment and not allowing that to knock you off course or cause you to doubt.
• What appears at first to be failure may actually be something else altogether—an opportunity to grow in an unanticipated way.
• in some situations, there’s no such thing as winning.
• Sometimes we express ourselves most eloquently by not expressing anything—by allowing our presence, unexplained and unembellished, to speak for itself.
• Impostorism causes us to overthink and second-guess. It makes us fixate on how we think others are judging us (in these fixations, we’re usually wrong), then fixate some more on how those judgments might poison our interactions.
• Presence and impostorism are opposing sides of the same coin—and we are the coin.
• Men who deviate from the strong-assertive stereotype—in other words, men who are able to express self-doubt—risk experiencing what psychologists call “stereotype backlash”: punishment, which often takes the form of harassment or even ostracism, for failing to conform to societal expectations.
• Who fears failure most? People who have achieved something—people who are demonstrably anything but frauds.
• Impostorism undercuts our ability to feel good about the things we do well, particularly when we are being compensated for them.
• Here’s the cruel irony: achievements don’t stamp out impostor fears. In fact, success can actually make them worse.
• Achievements present us with new situations and opportunities, which only exacerbate the impostor fears, since every new situation is another proving ground.
• Research shows that in pressure-filled situations, when we are distracted by thinking about possible outcomes of our performance, our skills are measurably diminished.
• Fears that we will be unmasked as frauds can defeat us even before we begin.
• Nothing feels worse than losing part of your core identity.
• You never figure out how to write a novel; you just learn how to write the novel that you’re on.
• Most of us will probably never completely shed our fears of being fraudulent. We’ll just work them out as they come, one by one.
• Power makes us approach. Powerlessness makes us avoid.
• 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.
• 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.
• In short, social power is power over—the capacity to control others’ states and behaviors. Personal power is power to—the ability to control our own states and behaviors.
• the feeling of power or its absence can be summoned forth even by little nudges in one direction or another.
• We are easy beings to manipulate.
• A heightened sense of danger increases our social anxiety in several ways.
• Power makes us fearless, independent, and less susceptible to outside pressures and expectations, allowing us to be more creative.
• People who feel socially powerless are, by definition, dependent on powerful others to lead the way.
• And lack of personal power can be as dangerous as possession of social power.
• Power doesn’t just expand our minds; it also expands our bodies. Expansive, open body language is closely tied to dominance across the animal kingdom, including humans, other primates, dogs, cats, snakes, fish, and birds, and many other species. When we feel powerful, we make ourselves bigger.
• When we feel powerful, we speak more slowly and take more time.
• When we are feeling powerless, in virtually every way that we can, we make ourselves smaller.
• Powerful body language signals others to either approach or avoid.
• Body-language norms vary widely among cultures, and understanding these idiosyncrasies can make or break cross-cultural interactions.
• Decisions create confidence.
• The body and brain are part of a single integrated, complicated, beautiful system.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Posture not only shapes the way we feel, it also shapes the way we think about ourselves—from our self-descriptions to the certainty and comfort with which we hold them.
• 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.
• The body shapes the mind, and the mind shapes behavior. But the body also directs itself.
• Presence often begins with the physical—showing up and sticking around.
• Expansive body language increases our feelings of physical strength and skill; contractive body language decreases them.
• 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.
• Power posing can make us feel stronger.
• Expanding your body toughens you to physical pain.
• Research has shown that when people perceptually inhabit virtual representations of themselves, they tend to take on their avatars’ characteristics.
• power. A mountain of evidence shows that our bodies are pushing, shaping, even leading our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That the body affects the mind is, it’s fair to say, incontestable.
• 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.
• 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.
• Use the big poses to speak to yourself before walking into a big challenge.
• As important as it is to adopt bold power poses before challenging situations, it’s just as important to maintain less bold but still strong, upright, and open postures during challenging situations.
• It’s important to avoid falling into the powerless poses we often mindlessly inhabit.
• our behavior reinforces our behavior,
• When our body language is confident and open, other people respond in kind, unconsciously reinforcing not only their perception of us but also our perception of ourselves.
• By simply reframing the meaning of the emotion we’re experiencing—by nudging ourselves from anxiety to excitement—we shift our psychological orientation, harnessing the cognitive and physiological resources we need to succeed under pressure. We effectively transform our stage fright into stage presence.