People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.
Amy Cuddy
Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.
The mind shapes the body, and the body shapes the mind.
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.
Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the 'iHunch.' I've also heard people call it 'text neck,' and in my work, I sometimes refer to it as 'iPosture.'
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.
Practice smiling by holding a pencil between your teeth for twenty minutes.
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. And it's doing so in ways that either facilitate or impede our ability to bring our authentic best selves to our biggest challenges.
I'm good enough; I'm smart enough. Self-affirmation is where people list their core values. These are things that really make them who they are.
Trust comes before strength, and it becomes a conduit of influence. Your strength is a little bit threatening before people trust you.
Authenticity doesn't just mean you're not filtering what you're saying, it's about being able to know and access the best parts of yourself and bring them forward.
If you're going into finance, you might be dealing with a lot of sexism and a lot of alpha behavior. How are you going to deal with that? How are you going to feel powerful and comfortable with being who you are?
It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.
A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across.
People want to feel understood by their leaders.
People have a lot of control over their ability to rise to the occasion and to show their best or their aspirational selves.
When we're sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless.
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.
When you walk into those situations that have a lot of conflict in them, the first thing to do is to be present enough to allow the other person to speak first. You're not giving power away; you're actually allowing them to feel seen and understood.
Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.
When you have a novel, exciting finding, that gets attention. People are going to push back, and that's honestly how science should work.
Entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful if they're able to be present while pitching their ideas. It's about maintaining presence during big challenges - very high stakes moments with some component of social judgment. Everyone has them, whether they're entrepreneurs or not.
There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.
There is no one who is present all the time, but you work on becoming present when you are interacting with people who are working for you, being able to hear them without a sense of threat, to go into those meetings with confidence and not arrogance.
I sometimes work with a communications and media training firm called KNP Communications. It's nice to bring the research to the practitioners; I learn a lot watching how they put it into practice, and I know they like to be on top of what's happening on the research front.
Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.
Politicians are very experienced - maybe too experienced - at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.
You have to buy what you're selling. If you don't buy what you're selling, nobody will.
I would never encourage anyone to adopt a contractive posture. It's not good for you physically. It's not good for you psychologically.
Charisma seems to be more about the intoxicating quality that you have on other people, as opposed to presence, which is more about the self in relation to others, and how you feel you represented yourself in a situation, and how you were able to engage. So it's less about how others see you and more about how you see yourself.
I want people to be able to influence themselves. We convince ourselves, and that allows us to convince others.
