Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

What would you say if I told you that there was an essential life skill that could make you a better speaker, help you nail job interviews, get you better dates, improve your performance, and make you a better partner and parent? What if I told you that no one has ever bothered to teach you this skill, mostly because we didn't even know what it was? That secret skill is presence, "the state of feeling connected with our own thoughts, values, abilities, and emotions, so that we can better connect with the thoughts, values, abilities, and emotions of others." And Amy Cuddy's book can teach this state of "self-assured enthusiasm" to you and a whole lot more. For example, just last month, my professional singer friend Valerie was terrified of her upcoming auditions because of crippling stage fright. Right about that time, I was fortunate to attend a talk by Amy Cuddy on her new book. Valerie couldn't attend, so I gave her an advance copy of "Presence" that Amy had kindly given us. Valerie watched Amy's TED talk, read half of the book, executed the "power pose" (i.e. expansive body postures like the 'Wonder Woman' and the 'Usain Bolt' held for 2min) and "self-affirmation of core values" techniques right before her auditions, and nailed 'em: three auditions, three jobs booked. And it all worked *that* fast. People -- this is life-changing stuff. As a therapist and speaking coach, I've been teaching Amy's material to to students and clients for a few years, so I was thrilled to hear that she's putting her knowledge into book form. If there were a central premise to the book, it would be this: "The lesson is clear: focus less on the impression you’re making on others and more on the impression you’re making on yourself. The latter serves the former, a phenomenon that should become clearer and clearer throughout this book." Here are some of the things I like about it: -- Ample illustration of the concepts with real-life stories of folks from all over the world who have overcome huge challenges using the "Presence" techniques -- all the way from grade-school kids, to people stuck in bad relationships, to Icelandic show horses (really) -- The author's generosity and vulnerability in sharing of her own stories, e.g her painfully slow recovery from a brain-damaging college car accident and her own struggle with Impostor Syndrome -- It's a fantastic compendium of the relevant science on how the body affects the mind, all in jargon-free, highly accessible form, from the leading scientists of the day. Of course, the main reason I read a book is to learn cool new useful stuff. And even though this book is smack-dab in my own field of work, I still learned a ton (took 19 pages of notes!). Here are some tidbits I particularly appreciated: -- The cortisol-testosterone dual hormone hypothesis: you're most effective when you have high testosterone and low cortisol -- We usually think that confidence leads to decisions and thoughts drive behavior. But a surprising amount of the time, it's the other way around: decisions create confidence and behavior creates thoughts. -- 80% of all fibers from the vagus nerve go from the body to the brain, not the other way around. Body changes mind! -- The more people use the word "I", the less powerful and sure of themselves they are likely to be. -- "Ultimately, participants’ speaking rate had an inverse relationship with how powerful they felt. That is, the more slowly they read the sentences, the more powerful, confident, and effective they felt afterward." Speak slowly to feel powerful! -- Hunched over posture of staring at smartphones ("iPosture") kills both your mood and your productivity. -- Why new year’s resolutions don’t work -- Loved the section on self-nudges: little, incremental ways to change our behavior for the better. -- "The three most important things to understand about the self, particularly as it relates to presence. The self is: 1. Multifaceted, not singular. 2. Expressed and reflected through our thoughts, feelings, values, and behaviors. 3. Dynamic and flexible, not static and rigid." But wait: there's a bonus to Valerie's story. Now that she's back home for Christmas, Valerie's newfound adoption of more empowering posture is transforming her relationship with her sometimes difficult mother (which I'm sure none of you have, but just in case). Applying the teachings of this book can directly affect your relationships, performances, credibility, work, interviews, impostor syndrome, lie detection abilities, and overall mood. That's some important stuff, and "Presence" offers simple, practical, effective solutions to challenges in those areas of life. That's why I'm telling everyone about this book and buying a stack of 'em to press into the hands of my friends. It's quite possible that you, too, will feel compelled to give your friends the gift of a core skill for success after reading "Presence." -- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer, author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 4+ years

Amy Cuddy has written a book that has both heart and brains. We have been friends and colleagues for several years, so I am not a completely objective reader. With that in mind, here are a few reflections on why Presence is an important and worthwhile book. First, she wrestles with the paradoxes surrounding presence. She shares an insight voiced by actress Julianne Moore, which is that people feel the least present when they don’t feel seen by others. This brings her to the linkage between presence and power. The dimension that interests her is "power to control our own states and behaviors,” not power over others. This is the central challenge of the book: how can we learn to exercise that power so we can be confident enough to open ourselves to others? As millions who have seen her TED talk now know, she has researched the mind-body connection that enables us to feel more powerful simply by holding expansive poses typical of people who have just triumphed. Presence goes well beyond her own work to explore complementary research related to the voice and breathing, to name just a few areas she explores. She admits her own skepticism along the way (“I’m not a yoga person.”), but as a researcher she puts the evidence before her personal biases. Ultimately she concludes that William James was right: “Our bodies speak to us. They tell us how and what to feel and even think.” If you want to understand how to use your body to change your brain, there’s no better place to start than Presence.

This review was written for a graduate class assignment. Throughout my time in the classroom and now as an administrator, I have struggled to not sell myself short and to have confidence in my philosophies and ideas. As soon as I saw the tag line, “Bring your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges,” I knew I needed to take the time to read this book. In just 303 pages, Amy Cuddy shares not only her own personal journey with self-confidence, but copious amounts of psychological studies and research to support her hypothesis that the “body shapes the mind” (Cuddy, 2015, pg. 193). In the first half of her book, Cuddy focuses on presence; discussing what it is and how one can develop a strong sense of presence. Throughout the first few chapters, Cuddy shares quotes from individuals that wrote to her about what they thought the definition of presence was. The best definition of presence that resonated me with was shared with Cuddy by a gentleman named Rohan. He wrote, “Presence is confidence without arrogance” (Cuddy, 2015, pg. 26). Cuddy followed this by encouraging her readers to “focus less on the impression you’re making on others and more on the impression you’re making on yourself” (Cuddy, 2015, p. 32). She shared that when we spend so much energy during a presentation or interview worrying about how others are judging us that we don’t have enough energy to focus on what we truly believe and are sharing. In the next two chapters, Cuddy goes into further detail on how to have confidence which requires individuals to analyze what they value most. Cuddy believes “your boldest self emerges through the experience of having full access to your values, traits, and strengths” (Cuddy, 2015, pg. 50). The focus is being authentic and honest and how by truly showing up and being present, we can better connect with others. So much of what we do in education is based on relationships. From when I was a classroom teacher trying to connect with students to now working with teachers in an instructional coaching relationship, I have witnessed that being vulnerable and honest creates a solid foundation for building relationship. One thought that Cuddy shared that resonated with me was, “Presence doesn’t make you dominant in an alpha sense; it actually allows you to hear other people…And for them to become present. You can help people feel more powerful even when you can’t give them formal power” (Cuddy, 2015, p. 64). I thought this was so insightful and so true. Many times, when working with teachers, I am very aware that some may have preconceived notions that since I am an administrator I am trying to demonstrate my own power and control which is not conducive at all to forming the relationship needed in a coaching situation. By being aware of this and using some of the ideas Cuddy shared, I hope to be able to do a better job of being present in order to help the teachers I am working with to be present. Cuddy also does a fantastic job of discussing Imposter Syndrome. Cuddy shares successful individuals who have discussed Imposter Syndrome and how this can impact your presence. It supports the ideas she discussed early in the book in that it causes individuals to “overthink and second-guess. It makes us fixate on how we think others are judging us” (Cuddy, 2015, p. 89). What I appreciated most about this chapter was that she not only discussed Imposter Syndrome, but shared a practical approach in dealing with it and shared, “the more we are aware of our anxieties, the more we communicate about them, and the smarter we are about how they operate, the easier they’ll be to shrug off the next time they pop-up” (Cuddy, 2015, pg. 108). Cuddy starts to transition from discussing presence to how the body shapes the mind by introducing the ideas of power and powerlessness. The primary focus of this chapter was the spotlight effect. Similar to her message in the previous chapters regarding spending too much energy thinking about how others are perceiving and judging us, the spotlight effect describes the idea that we think people pay more attention to us than what they actually are. In the last half of the book, Cuddy focuses more on the human body and how this can impact confidence and presence. I didn’t enjoy the second half of the book as much as the first. Cuddy includes many psychology studies to support her hypothesis. While I understand the need to prove her hypothesis, I do think it made it a much slower read the second half of the book. Cuddy has proved 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” (Cuddy, 2015, pg. 216). Cuddy shared power poses that can be held for two minutes prior to an important event such as a presentation or a test. Performing the power poses will improve presence. Cuddy ends the book by sharing many personal witnesses to how power poses have helped individuals with many different situations in life and ends solidly with the idea that we cannot do a major overhaul and change ourself overnight and that we need to “self-nudge” or make “tiny tweaks to lead to big changes” (Cuddy, 2015, p. 249). I completely agree with Cuddy that the large goals set individuals up for failure and that making baby steps towards an end goal tends to be much more effective. After reading this book, I would definitely recommend it to colleagues, other teachers, and I honestly wish I would’ve been introduced to the idea as a senior in high school or an undergraduate in college. So many of our students struggle with confidence, and many of us are still struggling with self-confidence as adults. At a reasonable price of $12.49, this book would make for a great book study with a group of students or teachers. The fact that this book was published by Hachette Book Group in 2015 makes this a relevant and recently published book that does a good job of covering years of research in supporting the idea that the body truly can shape the mind. At the very least, I would recommend having high school students watch Cuddy’s TED Talk which provides a good summary of the ideas she shares in this book.

Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. This book explains the strong correlation between physical behaviour and emotions/thoughts/self-belief/authentic-self. A variety of strategies were clearly explained, with excellent supportive evidence, to enable me to nudge myself into making realistic changes in my behaviour and how I live my life. I am more aware of the physical forms I make with my body, and am now making choices about who I am and how present I am. Many things I have thought about doing for years, such as daily writing journal entries and doing yoga poses, are actually now happening. The written style is personal and also academic. An easy page-turning read. I highly recommend this book. Life changing! Spread the word. Hold a power pose now.

Everyone can get the best of themselves, self confidence, and the power of leaving without fears. Start believing of great things can be done by every person and living the freedom of been a big actor not only a viewer of life.

Amazing book! Very inspiring. I recommend to anyone interested in human behavior.

Life changing while witty and extremely enjoyable. This is a book everyone (everyone!) must read. With incremental changes you become the best version of yourself and (re)claim your personal power. It’s yours for the taking.

It doesn't just repeat the TED Talk. An incredibly huge amount of studies make this book delve much deeper than just "pose for power". It reaches various different psychological approaches to different situations – such as the power of self-affirmation, how to establish confidence with other people, impostor syndrome, social vs personal power, body language from an evolutionary perspective, scientifically proven connections between body and mind, how disabled people can strike power poses within their minds, and finally, how posing can improve our well-being. All those chapters before the final conclusion managed to add something to how I saw myself and my life. And thankfully, questions I had from the TED Talk were answered: such as "does maintaining a better posture during work time affects my mood?" or "does the position I sleep in/wake up in make a difference?". If you are wondering the answer: it is yes. Incorporating those small changes such as no longer sitting in an "ankles wrapped" position or stretching a power pose upon waking up made big changes in my day, since I tended to fall into powerless poses very often. I have some very light criticisms about the book, though. One of them is how the author is skeptical of mindfulness, which is a missed opportunity. Recent books such as Brewer's Unwinding Anxiety scientifically show how mindfulness meditation is very effective for anxiety and other disorders. Cuddy's perspective on presence is, at least from my experience, very closely related to mindfulness. But instead of working on this relation, Cuddy argues that in order to reach a mindful state, one would have to "turn off thoughts". However, according to the actual description of Mindfulness from books such as Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness for Beginners, the technique is about relating differently to your thoughts, not shutting them down. While Cuddy gives mindfulness advice such as "looking at thoughts/anxiety, realizing it is there and then moving on", she dismisses the relation to mindfulness by judging it as a "transcendental eternal now". I think her philosophy and science would benefit a lot from a less biased view towards mindfulness - which is ironic, since in the last chapters she advocates for yoga, a practice that heavily incorporates mindfulness. Another biased view, perhaps wrapped in good intentions, is how she describes the difference between men's and women's body language as "almost entirely a social phenomenon". This of course has to do with the current bias of social sciences to label everything as "social" and ignore everything "biological". For instance, other primate societies, such as the ones described in Robert Ardrey's famous book African Genesis, also deal with less power-posing females. The reason is simply that they don't have to fight for territory nor display dominance - while monkey males fight to dominate and protect territories, females take care of children. Of course, in the nowadays human world, everything is drastically different: females have the same roles as men and should empower themselves to do big things - but it's kind of not scientific to dismiss our well-documented monkey-like tendency, namely the male tendency to aggressiveness and dominance, just because it is not at all pleasant. But leaving out these and other small flaws which derive from the sad current reality of the social sciences, it is an incredible, life-changing book, which proves itself as a great tool to deal with lots of mental issues.