Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges | Dr. Amy Cuddy | IDEAcademy 2018

okay I know statistically speaking because she has the number two most watched TED talk in the history of humanity here's a good chance you've all seen it and that's wonderful if you've done you know as long as you've lived on planet Earth for a couple years you've heard about her you know that she's her list of accolades is as long and I would be overtime she would be giving me the time signal if I went through all of them whether it's Time magazine the BBC The Guardian and the list goes on New York Times bestseller it's it's such an impressive resume and I think one of the reasons dr. Cuddy is so popular is while we respect institutions of higher learning an academic research there's not too much of it that tends to jump over and across the Gulf and translate into everyday life in a meaningful way that can benefit large swathes of the population and somehow dr. Cuddy has managed to crack that code and if you just stop right there and you said that's pretty incredible to be able to do that because it's it's a very special skill set that would be great but sometimes you find people who are wildly talented you know they're so smart but when you meet them you go hey I wish I would have done that I wish I wish I would have kept that image before I met you I've had a bit of an opportunity to spend some time with dr. Cuddy and for all the achievement she's made she's an even better person and that's not just because she's she describes herself as a former deadhead I'm not sure there's any such thing as a former deadhead I knew when she when we discuss which Avett Brothers song was our favorite that she really gets true sadness poetry and culture but it's just so nice to see people who can reach the height of fame and be recognized and maintain the authenticity that they are just as an aside after she's finished here she'll be in Boston for a couple of days than travel to Helsinki where there's two keynote speakers dr. Cuddy and President Obama yeah so when I say I'm extremely thrilled to have dr. Cuddy here I'm extremely thrilled I think we're amazingly fortunate to have her come to our little neck of the woods in the region and without further ado I introduce dr. Amy Cuddy [Applause] thank you so much for coming and thank you for that warm introduction and I was telling him that now I'll get all choked up thinking about the song that we had been talking about the Avett Brothers song I want to say I really am honored to be here I I've gotten to spend some time here just you know the last 24 hours and get to know what's happening around here and I am so impressed with this community I I love it I'm planning my next visit back so very excited to come and talk to your high school students someday really a wonderful place and and thank you for building it because I think it's a great model for so many other people I want to talk to you today about how we find a way to be present in our most challenging situations so I want you to first start by thinking about what is your biggest challenge so what's a situation that you approach with a sense of dread you execute with anxiety and distraction so you're thinking not really about what's happening but you're worrying about what other people are thinking of you you're worried about what you should say in a minute what you should have said up you know a second ago what will happen after this you're not actually paying attention to what is happening in that exchange and you leave with a sense of regret and that regret is usually tinged with the sense of not having been seen so think about a job interview that maybe didn't go well and you leave and you feel like I wish I could have shown them Who I am it's a bad feeling right to be left with that feeling of not really revealing your true self and the idea that you might not get the outcome that you want because you didn't show them who you are is really hard to live with right and when you think about all of these stages you're not present in any of them so before you even go into that challenging situation you're you know you're borrowing trouble from the future right you've decided that it's gonna go badly while you're there you're not there and when you leave your post event processing you're going back over it so how can we instead approach with composure and execute with a kind of calm confidence and leave feeling satisfied feeling satisfied that we showed them who we were that we had a real genuine connection that we did what we could do so think about what that situation is for you and I will give you an example of one from my own life that I hope will will be such a good downward comparison that you will never again feel bad about yourself because you will know that it could never go this poorly so you know I grew up in this very rural area in Pennsylvania Amish country and not many people from my high school went to college and those of us who did you know paid for college well worked through our way through college I was a rollerskating waitress you know I was the only person to go out of state in my high school class you know none of us who went to college felt quite like we knew what to do because it was so new to our to our our kind of our worldview and and so I got there and you know felt felt pretty unsure of myself and then in the second year I was in this very bad car accident I was thrown out of the car we were going 80 miles per hour my friend fell asleep I you know woke up in a hospital I had had a serious traumatic brain injury and was in the hospital for a long time it took me four extra years to finish college because I really had to relearn how to learn so if you I already came in feeling insecure and then you put this on top of it you know I was not exactly feeling like I was the person who should be there then by some miracle I get into Princeton for graduate school you know as soon as I get there I think I'm going to be found out at any moment because this was obviously an admissions mistake so I'm feeling like an impostor from the beginning five years I worked really hard I was getting good grades I was getting you know papers published I was doing the things I needed to do and it seemed to be going well but I didn't notice that it was going well because I was so afraid all the time that someone was going to come along tap me on the shoulder and say I'm excuse me are you Amy Cuddy yes sorry we've made a mistake you need to leave right that's what I was into pating so in my last year my advisor who is a saint took me to a conference that's a very exclusive conference in my field and every year a few grad students get to go to this if they're on the job market and and they're chosen because they're good grad students but again still I was not getting that message that I was a good grad student I said to her what do i do how do I talk to all of these you know famous professors and she said you have to have an elevator pitch right so you have to have like a 30 minutes I mean a 30 second pitch explaining what you do and just you know have that memorized so I memorized it I was ready I get there and on the first evening I walk into the elevator literally and there are three men standing there who are you know giant professors in my field and I recognized them instantly and of course they have no idea who I am except that I have like graduate student in big letters on my on my nametag so they're thinking we have to hear a pitch right and so one of them just says to me with like really the biggest eye-roll oh okay we're in an elevator give us your pitch so that was my invitation to do this thing that I was terrified during I just I don't know what was happening words were falling out of my mouth you know my face went red my mouth went dry I was you know totally going into fight-or-flight mode I was apologizing and restarting and I was planning a whole other life because I was sure that because this pitch was going badly I would never get a job by the time we got to the top which felt like an eternity it you know I never got it together the doors open two of them flee quickly because they're like I this is awful the one who had goaded me to give the pitch does this so he steps across the threshold of the elevator and as the doors are closing he says that was the worst elevator pitch I have ever heard doors closed guess who did not get out of the elevator me right I stayed in the elevator right back down to the lobby where I you know pretty much hid out for the rest of the conference because I was so I was so distraught about how badly that had gone and I wanted to do over and you don't get a do-over so not only did I miss that moment but I missed the next few days but missed I wasn't present psychologically for any of it you know I would love to have a do-over but but what do we do going forward the problem is that when you have those moments you kind of picked up a piece of baggage that you're gonna carry into the next moment like that so now you're weighted down a little bit more you have to be able to put that baggage down you have to be able to leave those moments feeling like I was seeing and I can accept the outcome even if it's not the one that I wanted so presence is the state in which we are tuned to so we know we know who we are and we're able to comfortably access and express our authentic best selves now this word authentic self and best self and these terms are thrown around a lot right now so I want to be clear that what I'm talking about is not first of all when I say authenticity I do not mean unfiltered right there are moments to be unfiltered and there are moments to not be unfiltered so I don't mean that you don't filter yourself because there are other people in the world who matter also right I and I also don't mean when I say best self like your highest performing winning self I mean that's great if that's your best self but your authentic best self is really who you are in the moments of your life that are the happiest and most memorable so if you think back over the last say five years what moments really stand out as great moments in your life when you felt just full you know your heart was full you felt you come you were connecting with people you felt understood that is your authentic best self so you can feel that self when you feel safe but it's hard to feel that self and access that self when you don't feel safe that's really what you're dealing with in these situations now presence when you are present when you're able to actually access and bring forth that self it reveals itself to other people in several ways the first is that when we're present we believe our story so we believe what we're selling we buy what we're selling you often referenced the the show shark tank which i think is fascinating a little sort of well no pun intended but fishbowl and watching people who are you know trying to sell something watching their body language and seeing how these potential investors respond what I see is that it's not the most you know sort of sleek powerful presentations that end up winning it's the ones where the person clearly believed in themselves they believed in what they were selling that's what you want you're not just investing in a thing or an idea you're investing in a person you want them to be real the second is that when we're present we convey confidence without arrogance confidence is not the same as arrogance but we get them confused all the time right confidence is a tool that invites people in it's it's comforting to other true confidence is not off-putting it's comforting it's it's inviting arrogance is the opposite it's a wall that we put up to prevent people from challenging us it pushes people away it is intended to keep people away from us not to bring them in right arrogance is defensive confidence is open and allows for feedback even if it's not what you want to hear because you know who you are and you feel comfortable in that the last is that when we are present our verbal language matches our nonverbal language so the emotions that we're expressing with our body that's the emotions that we're expressing with our words now think about what happens when we lie and I'm not saying that any of you has ever lied but you know maybe you did as a child one time and what you're doing when you lie is you're suppressing one story the be like I I want to stay home from school because I really just want to you know hang out and watch TV story and you're telling another story which is I'm really feeling sick I feel horrible right so you've got emotions that go with the real story emotions that should go with the fake story and then the conflict in between and the guilt they are feeling you're trying to manage that what happens is that we get the words basically right but we're terrible at syncing up our body language so basically our body language gives us a way because it doesn't match the emotions in the story that we're telling that's what happens when we're inauthentic when we're when we're not present because we're having to try to choreograph all of this in a very piecemeal way that doesn't work because we don't have the cognitive bandwidth to manage what we're saying and also all these things that we're doing with her bodies it looks off right it doesn't it doesn't make sense to people when all of these qualities come together and things like job interviews in venture capital pitches you see that those are the people who are the most likely to get hired they're the most likely to get the investment and that's not just the immediate outcome they're good investments people who display let's display these qualities are good long-term investments they stay at jobs longer they perform better they're better colleagues they're more likely to take leadership roles they stick with it this is telling you something real about a person we ultimately convinced by our presence right so we convince others and we convince ourselves and you know following from that presence baguettes present so when you are present you are inviting others to be present when you're authentic others can be authentic with you think about a time when you were interacting with somebody and maybe they were distracted by their cellphone or you know they were looking over your shoulder waiting for somebody else more interesting to come in those are not the moments when you're gonna be open and at your best right why would you be you have no reason to really trust this person so when you are present you invite others to be present with you the having a little bit of an asynchronous speaking of asynchronous between those these slides and these slides so give me a moment here but but let's think about what stops us from being present distraction stops us from being present I'm going to be present with you again now what stops us from being present is that we cling to the outcome and we neglect the process so we're so focused on say getting the job that we don't think about what's happening in the moment so we forget about the actual interaction so that you know here's another situation where people face this first dates first dates are really tough right people are so worried about what the other person thinks of them and you know will this person ask me out again or you know whatever the outcome is they want that they're not thinking about that interaction and really what we really need to do in those moments is just be there it's to just you know connect and learn about each other so we're clinging to the outcome and neglecting the process we're obsessing about how others think of us now we always are thinking about what others think of us that's okay it's when we become sort of obsessive about it we start worrying more about the management you know managing the impression that we're making on others then managing the impression that we're making on ourselves that becomes a problem and last we feel powerless and we consent to that feeling of powerlessness we give in to that power is not a word that people are super comfortable with when I ask people what's the next word you think of when you hear the word power the most frequent word to come up is corruption and that's troubling because we need to feel powerful we can't change anything in our lives or other people's lives if we don't have a sense of personal power and as psychologists we know that having that sense of power really dramatically changes our psyche so it changes the way we feel it changes the way we think the way we behave our physiology so for example when people feel powerful and I'm not talking about power over others I'm talking about personal power right the power to do something the power to bring your best self forward the power to change your future when you feel that way you also feel generally more optimistic you feel happier you see the world is a place that's not filled with threats but that's filled with opportunities right you see people as potential allies and friends not as predators or competitors you think differently so when people feel powerful they think more clearly they are more creative they perform better on cognitive tasks why because they're not distracted they're able to focus on what they're doing they're present we behave differently and I think the most important takeaway here is this when people feel powerful they act power causes action powerlessness causes inaction when people feel powerful they step forward they take advantage of opportunities for themselves but they also step forward on behalf of others so you know we talk so much these days about what do we do about about bullying and incivility in this really bad behavior that we see especially online you know why why don't people step in and do something they don't because they feel powerless I mean the best predictor of not helping in an adult bullying workplace situation is the feeling of powerlessness so if people have a sense of personal power they're much more likely to step in and help a victim of any kind of emergency the last is that our physiology changes so people who feel powerful live longer they have a lower rate of stress-related illness they're more coordinated you see changes even in their circulating levels of cortisol which is the stress hormone that those low those levels are lower so feeling powerful is basically shaping our whole psyche in a way that we call approach power activates the approach system it makes us step forward into the world powerlessness does the opposite it activates the inhibition system and it causes us to step away from and shut down to the world so when we feel powerful we are you know aren't feeling sort of safe and not feeling that predators are all around us when we feel powerless we see people as predators in that elevator I saw those people as predators and my my body was basically going into this fight flee or faint state and if I had been attacked by a tiger that would have been exactly the right response but I wasn't being attacked by a tiger right the worst outcome was that I wouldn't get a job or somebody would make some snarky comment right it wouldn't have been the end of the world but we have not evolved yet we haven't caught up with what the real challenges are that we face today where we don't need to go into fight flee or faint so ultimately powerlessness blocks presence but it makes it Impreza NIF we're afraid of the world and power cultivates presence it allows us to step into ourselves and into the world but how do you get there now I'm gonna make a little switch and when I ask you to do this next thing do not adjust your posture just check your posture so pay attention to how you're sitting right now we spend a lot of time sitting especially you know in the workplace are you hunching are you making yourself small are you wrapping yourself up maybe wrapping your arms around your body or touching your neck or your face women sometimes will do it what I call twisty legs which is crossed legs and wrapped ankles right are you making yourself small or are you in some way expanding are your shoulders open your chest open your your is your are you breathing deeply are your arms away from your body a bit that dimension which seems not like a big deal right expansive versus contractive is a big deal because that it's the dimension that is associated with power and our bodies and our minds are constantly in communication are constantly conversing your mind is telling your body what to do and your body is sending feedback to your mind so if you're acting frightened physically your mind is going I guess I'm in a threatening situation right so we need to pay attention to our body language even when we're not the ones on stage right it still matters your body language is not just affecting others and how they see you it's affecting how you see yourself so let's look at this powerful body language and figure what can we take from this that will help us be present right because this isn't the way we want to be exactly so across the animal kingdom we know that animals that have power and status expand they take up more space they make themselves bigger in all kinds of ways they might expand their chests you know and and pound it some of them can cause their hair to stand on end so that they look bigger chimpanzees will pick up sticks and run like this so that they look bigger they do all kinds of things to make themselves appear bigger so that people are other other animals see them as powerful you do this you know when you are in some kind of conflict right look at the ears standing up standing on their hind legs the elephant with the ears out to the side right appearing as big as possible Swan snakes you just see this all across the animal kingdom I mean the peacock right this isn't the perfect display but raising the tail feathers fanning them out this is expansive body language and it's all about showing strength and power is it limited to non-human animals it's not so we're gonna look at this posture for a minute now this is what gymnasts do right before and right after their routine right they come out they put their arms up in the air they do the routine even if they fall off the beam four times they pop back up and do that again at the end right it's it's choreographed it's part of the script of what they do why do they do that of all the things that they could do why do they choose that pose they choose that pose because that's the victory pose that's associated with power and strength and confidence we know that because it's now being studied in about 36 different cultures by a researcher named Jessica Tracy who loves sports and started noticing when she was watching the Olympics one year that every time someone wins they throw their arms up in the air the infer when you win first place you cross the finish line whatever you're doing they throw their arms up in the air spontaneously so she wanted to know is this a universal expression of an emotion which means is this hardwired are we born with this with this link between expansiveness and power so let me just show you some examples we'll start with this one right here you have a little girl but she's not learned to do that but that's exactly what she does as soon as that bottle lands every single time let's look at some other athletes and what they're doing at the moment of their victory all different sports people from all over the world we have endurance sports we have non endurance sports team sports individual sports and you see the same thing again and again and again and this one's kind of interesting I think he kind of forgot who helped him win but no get the point so Jessica you know when she went into these different cultures talking to people she did a couple of things she watched them win and saw what happened in these little like foot races or something and she also showed them pictures of other people from other cultures and said what do you think this person is feeling this is the same way that we identified universal facial expressions like happiness and smiling and what she found was when she showed them those pictures they said words in their language that were basically synonyms for pride and confidence and power so this is universal around the world even in places where people have not interacted with others they did not learn this from watching television they were born knowing this this is one of my favorites this is a hundred year old World War two veteran who ran a 5k already huge huge accomplishment but he also won for his age group which was not a hundred and over it was like 65 and over so pretty amazing moment for him I'm gonna spend a moment on baseball which is my favorite sport so you you you see this a lot yeah you know you hear you've got some people in the you know moments wins but it turns out other people also do this when their team wins so here you have david ortiz boston redsox happens to be a team that i like and and he's he's running the bases after a home run and i mean during a home run and as this is happening this is happening okay so this is a police officer at fenway park who rather than helping the outfielder from the other team was trying to get catch big Papi's ball he is possibly having a head injury but the police officer is so distracted by the feeling victorious that his arms are up in the air it's a funny thing is that he's still around Fenway and he'll pose with people in that same pose if you have to get because that photo went super viral but look at whole stadiums of fans raising their arms when their team wins we feel that we have some ownership of that win we take some responsibility for that we call it basking in reflected glory and you see this again all over the world in all kinds of sports you see the same kind of behavior even when people aren't thinking about it yeah oops that's rugby in Brisbane so again it it it's it's when we win it's all around the world it is it is vicarious we do it on behalf of others but here I think is the most convincing evidence that it is a universal expression of an emotion even congenitally blind people do this so people who have never seen anyone do this and who we're not taught to do it raise their arms in the victory pose when they win right this is what we do when we feel confident and powerful in the moment we take up space you know you see taking up space showing in other ways and it's also associated with power and strength like this one right the superhero pose I mean this is a very popular one these days Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre so these are often ballets with themes of liberation and freedom and you see that express so clearly through the body language of the dancers I mean you see when you look at that photo you know what she's expressing right there there need not be words this one I think is very interesting because it's very sad alright she's doing this week although steepling or tenting and it's not the way we normally walk around it's not like we walk around like this but what we find is that as people grow more confident it during a speech say they will start spreading their fingers more right they start even subtle ways taking up space my son always tells me to not tell people to do this he's 16 because he says it makes him think of this which I think it's you know a fair criticism so not necessarily encouraging steepling but but there you go even the way people walk so this is data that we collect having people walk on treadmills using motion caps capture sensors that are attached to their joints right as you would sort of make a video game so they're walking in a treadmill and we can ask them how they feel on different emotions and then have other people watch those videos and tell us that these videos like this and tell them what emotion is being communicated so which one of these is more powerful the one on the right right so what you see is that this person is taking longer strides there the arm swings are longer and looser the arms are further from the body the shoulders are down there's more up and down vertical bounce people are even in their movement taking more space when they feel powerful here you have both things happening at once so who's feeling powerful the girl who just scored the goal what's she doing she's running forward her arms are going up into this and then you see the girl on the other team and what's she doing she's starting to collapse right that's what we do when we feel powerless we start to collapse and hide we cover our faces you know we wrap our bodies up we you know even when we're big we're pulling our shirts up over our faces it's it's the universal expression of feeling powerless and again it happens spontaneously it's not that they're choosing to you know mindfully going I'm going to get into that really powerless looking posture right now it's what happens when we begin to feel powerless here you have a weighing team fans and losing team fans this is what we do when our when our teams are not doing well you know and and when people look at this they often think it's a sign it's is that we're covering our eyes because we don't want to see something bad happening it's not that the the other emotion that's very closely linked to powerlessness is shame when we're doing that we're feeling ashamed we're actually hiding we're hiding from potential predators that might pick us off we are not wanting to offend those who are in power you know we're hiding ourselves because that's how powerless we feel and other animals do the same thing dogs with the tail between the legs dogs when they're feeling threatened that's what they do they pull themselves in they contract as much as they can or maybe they get down on the ground very low cats I mean you see the same kind of behavior there's signaling power and powerlessness to each other this is so extreme the tail wrapped around the legs the fur is down the ears are down as close to the ground as possible that is what happens when we feel powerful we expand and when we feel powerless we shrink and that is true whether you are you know a peacock or a human and whether you were born in in you know Zimbabwe or in the United States all over the world that's what happens now go back to that biggest challenge and think about what you were doing before you went in most people are not expanding because when you're going into a challenge you feel powerless you feel scared you feel threatened so what if we change that so let's look at one example one more sports example see what happens when you prepare by expanding before you go into the challenge all right does anyone know what this is Hakka okay so this is the New Zealand national rugby team they're called the All Blacks and they are the best rugby team in the world they're you know phenomenal athletes giant guys it's amazing to see but what they do right before every match is something called haka HHA haka is a maori indigenous traditional dance that in New Zealand it started in the early 1800s before challenges like battles it was not just exclusively a war dance it's also done at things like funerals so when something when there's a challenging a challenging emotional or physical situation in front of us so the All Blacks do the haka before every match in front of the other team I'm going to show you what this looks like all right so you can guess who won they did win that was the World Cup in 2011 they were playing France you see the French team trying to figure out what to do the plan was that they were gonna form an arrow and walk toward them but they it's like some of them were going like this it did not work out but when I first saw the haka and it was a New Zealand student who showed it to me and said I can't believe you don't know about the haka because it is you know it is it's just like the most powerful body language there is and I watched it and I thought this is really macho I don't like this it's like a physical cease and desist letter you know just felt like over the top and III was like that's like a it's like an American football player dancing too long in the endzone that's kind of how it felt and and the student said to me it's not what it's about read more about it learn more about it eventually get to talk to some of these guys and I have to tell you they cry when they talk about doing the haka they do it with a great sense of respect for each other for the other team for themselves it's not something that's done to be showy it's done to prepare the self and the team to feel connected to the ground to feel connected to you know the world around them to prepare themselves to be that powerful in the actual match so the idea right is that you're acting the way you want to be so can you act the way you'd like to be and become the way you act that's the idea can we do that but let's look at a really simple example I mean most of us have been told at some time in our lives to sit up straight right when we're told that it's usually about showing respect to others it's about being respectful when an adult comes in and you know kids hear this all the time I'm gonna say it's also about showing respect to yourself the posture that you're seeing here these sketches are based on images from clinical psychology of a person who is not depressed and a person who is depressed so major depressive disorder comes with these body language signs that are very reliable you know slouching making yourself small and so clinical psychologists are looking not just at what people are saying but they're also also watching body language and because these these these kinds of mental illness are so difficult to treat it's very hard to move the needle on them through just through talk therapy not that I mean talk therapy is very important but something else is needed so they started saying what if we could you know basically what we're doing in talk therapy is sort of trying to get them to change the way they talk about themselves the way they sort of tell their stories about their lives to themselves what if we also tried to change the way they carry themselves so we changed their depressive body language to non depressive body language so in these early experiments they they got people to sit up for just two to three minutes sit up straight like the person on the left and they then measured happiness on a bunch of variables one of them was simply how do you describe yourself right and the people who had sat up straight describe themselves with more positive terms they remembered more positive words from a word list that they had been shown earlier in the study their mood was elevated so you see this not just in clinical populations but also in the general population when people sit up straight they feel happier it gives them a mood lift the problem is is that we are constantly hunching over these little devices that are supposed to be improving our lives having a little trouble with the slide advancer there we go so this is what we're doing right we're not sitting up straight we're doing this which is again supposed to make our lives in some way better but we're doing it all the time this is a bunch of people standing outside a talk that I was giving they didn't even notice me taking a picture of them right everyone's on their phone all the time so we decided to do this study to look at it and what we had what we did is we had people come into our lab and they were randomly assigned to one of these devices they then were in a room alone working on one of these devices and they just were filling out filler questionnaires that we actually didn't use as data because what we wanted to know is if it made them more or less assertive to be slouched like this or expanded like this and so what we did is we told that when the study was over the experimenter came in and said I'll be back in five minutes to debrief you and pay you if I'm not back in five minutes please come get me because I don't want to waste your time and on the wall there is a giant clock and that's the only thing in the room other than the table and chair that they're sitting at and they you know the experimenter will say explicitly if I'm not back by two forty two please come get me so what we want to know is do these people come out and now they don't have the device we've taken it away so they have nothing to do do they come out and say hey I'm waiting at that 5-minute mark this is what we find at ten minutes almost all of the people in the most expansive condition have come out of the room to say hey you know I'm waiting I'm ready to go only half of the iPhone users have and and they're basically sitting in their little gell jail cell like that's how they see it now and we come in and have to let them go so the more expansive their body language was the more assertive their behavior is going back to these walkers so these walkers are not just expressing emotion they're also changing emotion so if you get people to get on a treadmill and they're looking at these these dots in front of them and you say try to look like the one on the right or the left it changes their mood so even the way you move changes the way you feel how about pain okay we're talking about the approach system which prepares us for challenges and pain researchers at the nerves of Toronto did studies looking at expansive versus neutral postures done before exposure to a painful stimulus and they found that when people adopted an expanse of yoga pose for two minutes before this painful stimulus versus just a neutral pose like this so not even a powerless pose they were able to to withstand greater pain for longer and they rated the experience as less painful after the fact how about this how do you sleep do you sleep like this or do you sleep like this it's a there's a range and and it goes kind of like it's about 40% of people sleep in the fetal position and then you've liked the Usain Bolt's at the other side and I do find that in couples you've won you know once when Usain Bolt and one fetal position person often but but we wanted to know is this related to how people feel so this is not a causal relationship necessarily we don't know we know that it's correlational we had people for two weeks tell us every morning how they were sleeping they chose from a bunch of sick figures and then they filled out an anxiety questionnaire and this is what we found the people who woke up like this we're by far the least anxious the lower body did not matter by the way it didn't have enough any kind of relationship but the upper body did now it's hard to change how you sleep but you can change what you do before you get out of bed in the morning if you wake up feeling anxious and you're all curled up and your your hands are in fists don't put your feet on the ground and check your email you know stretch out spend one more minute doing some kind of bed yoga to make yourself more expansive you can choose to make these tiny little changes that can change the way you feel at the beginning of the day expanding before lifting things allows people to lift more weight and makes them think that what they just lifted was lighter than it actually was so you see all kinds of effects the one that I care the most about is the one that I started with in the beginning does expanding not just the victory pose but just expanding in lots of different ways caused people to feel that sense of power that's going to activate all those other things does it change the way people feel so we had people in many different studies sit in poses like this this was a high power condition or in poses like this they were randomly assigned to these conditions and they sit like this for just you know two minutes we've had we've done 30 seconds people have not done these studies all over the world and what you find the most reliably of all the effects that we've looked at the one that was the most reliable and most robust is that when people adopt those high-power poses it changes the way they they feel more powerful they feel more confident more assertive in charge and happier so just shifting that body language for 30 seconds and you get that kind of effect that is a change that we can make we can change the way we carry ourselves and let me say here I've heard from a lot of people with physical disabilities that prevent them from expanding so I started working with with this woman who does sort of coaches people in speaking she's quadriplegic and she feels incredibly powerful she says because she imagines herself in her mind's eye in a powerful position we've done studies having people do that task and we find exactly what she told us we would find when people even imagined themselves to be more expansive it changes the way we they feel so what about the big challenge let's go back to the job interview which is that's the one that I think people list the most often as their big challenge if you look if you look on Google if you do a google image search and you type in job interview waiting room this is what you find right people are not preparing themselves they're not doing the haka before a job interview they're sitting like this this is what we think right because again were scared what if we instead had them do this alone in a room where no one can see them of course before they go into the job interview what would happen so in this study this is what we do people are assigned again to high power or low power poses before a very stressful mock job interview in the job interview what they have to do is answer one question why are you the best person for the job this is very common it's also a terrible job interview question it's way too open-ended but but it gets people very anxious and so we had people high power or low power pose they go into the job interview and and what we find is that the people who had done the high power pose is not during in the job interview but before are rated higher by trained job interviewed judges who are watching videos of these interviews they are not there these judges are blind to the hypothesis they're blind to the conditions they have no idea that people did this before they came in but they rate them better overall and we say who do you want to hire they want to hire the people who did the high power poses that's what memorial but then we want to get it like what's happening what's changing you know what are these people doing that's different are they answering the question in a different way you know are they like exaggerating their skillset or you know are they are they saying the same kinds of things in a different way so we then had a separate set of judges code the videos for those things what we find is that what they said didn't vary they were basically saying the same things but they were saying them in a different way and that's what mattered they were more present this is why they were hired and this fully mediated that relationship they believe their story they showed confidence without arrogance and they communicated harmoniously they were present and that's what appealed to people expanding activates the approach system just like power does and shrinking activates the inhibition system right so we're approaching the world or moving away from it expanding your posture and your movement can give you the courage to bring your authentic best self to those big challenges and if we do that life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage right so if we have the courage to expand and approach the world the world expands for us right it opens up to us so this is self perpetuating it makes our lives richer prepare with the big poses before you go in do not do them while you're interacting with people I have had people you know they're like I did the Wonder Woman pose in a job interview and they didn't like it like I am NOT surprised so don't do this right so this is not what I'm arguing for also don't do this I guess I get so much angry mail from people in the UK who think I've somehow taught their politicians to do this during speeches not do that I'm sorry I did not do that I would never recommend that prepare with the big open poses in private take two minutes in a bathroom stall or in an elevator without people you know in your own office find space it doesn't matter you can be is its expansive as you want you're not going to break any cultural you know cultural norms because other people aren't there that's fine it's your body do what you want to do with it when you go in you want to present with good open posture remember that when you go in and you want to express confidence you're not challenging people to a duel right that's it you're not trying to you know to win or kill them right here you are you are trying to invite them in to see who you are to show your strength to connect with them so you want to use posture that shows confidence but also that's open you know that shows that you're interested that you want to be there mind your posture throughout the day so I showed you all these little ways in which our posture is affecting us even the way we sleep you know find ways to build in those little postural hacks throughout the day you know for example if you get an email that makes you mad you know what you do you go like this and you start writing a response to it don't do that get up I mean for many reasons don't do that self-regulate but also walk away and take a walk and take long strides right walk in a way that you might even think look silly but it will lift your mood then you can return to those things and you have a fresh set of eyes to look at them the other thing is attend to their posture so when people talk about body language they're also they're often talking about you know what impression we're making and other people so when people ask me about it they're like well you know what should I do if I want to you know show people on this or that or I will say how can I tell if somebody's lying or you know what I would say we should be worried about or concerned about in other people's body language is whether they're feeling safe or not so I mean when you're interacting with someone so if you know if you're in a leadership position or if you're a teacher and you're you know talking to a student if you notice their body language shift from their baseline so something that looks more threatened what's happened in that moment you know what's going through their mind is there something in the conversation that they misinterpreted are they not feeling seen how can you get that back on track again this is the kind of thing interestingly that health care providers are learning to do in their interactions with patients right so if a patient starts to look threatened and close they realize this patient is scared I haven't explained something clearly or I need to address this in a way that will help them feel safer right so you can attend to their posture as well our bodies are changing our minds our minds are changing our behaviors and our behaviors are changing our outcomes these are you know small things that we can do but in aggregate they have an effect I want to give you one more study and this is a study that was not meant to be the study it became we wanted to do a study with kids to figure out at what age they start to associate expansiveness with power so we made a bunch of figures stick figures they were like the dolls that you're seeing that wooden dolls and they were either in contractive or expansive postures and we would ask these kids which one is more powerful and this was what the kids would say to us which what do you mean the boy or the girl so what they were seeing was not power they were seeing gender even though these are all the same exact same wooden doll so then I start thinking wow you know we know for sure that women and men use different body language when it comes to expensiveness so women are much less expensive than men but when does that begin because when you look at little kids let's see this one again but she's so she is not worried about being expensive right she's maybe two years old this little girl my friend's daughter on her first day of kindergarten not worried about being expensive when I think about my son and his friends you know when they were running around his kids they were all throwing their arms up in the air like being goofy they weren't worried about being small but then they hit middle school and what happens the girls start to shrink they make themselves small they start pulling their sleeves down over their hands they do things like this they touch their jewelry and their hair they're not the same they become these shrinking violets the boys are not changing in any kind of noticeable way on average I'm not the middle school is hard for everyone so there are you know lots of kids do this shrinking but on average you see girls doing it much more so we wanted to know are they born somehow with these you know these these gender differences built-in or are they learning them and the way to know that is to see if it changes between the age of four and six in how they perceive these dolls so at age five that's when we really learn gender and race stereotypes that's when we can say what they even are so what we did is we showed four year olds and six six year olds 16 pairs of these dolls and now instead of saying which ones were powerful we said point to the boy point to the girl right so they go through 16 of these slides like this on an iPad point to the boy point to the girl and and we want to see if we see a change from age 4 to age 6 well unfortunately by age 4 they've already begun to learn that stereotype because 75% of the four-year-olds are associating more of the expansive ones with boy by age six that goes up to eighty five percent but this really shows us that they're learning this at age four only 13% see every one of the 16 expansive ones as a boy and every one of the sixteen contractive ones they are learning this from us so when people ask me you know how do I get women to speak up more in the boardroom I think don't tell them to stop speaking when they're little because they're speaking they're taking up space we're giving them signals even if we think we're doing it from a place of caring for that we think it's in their best interest we're somehow signalling to them that they should be smaller so we need to teach our daughters to expand you know to take up some space to express their ideas to show their strengths to not be afraid to do that let me be clear I am the mother of one child and it is a boy I do not want him to shrink I want him to walk into the world feeling confident and powerful I'm not saying teach the boys to be smaller I'm just saying let's not let the girls think that they need to be small and let's show them images like this where women are you know are making a huge difference in the world they are unapologetically showing their strength this is my friend Amy Purdy who lost both her legs at age 19 and is now a three-time Paralympic medalist and snowboarding amazing athlete she she you know has told me that when she was a teenager she wanted to be a model and she was very focused on being very very thin she said then I lost my legs and I'll tell you nothing makes you want to be strong like losing the part of your body she said that really turned me around and then I focused on being strong and I think it's just such a wonderful role model in so many ways for our daughters to see these kinds of images this is a program called sand like a superhero than a dad started when his girls hit middle school this is a TV show a kids sort of game show and the mother of this little girl sent this clip to me she's I showed her your TED talk like a couple of years ago and then she went on the game show when I saw all of the clips she was standing like this for every single question and so the actual the host of the show is Neil Patrick Harris who eventually goes what are you doing she's like I am power posing it's a pretty funny interaction but I loved it she figured out how to use this this is in an anti-bullying program you know how do we get kids to feel strong enough to go to school if they're being bullied every day right not what they do in front of their bullies but how do they ground themselves and who they are this image really really moves me this is a statue that some of you might be familiar with it's called fearless girl it was installed on Wall Street about a year and a half ago overnight people woke up and there was this little girl standing like this in front of the famous bull on Wall Street so everybody got into fights about this of course right so so some people were mad because they were like that's not that's offensive to the bull and what it stands for some people were mad because they thought it should be a woman and not a girl they were all these reasons to be upset but while all but all the grown-ups are fighting the kids are telling us what it means to them and this is what it means to them they these little girls from all over the world they go to New York City and they ask their parents to go see The Fearless girl statue because they want to get their picture taken with her right so you see this I get these pictures all of it all the time of little girls going there to stand like a superhero next to this little girl and a dress and converse high tops right it's it's it is not scary this is a wonderful thing they're telling us what they want I love this one in particular the boy linking arms with her right it's not something that we should be afraid of it's something that we should actually embrace I finally visited fearless girl she's now been moved to somewhere near Times Square but but I stopped really quickly jumped out of a taxi we ran across ask somebody to take a picture there were about 60 or 70 people there waiting to take photos and somebody you know that they were like are you the power posing lady and so I did end up meeting a lot of those people and getting a lot a lot of pictures with them but I just I'm so moved by what our daughters are telling us which is I want to be like that this is probably my favorite of the sort of you know famous female role models of the state these days this is misty Copeland who is the first black woman to be promoted to principal American Ballet Theatre or at any internationally recognized ballet company which is pretty amazing and she overcame enormous hurdles she was told again and again that she was too strong or she was too heavy or too - you know - muscley to be a famous ballet dancer which you know it's crazy I mean look at look at her she's amazing and she kept on starting again and finally rose to the very top and it's now just this incredible spokesperson for all of our kids I mean not just our little girls who want to be ballet dancers but she carries herself unapologetically with power and poise and grace and presence right it's not in-your-face it's beautiful and there's no reason why we wouldn't want all of our daughters to be doing that so this is a tiny little tweak that can lead to big changes over time the more we practice it the more we spread this these are some of the people that I've heard from just and some of them I visited and gotten into all these different ways in which people are using this but I'm gonna leave you with a story about an animal and because it's it's it actually tells us I think a lot about ourselves so a woman named Kathy sends me an email this is Kathy and the email subject line says I use your TED talk with my horses I was like this sounds a little crazy I'm not really sure if I should keep reading cuz you know once in a while I get the email that's just a little off but I did and it turned out I'm very glad I did because she is a totally legitimate world-class horse trainer and what she does is she works with very submissive horses and tries to bring them out of their shelves right to get them feeling healthy enough to interact with other horses because what she said is when horses are submissive chronically they get sick much more easily they die sooner their quality of life is poor so even if you're not trying to get them to be competitors it's good to get them to be more dominant that they are and I said well how do horses show dominance and she said well they they kind of rear and pounce they play they interact with each other and they do have their own kind of horse power posing so she said I I saw your TED talk and I thought I gotta get Buffy this is the name of the horse vfi to power post because Buffy who is very strong and was expected to be a very successful competitor ends up standing where the fences mean and just rubbing the fur off his forehead he won't interact with the other horses and she's desperate to get this horse interacting so she said I made a giant cat toy it kind of looks like this it's a stick with a string and a ball on the end of it she spent three afternoons in a pasture running around and having Buffy chase it and because he will interact with her he started emulating you know the airs and graces of these dominant horses these behaviors that she wanted to see Buffy changed so dramatically when she put him out with the other horses that he became the most dominant horse of the group he's now going to competitions you can see the before and after posture is dramatically different he's meddling at international competitions this is what Rafi looks like today and so I love the story and I think the mechanism that she's that she's a hypothesizing probably is right but I said to her it's just one horse right and as a scientist we need a bigger sample you know I think I need to see more data before I could really believe that this is working which I'm sure she thought like you are such a wet blanket I just told you this movie and story about a horse and you're telling me that it might not be true but okay six months later she sends me this video [Music] [Music] so pretty amazing Kathy is now working with horses from all over the world trainers from all over the world both UC Davis they're having tremendous success she's actually started a horse farm where she uses this model to help unhealthy horses and and you know it is working because horses are not good at telling themselves that they're actually confident and powerful and we kind of stink at it too when we tell ourselves we're powerful and confident now we just think we're lying to ourselves if we feel bad so we're not good at talking ourselves off the ledge but we actually can walk ourselves off the ledge right we can change the way our do we carry ourselves to overcome these challenges and I'll leave you with this stand up straight and realize who you are that you tower over your circumstances thank you so much for your time it has been an honor to be here thank you [Applause] [Applause] Thank You dr. Cuddy and thanks to all of our speakers who were here with us today with these inspirational words we're very fortunate to have them with us so thanks to all of our speakers thanks for being with us as you might expect an event like this does it take place easily without having a lot of people behind the scenes making it happen Chrissy and her team and the team from ETSU have really worked hard to make it actually began a year ago September October of last year the plans were being put in place for this event that we're enjoying today so if you as you leave if you see these folks running around in these really cute green t-shirts and incidentally I want one please stop and thank them for all that they have done today to make this a very very special event additionally I need to thank Eastman we began this journey about three years ago we've had an endowment at ETSU very gracious in debt endowment by Eastman Co they spent chemical that went back many many years and about three years ago CG McCord and her team and I got together and said is there a way in which we can take this and scale it up on a regional basis and make what was at one point in time just an event that we had on campus to make it far broader and far more regionally focused so this is the third edition of the idea Academy that we're enjoying here today and I can't thank Eastman and David and your leadership team enough for making all of this possible we're grateful to them for their support and everything that they do for us at ETSU and we're thankful that we have some students here with us today as well thanks to you for being here with us and we would encourage you to look forward in the future my guess is in the next couple of weeks CG will be bringing us together as we begin planning next year's event look forward to that and it appears at least from my perspective as I look back three years ago to where we are today we seem to be making some great improvements each and every year that we put on this event again thanks for being with us and safe journey home god bless [Applause] thank you for attending

Channel: Eastman

Views: 124,371

Rating: 4.8835759 out of 5

Keywords: IDEAcademy

Id: ATo9sYax-AQ

Length: 68min 29sec (4109 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019