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Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy gave a great TED Talk this summer about how tiny changes in your body language can radically change your job performance and career.
2012-11-19
Certain "power poses" immediately change your body chemistry, Professor Cuddy says.
And these changes help or hurt the way other people perceive you and, importantly, affect the way you actually perform.
Professor Cuddy concluded her talk with a startling revelation about herself, one that led her to choke up momentarily. Then the talk ended in a standing ovation.
The full video (21 minutes) is available here and at the end of the slides.
I've pulled together Professor Cuddy's key points below.
Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School.
Small gestures reveal glimpses of character and shape perceptions about how people are perceived. Here, President Obama shakes the hand of a British policeman while entering the Prime Minister's house on Downing Street.
This power pose, called "pride," is innate. Congenitally blind people do it when they're victorious in events, even when they've never seen it or been taught to do it.
Researchers already know that nonverbal communication affects how others perceive you and feel about you. For example, a 1-second glimpse of a candidate's face allows people to predict the winner of 70% of Senate and Gubernatorial races.
After just a 2-minute "high power pose," the risk tolerance of the high-power posers soared. The risk tolerance of the low-power posers, meanwhile, shrank.
This, the researchers found, was the result of a profound change in body chemistry. Testosterone is the "dominance" hormone. After a mere 2-minute pose, the testosterone levels of the "high power" posers rose 20%. Testosterone levels for the "low power" group, meanwhile, fell 10%.
Testosterone is one key chemical for "power." The other is cortisol. When cortisol levels drop, people are better able to handle stressful situations (a good thing in a leader). After the 2-minute poses, the cortisol levels of the "high power" group fell sharply. The cortisol levels of the "low-power" group, meanwhile, rose.
But think about how people "pose" when they're waiting for job interviews. They "close up" and assume low-power poses. So, what if, in the bathroom or something, you prepared for an interview by assuming a high-power pose?
Professor Cuddy and her colleagues decided to test that. To reduce the impact of interpersonal feedback, they trained the "interviewers" to be completely passive during the interviews, giving no responses whatsoever. (Apparently, most people find this more stressful and disconcerting than getting actively heckled).
The results? You guessed it. The "high-power" posers were overwhelmingly the ones that non-partial judges who viewed the interviews wanted to hire. Importantly, what these people actually said in the interviews was irrelevant. It was all about "presence."
At this point in the talk, Professor Cuddy revealed something about herself. At age 19, she was gravely injured in a car accident. She woke up in a head-trauma ward and was told that her IQ had dropped by two standard deviations. She was told she would never make it through college.
She decided not to quit. She worked and worked. It took her four years longer than the rest of her class to graduate. But she graduated. Then she somehow managed to persuade someone at Princeton to accept her into grad school.
She felt like an imposter. The first day at Princeton, she realized what she was up against, and she told her advisor she wanted to quit. Her advisor wouldn't let her. The advisor said, effectively, you're going to fake it until you make it--no matter how much it scares you.
Professor Cuddy "faked it." She "faked it" all the way through Princeton and Northwestern and Harvard. She "faked it" until she had long since forgotten that she was "faking it."
And then, at Harvard, one of her students came to her and said, "I'm quitting--I can't do this." And Professor Cuddy realized two things: First, that she herself had not just "faked it 'til she made it." She had faked it until she BECAME it. And her student was going to fake it until she became it, too.
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Henry Blodget cofounded Business Insider, then called "Silicon Alley Insider," in the loading dock of another New York-based startup in 2007. He served as Editor in Chief until 2017 and CEO until 2023. Business Insider is now owned by Axel Springer.A former top-ranked Wall Street analyst, Henry is often a guest on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other networks. He has contributed to The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Fortune, New York, the Financial Times, and other publications (including, of course, Business Insider!). He has written extensively about technology and investing and is the author of "The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Investing."
Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy gave a great TED Talk this summer about how tiny changes in your body language can radically change your job performance and career.