CONVERSATIONS WITH AMY CUDDY
BY KELLY HEITZ
Win a copy of Cuddy’ s best-selling book, Presence! Post a photo of you with this issue of Pulse on Instagram with # ISPAdoyou
PULSE: One of before Sept. 1. your most popular quotes is“ don’ t fake it until you make it, fake it until you become.” How should people use this advice? Cuddy: The idea is that sometimes we need to fake being our best selves until we feel confident enough to truly reveal who we are. You’ re not tricking anyone else; you’ re tricking yourself into believing you can fully be you. After we’ ve practiced doing this enough over time, we become the best version of ourselves that we can be.
P: How can we convince ourselves to be confident, even when we know we are faking it? C: That’ s where the body-mind connection becomes so important. When we get stuck in our heads trying to tell ourselves that we are confident when we don’ t feel confident,
Amy Cuddy isn’ t supposed to be where she is today. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to finish school. But she proved them wrong, and now she’ s a successful social psychologist, professor at Harvard Business School, best-selling author of Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, and keynote speaker at this year’ s ISPA Conference & Expo.
How did Cuddy overcome such incredible challenges to get where she is today? By learning to forget her fears and insecurities and project confidence, even when she didn’ t feel it. Her book and TED Talk, which is one of the most-watched TED Talks of all time with over 41 million views, explain in detail her research on posture and body language and how we can use both to trick ourselves into feeling confident, even when we aren’ t. In this month’ s Conversations, we asked Cuddy about her book, her methods, and“ faking it until you become.”
we’ re facing a very daunting challenge. But, the relationship between certain body language and confidence is so hardwired that it works in both directions and it doesn’ t involve a lot of mental gymnastics. By adopting powerful and confident postures, we’ re allowing our bodies to do the work of telling our minds that we actually are confident. It may seem primitive, but that’ s why it works.
P: In your book Presence, you say that little nudges can help push us past our fears. Other than tweaking our body language, what nudges can we do on a daily basis? C: One of my favorites, and maybe this isn’ t something that everyone faces every day, is to reappraise your anxiety as excitement. The idea of keeping calm when we’ re feeling anxious is actually very hard to do. Because anxiety is a high-arousal emotion and calmness is a low-arousal emotion, our bodies find
30 PULSE ■ August 2017