Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Change Maker: Amy Cuddy, Scientist, on Boosting Confidence and Finding your “Thing”

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Originally aired 6.25.21 Dr. Amy Cuddy (you know her as the genius behind the “power pose” research) joins Nicole to talk about how she went from aspiring ballerina to PhD, and which insights from psychology you should use in your next job interview. 

One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that

I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN. Chime. Feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boosts are available to eligible Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details.

Hey guys, are you ready for some money rehab? Wall Street has been completely upended by an unlikely player game stop and should i have a 401k because you don't do it no i know you think the whole world revolves around you and your money well it doesn't charge for wasting our time i will take a check you recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin.

As you know, every Friday we talk with a public figure making change in every sense of the word. And along the way has been in or is still in money rehab. Today I'm talking with Amy Cuddy. Amy got her PhD in social psychology from Princeton University. No big deal. She is a best-selling author, and her game-changing research on power poses went viral. She'll give us more info on her research in this episode. It is fascinating, and Amy's research insights can help us on our money rehab journey because all things we talk about, asking for raises, negotiating the APR on your credit card, all of these things require confidence, which is Amy's forte. But this research isn't

the only part of Amy's story that fascinates me. Growing up, Amy never thought she would be a scientist. And after a traumatic car accident, Amy was told that she would never graduate from college. But she did. And I wanted to hear more about how she found her passion and what her story can teach us about proving the naysayers wrong. Amy, welcome to Money Rehab. We start out with a quick Money Rehab never have I ever. So instead of having a shot like we would do in real life, which I hope we can do soon, you just say I have or I haven't. All right. Never have I ever invested in the market. Not really, directly. Never have I ever bought a house. I have.

Never have I ever bought crypto house. I have. Never have I ever bought crypto. Not again, not directly. Okay. Never have I ever overdrafted. I have. Haven't we all? Never have I ever taken out a student loan. I have not.

Never have I ever negotiated a contract. I have. Never have I ever missed a credit card payment. I have. Never have I ever maxed out a credit card. I think I have probably I had in undergrad at some point. Never have I ever started a business. Yes.

All right, sister. Never have I ever applied for a grant. I have applied for grants. So I want to hear everything about that. I am fascinated by all of your research. But before we dive in, I want to get a little background on baby Amy and hear where you started. What did you want to be when you grew up? A rock star. Really wanted to be like, you know, pop star first. It was like Olivia Newton-John. But then, you know, I was much more into, you know, rock and roll. So more like Joan Jett, you know, something like that. But I mean, you know, I wanted to be all the things. I went

through all the phases, but I was a very serious ballet dancer. So for a long time, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. I guess I wanted to be a lot of things like a lot of us. You still do a lot of things. I am fascinated by all of your social media, of course, but in particular, your roller skating videos are my everything. I live for them. So many of the things that I post on social media are not things I get paid to do. But the funny thing is, the reason I'm, you know, a good roller skater is because I paid for the second half of college as a roller skating waitress. Oh, my dear.

You're my hero. You're my ultimate shero. By the time I went back for my last two and a half years, because I had this head injury at the one and a half year mark, and then it took four years to kind of get back in, I was working as a roller skating waitress. And I had become an in-state resident in Colorado. So I was paying state tuition. And so not out-of-state tuition. So I worked, yeah, as a roller skating waitress. So I did get paid to roller skate.

Wow. So you didn't take out student loans because you paid for schooling by roller skating? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it's pretty good, right? Now my social media makes sense to everyone.

So baby Amy, who wanted to be a rock star, ballerina, author, artist, turned into a professor, author, researcher. How did that happen? So I grew up in this very rural area, small public school. You know, many of the kids I went to high school with helped to run their family farms. There was just at that time, they didn't feel there was an opportunity to go to college. So only a third of my class went to college. So high school was not especially hard. And I knew I was smart because I had been in the gifted program and sort of, you know, that part of me had been validated a lot. So I didn't, truthfully did not work super hard in high school, got by, it was fine. Went to Syracuse to be a broadcast journalist. That was not for me. Transferred to the University of Colorado and really got into sort of student activism and became, and I'd sort of grown up this way, but an environmental activist that started working

for National Wildlife Federation as a grassroots organizer. And here's, this is an important part of my kind of story of getting there because it's, it's a thread that I don't often talk about, but one of the things I realized as an organizer, and I was working on getting the Endangered Species Act reauthorized. So I was literally lobbying, you know, members of Congress. I was 20 and, you know, calling people and trying to convince people that this was worthwhile. But I was talking about like the spotted owl and, you know, plant species that had never been discovered. And it was not persuasive. Like people who don't passionately care about that issue don't care about plant species that have

not yet been discovered, right? And the possibility that they would go extinct before they'd been discovered. So I started to realize that the way we approach influence is just wrong. We were like dumping information on people rather than connecting with them and trying to meet them where they were. So that was relevant. Now, what got me into psychology

was that in that first year at Colorado, I was in a really serious car accident, thrown out of the car, had a bad head injury, was in the hospital for a long time, rehabbing for a long time. And that got me interested in neuropsychology and neuroscience. So when I went back, I was totally focused on psychology and started in a neuropsych lab, which I ended up not finding interesting enough, moved to social psychology because it brought together these different interests, which were sort of like social justice and fairness, and also really understanding how people operate, how they're influenced, as opposed to how we want them to be influenced, which is, you know,

we want them to be influenced by information, you know, here are the facts, and they'll do the right thing. But it's just not how it works. So that's how I got there. And then I just realized I loved, I loved doing research, I loved deep dive reading and sorting out a problem through experiments. And that's how I ended up in grad school. Hold on to your wallets, boys and girls. Money rehab will be right back. One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves.

So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN. Chime feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A.

Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Booths are available to eligible Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details. Now for some more money rehab. And then how did your research around power dynamics and nonverbal cues happen? Like how did you start gravitating toward those subjects? I was studying, my main area is actually stereotyping and prejudice. And one of the unfortunate things about studying stereotyping and prejudice is that you discover pretty quickly that everyone is biased and that some people are deeply biased and that

discrimination is everywhere. And discrimination we think of as the behavioral part of bias. So the stereotype is sort of the thought about a person. The prejudice is like the emotional response and the discrimination is the action. And, you know, there's just discrimination everywhere. It's not at all difficult to show that. It's hard to find a place where there isn't discrimination happening. And that's, you know, that makes it a hard problem to be focused on if that's your solitary sort of goal. time that I'm studying things like sexism and racism and, you know, anti-Asian bias and anti-Semitism, I realized that I also wanted to be able to study tactics, you know, tools that would help people who are being discriminated against, not because I think it's their fault

at all. I want to be totally clear about that. I think that's really important. But because I know from studying prejudice and discrimination that it's not going away tomorrow. And so I wanted to kind of prepare people to go out into the workforce knowing that they're going to face this and give them every bit of sense of deservingness and confidence that they should have. So that's how I got into studying power and especially, you know, power and gender. That's where I was. That's where I got started. Really noticing in the Harvard Business School classroom, these very pronounced differences

between the body language on average of male students and female students where male students were kind of like you know sitting back you know swiveling in their chairs they actually do have those really nice you know thousand dollar chairs and you know and and the female students were much more like this or like this so they're wrapping their you know their arms around themselves, touching their face, touching their hair. They're doing things that look powerless and that we know do signify that they feel powerless. That led to this question, could you reverse it? If people make themselves small when they feel powerless, could you make yourself expansive to make yourself feel more powerful? So can you flip

it around? Can you flip the direction? Is it actually bi-directional? And if you can do that, you know, can that little bit of boost help someone a little bit in a negotiation or a little bit in a job interview? And and but really like incrementally over time can it help them feel more comfortable being the fullest version of themselves I you know I kind of hate this term version of of oneself because it's so overused now but I really mean you know to be able to reveal your um sort of most uh open and competent self to show them the skills you have. It's not about faking competence. It's about telling yourself that you deserve to feel confident enough to show them what you have. Well, you tweak the phrase, fake it till you make it to fake it

till you become it. Is that where this stemmed? Yeah, that's exactly where it was from. I mean, and it's funny because that phrase, I wrote that sentence when I was on the plane going to give my TED talk because I had called, I talk about a student in that talk and who was from a small town like me, hadn't spoken up in class. I called her in to say, you have to speak in class. It's 50% of the grade. I mean, I can't, you're not going to pass if you don't start participating. And she really let me in and, you know, explain that she felt that she didn't deserve to be there. And she was from a small town in the South. Her mother was in high school when she had her, she grew up poor, you know, she, she really felt that she didn't fit in. And, and I related to that because I

was feeling the same way. But, you know, I called her the night that I was flying to give that TED talk, just to say again, are you sure you're okay with me telling this story? I'm not going to say your name, but is it okay for me to tell this story? And she said, definitely. And she said, it's funny because now I've been doing this sort of power posing for a couple of years and I'm actually now doing what I love. I switched fields. I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing. Now I'm in education and I'm really the person I wanted to be. So the funny thing is that by sort of faking that confidence to go in one direction, I actually

discovered myself and that I wanted to be over in this other direction. So I became myself. So that idea of faking it till you become it, to me, to me is so different from faking it till you make it. Fake it till you make it is sort of like single-mindedly focused on getting to this place. And then you're in this role and you haven't really changed. You just have to keep on faking it. You know, faking it till you become it is, faking it till you make it is about tricking someone else into thinking that you're something that you're not. Faking it till you become it is about tricking yourself into believing that you deserve this thing that you would like to have.

And does that happen? Has your research shown that that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? Because of course, if people don't know, your research on power poses went viral, as it should have. And so not just with this particular student whose story you told, but with others, have you found that by doing the power pose, by faking it till you make it, you actually become it? I mean, I can tell you that I stopped. I had to stop keeping tracking stories from people when we got to 10,000, like people who had written and shared stories about how it helped them.

And these were not just people who wrote, you know, in the next week. I still get them. And this sounds self self aggrandizing, and I don't mean it that way at all. But it's been nine years, and I still get stories every single day. I've just heard from such a wide range of people with such a wide range of challenges. And I follow up with a lot of these people. And I'm not saying that power posing is what, lot of these people. And I'm not saying that power posing is what, you know, got them the job or got them through school or got them the courage to, you know, speak up to their doctor. It's a combination of many things. But I think a lot of it was just that sort of incremental change mental change and the realization that we have some control over our emotional state of power,

right? So power is not just your position in a hierarchy. It's also a mental state, right? If you feel powerless, you're not able to access your skills and your competencies. to access your skills and your competencies. You're not able to be open. You feel inhibited and afraid. If you feel powerful, you are able to access those things. You approach the world rather than withdrawing from it. You see other people not as threats, but as potential collaborators, as allies. You see challenges as opportunities, again, instead of seeing them as threats. So that feeling of power and powerlessness, that matters. And that's something that you can have, even if you don't have formal power. So you could have no power over others, but you might still be able to find the power to or the power over yourself, if that makes

sense. And how does somebody do that? So if a listener is thinking, well, okay, fine, it's a combination of the power pose and a lot of other things they're doing. But now I want to incorporate the power pose part. How do I do that? And how do I feel? I guess it's like feel the power. I think that the what. OK, so here's what happens when animals who are human or non-human. So when we and all the other animals have power or feel powerful, we physically expand. We take up more space. You know, we stretch out our arms. We might expand our chest, have our feet apart. arms. We, you know, might expand our chests, have our feet apart. You know, chimps will hold sticks out to make their arms look longer. You know, gorillas will expand and pound their chest. Some primates can cause their hair to stand on end to make themselves look bigger. You know, you'll see other mammals in fights where they're standing on their high legs with their ears up and their hair raised to make themselves look bigger. Peacocks,

swans, all kinds of bird species, cobras, right? You see the same thing. When they feel powerful, they expand. For humans, it's the same way. So think about someone crossing the finish line in first place. They throw their arms up into the victory pose, right? That's universal. And the research shows that that is a universal expression of feeling a sense of pride in that moment, a sense of power. And so when we reverse that, you know, when we expand in a time of feeling powerless, we're just even, and by expand, I don't even mean necessarily stand like Wonder Woman. I just mean sit up straight, right? Hold your shoulders back and down. You know, don't wrap

your arms around yourself. You know, keep your arms away from your body a bit. Maybe even rest them just on the arms of your chair, even doing those simple things. So the difference between sort of, you know, slouching and sitting up straight, that is expansive. And that there's a lot of evidence that there's, there's that change affects our mindset even more than the change from neutral to very expansive. So it does work in both directions. When we expand, whether it's by, you know, standing in the victory pose or with our hands on our hips, or just sitting up straight, speaking more slowly, which is a way of expanding temporally, pausing when we speak, that takes up time as well. Breathing deeply and slowly, taking longer strides when we speak, that takes up time as well, breathing deeply and slowly, taking longer strides when we walk, all of these things affect our mindset. And you started this research with the fancy chairs at Harvard and the guys who were like sprawled out and the women who were all in a little ball. Did you think you were going to focus

on women primarily and then it expanded or how did that work? I didn't really, I mean, I just, that's what got me interested in it. I was not, I wasn't, you know, I studied sexism and so I would give a talk to my female MBA students about sexism and leave them with this like just bad news, you know, like, yep, it's there. Good luck with your job interview next week. Smell you later. That or, you know, watching them not participate in class. That's what got me interested. But no, I was not specifically interested after that. My studies were not focused on that. I do find, you know, these issues of power and powerlessness really relevant to women. I mean, I think that there

are so many situations where they lack formal power and are kind of told that feeling powerful is not appropriate for them, right? So they even shy away from the idea that they deserve to feel powerful. So to me, I do think like all of this research on power, whether it's about posture or just sort of the psychology of power and powerlessness, it's relevant to all marginalized groups for sure. You know, I always worry when, you know, one of my most like dominant sort of guys in the class is like, hey, how can I boost my testosterone even more? I'm like, that was not my point. So yes, I certainly find that it's that although the research did not focus on gender, I as a human am interested in that.

And I as a human and also the host of a show called Money Rehab would like to know if this can apply to your money. Can you make more money by like expanding it somehow? I can't as a scientist say yes or no. I mean, I had to ask. Yeah, I wish I could. I wish I could say yes. What I can say is that the findings are now clear on how it changes your mindset. It makes you feel more confident, more powerful, more in charge, more assertive, and all of those things.

I mean, it is your feelings that shape your actions. So, you know, you can take it from there and see how incrementally it certainly looks like it's more likely to get you to your goals. Well, your goals have changed over the years into this beautiful tapestry of ballet and roller skating and broadcast journalism and psychology. Do you feel like some of these other paths that you didn't take helped influence what you, where you ultimately are? Yes. I mean, I am, you know, I'm, I was a very serious ballet dancer. I, you know, an avid roller skater and avid skier. I'm a very physically active person.

You know, I love live music. I go to tons of concerts and I dance the whole time. I've, tons of concerts and I dance the whole time. I mean, so all of like, especially dance is all about communicating non-verbally, right? Your dancers on stage are not in any way verbally communicating to an audience, yet they're telling an entire story with their bodies. So there's no question that my interest in body language is related to my love of dance. I mean, it just, how can, how can that not be the case? Yeah. But you didn't realize that like Steve Jobs didn't know that calligraphy was going to help him create fonts. I know. I, I, but how, like, it is so strange to me that like somebody else had to point that out for me to go, oh my gosh, of course those things are linked. And I think that's really important

to remember because I am just not a person who has regrets. I just don't generally. So I did lots of different things. And I am so glad that my life has been, as you described it, And I am so glad that my life has been, as you described it, this sort of rich tapestry of things, because all of them are interdependent and influencing each other. And I always come back to the same sort of themes, which are really, you know, one, in order to be the most present, generous, confident, competent version of yourself, you do have to feel personally powerful. If you feel powerless, you are too inhibited to be yourself. I think one of the great quotes about power is Robert Caro, who was Lyndon Johnson's biographer, the historian, Robert Caro, who was once asked, does power corrupt? And he said, he said something like power does not necessarily corrupt, but power always reveals. So feeling powerful reveals who we are. It's up to us to be good people, you know, like that's on us. It's up to us to be competent. If you're not competent, it's going to reveal that you're not competent.

But it's the only way that we can bring ourselves fully to a situation. So that's the one theme. The other theme that comes up again and again for me is that we're judging each other on these two dimensions. How much do I trust this person? And how strong do I think this person is? Or how warm do I think they are? How competent are they? So it's, you know, trustworthiness and warmth and strength and competence. Tons of research supports this, that these are the two main judgments that we're making of strangers, of anyone new that we meet. And those two dimensions

account for our overall impression of them. But the twist here is that while we prioritize looking competent and strong, so we want other people to see us as competent and strong. And so we immediately in a professional situation want to show people what we know. And so we immediately in a professional situation want to show people what we know. They want to know that we're trustworthy. So our strength is a gift to them if they know we're trustworthy. But if they don't think we're trustworthy, it's a threat. So while we want others to be trustworthy, we want to be seen as strong. So I think this is so that that's a theme for me too, is that trust is the conduit

of influence, right? It's the only way that your great ideas have a medium to travel through. So the trust has to come before the strength. So building trust is not a waste of time. Chatting and getting to know people is not a waste of time. Listening is not a waste of time. Chatting and getting to know people is not a waste of time. Listening is not a waste of time. All of those things build trust. And so then people can share themselves with you. They can share their true interests. I mean, think about negotiations. I'm sure you know like this work on negotiation that five minutes of chit chat before a negotiation leads to better outcomes for both parties because people are getting to know each other and trusting each other. So they're more open about their interests.

You know, so you're collecting better information about them, but they also, you know, it builds efficiency into it because that trust makes it much more easy to move forward in the negotiation. So that five minutes of chit chat, you know, people think, oh, that's a waste of time. That might have been the most important thing you did in the whole negotiation. So here's a tip from Amy you can take straight to the bank. Your path does not have to be linear. I started as a freaking poetry major. And hello, did not think I would be in finance.

If you haven't read Rich Bitch, spoiler alert, beyond the title, it doesn't rhyme. You can be a finance expert even if you didn't grow up with the Wall Street Journal on your coffee table. You don't have to fit whatever origin story is typical for your industry. You can break the mold. You can break the glass ceiling. You can break hearts for your industry. You can break the mold. You can break the glass ceiling. You can break hearts if you want. You can break balls. You can break stilettos. Don't break the bank. But you can break whatever it is you want. I did it. Amy did it. And now it's your turn. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin.

Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Catherine Law. Money Rehab is edited and engineered by Brandon Dickert with help from Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Mangesh Hatikader and Will Pearson. Huge thanks to the OG Money Rehab supervising producer, Michelle Lanz, for her pre-production and development work. money rehab supervising producer, Michelle Lanz, for her pre-production and development work. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all. money money money money money money money