Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 5: Amy Cuddy

Episode Date: March 27, 2016

Amy Cuddy has created a bonafide sensation in the world of happiness and well-being. A social psychologist at Harvard Business School and a New York Times best-selling author, Cuddy gave a TED Talk that has been viewed millions of times about how to make yourself look, feel and act more powerful, through something she calls "power poses." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey, and welcome to 10% happier. I'm Dan Harris. My guest today is a little bit out of our usual template in that she doesn't even meditate and we're going to talk about why she doesn't meditate at Great Lent.

But she has created a real sensation in the wellness world. She is one of the most popular TED Talks ever, more than 32 million views. Her name is Amy Cutty. She in her TED Talk and in her new book called Presence, which has become a New York Times Best Seller. She talks about how through something as simple as what she calls a power pose, we can go from feeling powerless or like imposter to being much more confident and much more effective in the world.

What is a power pose? Oh, okay. We have unlimited time. I know, I'm so glad about it What is a power pose? Oh, okay. We have unlimited time. I know, I'm so glad. Go wherever you want. Okay, okay. School me. A power pose is an expansive posture.

Imagine sort of what a superhero would do or what you do when you win first place in a race and you run across the surface. That has never happened for me. I knew you were going to say that. I knew that was not going to work for you. But you would throw your arms up in the air. If that happened to you, that is what you would do into a V and lift your chin and smile. So it's a really expansive, powerful posture that you hold for a minute or two before a stressful

situation. That's a power pose. So it's, people will have compared it to like a cobra with its hood out. Yeah, exactly. Right, so think about it. Yeah, wonder woman. I mean, any, I mean, across the animal kingdom, when individuals feel powerful or have status, they expand. They take up space, they make their bodies as big as they can, they stretch out. You know, they sit at the highest point on the hill.

You know, think of a peacock lifting and spreading its tail feathers. and they stretch out. They sit at the highest point on the hill. I think of a peacock, lifting, and spreading its tail feathers. Animals will stand on their hind legs to make themselves look bigger. Chips will sometimes pick up sticks and hold them out to make themselves look bigger. Other great apes had the ability to cause their hair to stand on end, which makes them look bigger.

So when we feel powerful, we want to take up a lot of space in the world to signal we're in charge. We've got the power right now, even if it's fleeting, like winning a race. And so you're saying that even if you don't feel powerful, you can use one of these poses to kind of trick your mind into feeling powerful in a key moment. Yeah. So emotion expressions are, you know, nonverbal expressions of how you feel. So think about smiling when you're happy.

But researchers now know that you also feel the emotion when you just make the expression. So you can smile and that will make you feel happier. So if I'm bummed out and I smile, I will actually start to feel better. I like to be careful about this. I don't know what will happen for you, but on average, that's what happens, right, across people. So you never have a study result where everybody in the condition has the response

that you've hypothesized. But yes, on average, if people force this fake a smile, it will improve their mood. Or if they furrow their brow, it will make them feel angrier. So that's called facial feedback. So the takeaway is that emotions are expressed nonverbal, but nonverbal expressions also cause emotions. Now all of that work was focused on the face.

What we've been looking at is posture, you know, below the neck. Now, you know, knowing that expansive posture is associated with power and that's a universal expression of pride, that's where you get to the hypothesis that it seems likely that you would get the same kind of feedback effect with posture. When we feel frightened and powerless, we do the opposite. We wrap ourselves up, we touch our necks, we cover our faces,

we pull our knees up, fetal position, we want to make ourselves invisible as small as possible. We don't want to offend anybody. And so when you're going into a really stressful situation, something that has high stakes and that feels like a social evaluation, much of life is a social evaluation, we tend to start feeling powerless and collapsing, right? Rapping ourselves up.

You think about going into the most stressful situation. You're not walking around like a superhero before you do that. That's signaling to the brain that you're in a stressful kind of fight or flight situation, and that's not the way you want to go into that situation. So, this work is focused on whether you can expand before you go into those situations and can that cause you to feel enough more confident that you can actually be in the moment, be present, engage with what's actually happening

and not with what you fear is happening. So rather than going in and thinking, I should have said this a minute ago, what does this person think of me, what's gonna happen after this moment? When you go in feeling powerful, you're able to actually be there. So you just to drill down on that a little bit, your advice would be find a private place and strike a pose.

That's what I, yes, that's what I would suggest. And what would these poses look like? I mean, wonder woman is one example that gets thrown around. I mean, it can be whatever feels comfortable to you. And so, you know, I always get worried when people get really concrete and fixed on this. Like, does it have to be this for this amount of time? And it doesn't have to be anything other than expansive and open. But, you know, Wonder Woman, the victory pose, feed up on the desk with your hands behind your head.

That's a powerful posture. Anything that is really expansive. And yeah, I encourage people to do it in the privacy of their own office or a bathroom stall or a stairwell before they walk into these stressful situations so that they're walking in, not feeling that a tiger is about to attack them. So you said at the beginning that there's so much more that it's than power poses. What did you mean by that? Well, I just think that what I want people to understand more than should I stand like Wonder Woman

for two minutes before a job interview is that your body is constantly conversing with your mind. And it's a two-way conversation, but we tend to focus on the mind body direction, more than the body, mind direction. And I think that the body is signaling a lot of information to our nervous systems about what state we're in and how we should respond.

So I think that, you know, expansiveness is also related, well, it is also related to better mood. You know, if you sit upright and hold your shoulders back, you're likely to be feeling happier. You know, slouch posture is a clear signal of depression. But when you get depressed patients to sit upright with their shoulders back just for a couple of minutes, you see a reduction in depression symptoms

and an increase in their memory for positive events in their lives and positive traits. So it just goes so far beyond standing like wonder woman. I want people to know that how they carry their bodies is to some extent shaping how their interactions play out and how they're carrying themselves through their lives. And they can take control of that conversation. I think if you will indulge me for meant to go on for two more minutes about this. I'll indulge you. Go ahead. Go for it.

But think about the kinds of self-affirmation, things that we used to think we should do to make ourselves feel more confident. I've steward Smolly looking at the mirror. Exactly. So now, I've noticed though, after giving talks all over the place that most people now don't know who steward Smolly is. Okay, steward Smolly. Which is terrifying.

Okay, steward Smolly was a character on Saturday Night Live, played by Al Franken, who's a partist. Now it's not very good. You know, now kids are like, but he's a politician. He used to play steward Smolly. And the idea was that he would stand in front of a mirror, sit in front of a mirror, and say to himself, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough,

and dog on it, people like me with a smile. And he would repeat this. It was called daily affirmation with Stuart Smolley. What was funny about it was that it didn't work. By the end, he'd interview a guest, someone like Michael Jordan, someone famous. And by the end, he'd be saying things like, I am in a shame spiral, and I'm going to die homeless and penniless and overweight, no one will ever love me, and I'm a phony, they're going to cancel

the show. It would go on and on. We thought that was funny because we know that when we are in a state of acute self-doubt, we're not going to believe ourselves when we say, I'm actually great. Now, not only are we self-doubting relires as well. So I think that that old idea of self-aggrandizing self-affirmation before these stressful situations turns out to totally backfire. What I like about the body-mind connection, and these kinds of interventions,

is that your body is telling your mind this information. It's a little bit more primitive, right? So there's not as much room for that self-doubt. The body is just saying, yeah, actually you're okay, you're safe. It's communicating that information of the nervous system. So there's just so much more out there, you know, work with combat veterans with post-traumatic stress, or rape survivors with post-traumatic stress, or rape survivors

with post-traumatic stress, depressed patients, all looking at these body-minded interventions and seeing a lot of success. If all of your indulgences are that interesting, you should just go for it without asking my permission every time. I suspect people are gonna say, okay, if you're depressed or if you're a rape victim,

or even if you're just in a moment of acute self doubt, don't we need something more than just posture improvement? Well, I mean, there's always more, right? I mean, it's, I guess, for me, it's, you know, what little incremental thing can you do to feel a little bit better? So you're not saying this is a silver bullet? No way. And, you know, and sometimes I, you know, people sometimes people say, Amy Gotti says it's a cure all.

And I would never say anything like that. All I care about is helping people to feel a little bit better, seen incremental change over time. So if you feel a little bit better, so I hear from so many people who explain to me how they use this kind of idea. Imagine, here's one.

One of the first people I heard from was after the TED Talk was a retiree, World War II vet, lived in Florida, who wrote to say, my biggest challenge is going in to see my physician and being taken seriously and getting the answers that I need because he's always dismissive with me. And we know that in healthcare older people are dismissed. They're not taken as seriously.

They're not given full information. And it's a bias in the healthcare system. So he said, I realized that I had to adopt these powerful postures before I went in so that I had the courage to say, you know what, I'm not done, I've got more questions. Can you tell me more about that? So, you know, is that going to make him feel better forever? No, but it got him more information and it made him feel more self-respecting, probably more respected by the physician.

And the next time he goes into that situation, it's going to be a little bit easier because he'll have the memory of having done it before. So what about with you or you just constantly aware of your own posture? I am a lot of the time. I mean you have a very good posture. For those who are just listening and not watching this you have your Ramrod straight spine. I used to be a ballet dancer so professionally so that was a pretty big part of my life. So dance is all about body language. It's the best expression of really body language

that there is. But I am aware of it, not just because I think I feel better when I'm sitting up straight, but because I know that other people are watching my posture, like I'll get comments like, you know, cutty's posture on this or that show. And I'm like, actually, that was the the mic pack in my bag. But, you know, soies posture on this or that show. And I'm like, actually, that was the, uh, the mic pack in my back. But, you know, so I know that people are watching it very,

that would be like if I stopped meditating. Yeah, yeah, I'm comfortable being a hypocrite on a bunch of levels, but not that much of a hypocrite. So you just have always have to watch your posture. I do. But do you notice though that it impacts your state of mind? I, you know, I feel like it does. And I know that this sounds so, this is so annoyingly sciencey, but you never know for a single person as an experimental psychologist if something's

working for that person. I mean, if it's working through the mechanism that you hypothesize or it's working because it's a placebo, you don't know. I feel like it works for me. I mean, I certainly feel better and I find that I stand in a much more open posture now than I used me. I mean, I certainly feel better. And I find that I stand in a much more open posture now than I used to. I mean, I was definitely a collapseer. I was always touching my neck and playing with my jewelry and making myself small. I felt anxious a lot of the time.

So I feel much less anxious now than I hold myself in a more open posture. I don't find that annoyingly sciencey at all. I mean, maybe it's because of my parents or scientists and my wife as a scientist. I think you're just being precise. I want to talk about your personal history and the TED talk and a million other things, but since we're talking

about your science, you and I were talking about this a little bit before we came on here. So, of late, there's been a little bit of a backlash that you've been dealing with. So I read this one article, I think it was in slate. It was by these two guys Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung, who described themselves as practicing statisticians who work in social science. And they say, quote, an outside team attempted to replicate the original study using a sample population five times larger than the original group in a paper published in

2015 the team reported they found no effect and they go on to call your study Spurious this pretty tough stuff. Yeah, you I don't need to be dismissive of I mean so here's here's what I think is important about that and and there's stuff that that is just subjective personal Sort of biases about certain kinds of research that I think I'd rather not get into. Okay. But there is another study.

Well, there are many studies that look at powerful posture, right? So what they're talking about, they're talking about the hormones findings in particular. In your study. Right. So that's, they're saying that it didn't replicate the hormones findings. What it did replicate is that people felt more powerful. So if the main takeaway for me is that when you expand, it makes you feel more powerful. This study with 200 people showed the same thing that we showed. Now, somehow that gets lost, but here let's get into the

hormones because I think that that is where we we don't know. I mean, the fact that they didn't replicate our our findings with hormones and we don't know. I mean, the fact that they didn't replicate our findings with hormones, and we haven't really talked about that. Yeah, what do we go back and tell me about your original study, and then we'll go into this. So in our original study, we had subjects assigned to either higher-low power poses randomly.

They didn't know about the other condition. They held two poses for one minute each. So a total of two minutes, we took saliva samples before and after, and we were looking at what we hypothesized was that powerful postures would lead to an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol, and low power poses would do the opposite. Now that's based deeply in neuroendocrinology,

not just from humans, but from the animal literature as well. When individuals have power, that is the hormone profile that you see. And when a primate ascends to the position of alpha, he is likely to experience an increase into testosterone and a decrease in cortisol. So we hypothesized that faking power would trick your brain into thinking that you have power, and you'd see these hormonal changes. We felt like it was the most conservative test of this hypothesis that it makes you more powerful.

I mean, if you see this, then what you're getting is not just a priming effect. It's actually something physiological. What's a priming effect? Oh, so where you're primed with a concept of power, and you go, oh yeah, I am more powerful, right? By the way, that's okay too. Like I think that's interesting stuff, but we wanted to get it something more physiological. So that's what we found. We found what we predicted. And I have to say, as an experimental psychologist, like you don't get

clean results very, very often. This was one of the cleanest studies we had ever done. And what I mean is, everything we predicted happened. And the chances of having that happen are pretty slim, to have multiple hypotheses and see the directional changes that you predicted on all of those hypotheses. So now- So people self-reported feeling more powerful and then also they had more testosterone and lower cordial. Right.

We also, we did a second study in that paper. In both of the studies we looked at feelings of power and risk taking. And in both of the studies we found effects on both feelings of power and risk taking. The hormones piece we only looked at in the second study. So in two studies we found feelings of power increase with high power poses and risk taking increase with high power poses. So they're more willing to take what kind of risks. It's like a very low cost gamble.

So they're paid to come to the lab to do the study and they get that payment no matter what. We then offer them an extra payment and then they can gamble to possibly double that or lose it. So it's like a tiny windfall that they weren't expecting, and they can leave with or without it. So that was the gamble. We actually had real money.

It wasn't a computer task. It was, here's a die, roll the die, and here's some money. So we found an increase in risk taking and feelings of power, and then in the second study where we looked at hormones, we found that there's another study from six years earlier that looked just at this was a medical study that looked just at the co-propose, which is a yoga pose, you know, where you imagine line on your stomach and you push yourself up with your hands and you open your shoulders and you sort of arch your neck. Yeah, I might do that. I jack my back up.

It hurts, right? Yeah, I hurt you. And that's what I think is interesting about this study is that it's not a particularly comfortable pose. So it's not that powerful postures are more comfortable. They're not always more comfortable. In that study, these people wanted to look at blood serum changes in four hormones,

testosterone cortisol, and two others that I'm not going to start talking about. But what they found were effects only on testosterone and cortisol. So it's a very small study, but everyone in that condition had an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol, blood serum levels, which are more conservative than our saliva samples. Enough, that's another thing that rarely happens in an experiment. Every person shows the effect. And the average effect was a 16% increase in testosterone and an 11% decrease in cortisol. So there is other evidence that this happens.

The study from 2015 did not find the effect on hormones. They also did a lot of things. They changed a lot of the variables in the study. So they changed the methods in ways that when the paper came out, we thought this is really cool because it gives us some insight into the moderators of the effect. So it's a little frustrating that it's seen as this, oh, it's a non-replication. So this means it doesn't work as opposed to, well, all of these things were different. So let's look at what happens when you move them around.

You know, they're still getting effects on feelings of power. work as opposed to, well, all of these things were different. So let's look at what happens when you move them around. You know, they're still getting effects on feelings of power. But for example, they had people hold two poses for a total of six minutes as opposed to two. That's a pretty big difference. They did a lot of the tasks differently. They had a difference. It was done in another country.

I mean, these are all potentially interesting moderators of these effects. So when it came out, it was really exciting. And we actually did write a response, reviewing a lot of other studies that's showing effects of powerful posture on, you know, showing these feedback effects, not necessarily on hormones because there are so few of those. But it's somehow, you know, it's too bad that it's taken a misdirection of, oh my gosh, this isn't a real effect. I think that as science evolves, you know, we're going to be wrong about some stuff. Maybe we are totally wrong about the hormones.

Like, let's say that all of those findings in that first study all were a fluke. Okay, we're going to move on. We're going to keep learning, right? We don't stop studying something because one study didn't replicate it. But also the self-re poor data and the cortisol data would, or its cortisol is also hormone. And of course also, also. So it's just a poor data.

So the cell for poor data would be valuable, no? Yeah, I think so, right? So I think that, you know, if you're still seeing an effect on feelings of power, it's possible that there's study, which had, as you said, it had 200 people, which was a lot more than we had in our study. And we are fine. In the last couple of years, psychology has really shifted to having more subjects in the studies to increase what we call statistical power, to know to be more

sure that the effect is real. So that is absolutely a strength of our, of their study and a weakness of ours, which we did in 2009. And if we were doing the study again, I would change nothing, except that. I would have, you know, four times or five times as many people. So yeah, I'd like to see the science grow. I'd like to see us all talking about it, rather than going, this one showed it, this one didn't. It's real, it's fake. I'm not sure how that happened, but it's happening, not just with regard to our study, but with regard to just about every finding in social psychology.

So this is happening all over the place in social psychology. These kind of fights where people are staking out positions. But this is kind of the way, I mean, look, I'm not a scientist. As I said before, I'm close to a lot of them. But this is kind of the way science works, where it's to the benefit of all of us that we have these kind of tough battles among the scientists because ultimately it gets us to the truth. I think that's true, but I think that a couple of things. I mean, I don't think that the battles have to be,

we've finished. This is the final conclusion, and I feel that that's where some people would like to take this. And again, lots of other effects in psychology, so not limited to this. I don't see why we wouldn't continue to have a discussion about the boundary conditions of these effects, and what are the mechanisms, if it's not the hormones, but we're getting effects on feelings of power, what is happening?

Is it a priming effect? I mean, here's another possibility. When you breathe deeply and slowly, and you probably know this work better than I do, but you have another body mind effect. When you breathe deeply and slowly, it's telling your vagus nerve that you are in a rest and digest situation so that you are calm. To break that down, what is the vagus nerve and what is the rest in that? The vagus nerve is sort of a central nerve that's related to your feelings of threat. And when you breathe deeply, it basically responds

as if you are safe. Because when you are safe, you can breathe deeply and slowly. So again, it's this sort of bidirectional relationship. Now, that work, people refer to that as the relaxation response, has been used for decades. I mean, there are many, many studies on this. Doctors use it all the time to calm patients before surgeries or to even to increase compliance with instructions. It clearly is working well. You see that happening in a lot of these yoga-based interventions as well. That's a possible mechanism. I mean obviously when you are standing in a more open posture, your breathing is going to change.

So that's something that we could be looking at. I just think there's so much to this. Let's break it down and work on this collaboratively, rather than staking out positions. I don't think that that does serve science. Have there been moments during this back and forth where you've really needed a power post?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think the worst part is I care so much about the people who are affected by this kind of work. And I know that other people aren't receiving the emails that I receive or meeting the people who I meet who say, look, my awareness of my body, you know, changing my awareness of my body has helped me in this way. So I would like to really understand this as well as we can. I certainly don't want to give up on something because a study didn't replicate it when you've got dozens of studies that have shown effects. So that to me is heartbreaking. And people are generally really positive.

I, we're talking about a small group, but it certainly hurts when people make attributions about my motives. Oh, she's got a book now. The book doesn't talk about the Hormone study until chapter eight. The book doesn't talk about the Hormone study until chapter eight. Like, the book cites hundreds of studies on many, many, many, many things in social psychology.

It doesn't even get into body language until chapter six. So it's frustrating to me that if this study doesn't replicate, and maybe it won't, that everything gets dismissed or it's seen as, I wanna hold on to this finding because somehow everything is illegitimate if this finding doesn't replicate. It might not replicate. I will be okay with that.

Yeah, I will be okay with that. So what's the next step to do more studies? Yeah, I mean, I think people are doing more studies. I like people to do more studies in field settings, because I think that lab settings are a little bit limiting. And partly, honestly, because of the popularity of the TED Talk, a lot of people who go into these studies have heard of this already.

And that's like to affect people. That's right. So who knows in what direction people might react against it, or they might go, oh, yeah, this will definitely help me. But I think that field settings where people aren't, you know, it's not so heavy-handed the manipulation might give us some more insight into how it works in the real world. And I really would like to see, for me, you know, helping people who feel chronically powerless with little interventions like this that are free.

If I could do that with my life, that's what I would like to be doing. Well, you have. So, and I'm sure you want to do more of it. But clearly, a lot of people have taken this very seriously, and it's been very meaningful to them. And the response, as I understand it, to the TED Talk, I mean, the sheer volume of people who've watched it is staggering. And I know that you're hearing from people all the time. I want to talk about that, but I also want to talk about the fact that it's had a big impact on you personally. And this is a story that you tell very movingly in your TED Talk.

Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology

that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. Can you just walk us through for those of us who don't know much about your story, how these posture tweaks have started to make,

sorry, not have started to, have had a huge impact on your self-image in the way other people perceive you. Well, I mean, so I could talk about sort of the response that I've gotten, or do you mean more about my back story? Your personal story, yeah. My back story. Yeah, your personal story, then we'll go into the response. Well, so I, yeah, so when I was in in college I was in a bad car accident and I woke up in a

head injury rehab ward and I had been withdrawn from college and you know I spent it was a very very long recovery. I mean the kind of head injury I had which is common in car accidents is called a diffuse exonal injury and what is, if you think of the brain as an onion, and each layer is a different density, when you're in a high-speed crash, you know, so we were going 80 or 90 miles per hour, car rolled, and I was thrown out. So suddenly, your brain is shaking against your skull,

which is that your skull is meant to protect your brain, but they're not ever supposed to touch, right? They should not meet. In this case, they did. When that happens, those different layers are moving at different speeds. So the result is that axons that are connecting these layers are torn throughout the brain. So they call it a diffuse exonal injury. Now what's really frustrating about that for doctors and patients is that because it's

all over the brain, no one can tell you what your prognosis is. They can't really. They can guess based on data from other patients, right, which makes sense. And from doing a lot of neuropsychological testing, but some people might recover really quickly and some people might never recover. But it also affects your feelings, your thoughts, your personality, really, even things like your startle response. I mean, I have a horrible startle response, which is very common result of head injury.

So... You say in the book, presence of the New York Times bestselling book, that you felt like an imposter in your own body because your friends dropped you because they've said you were a personality. I really, really did. I felt like I didn't know who I was. I, my, I queued dropped by 30 points,

which I found honestly totally crushing. Because you had been a high achieving smart, super smart kid. I had been a super smart kid. I don't know if I was high achieving, but you know, the funny thing about that is that I didn't feel like I had to be high achieving because I knew I was smart. And so it felt like something that was something that I had totally took for granted.

A core part of your identity. Yeah, and that makes it sound like being smart and confident was the most important thing. And I don't think it was the most important thing. I think being a decent person was more important and seeing lots of live music, but other than that. But being smart, I didn't realize how core it was until it was taken away and everything was hard

and I couldn't process spoken information and I was frustrated all the time and I have my friends selling me your different person. I mean, that is really, really hard to take because the other outcome of a head injury is that you don't remember that much. Not just after the head injury, but for a lot of people, you know, there's a period of time before the head injury that's very foggy, and for me that was about a year.

So I really, and college, I was 19. So you are really developing as a person. I didn't know who I was, and I felt like I kept trying to hold on to this old self, but it was like a wet ball of sand that was drying in my hands and it was sort of slipping between my fingers. And I couldn't hold on to it. And I think I finally decided that it's sort of like a relationship that's not terrible and not great, but you know you're not going to marry the person.

So you can either stay in it or you can leave. You can stay in it and wait to see if something better comes along and then leave or just leave because you know it's not going to work. I had to kind of break up with my old self to find a new self before I knew what that new self was. So I sort of had to go, I'm not ever going to be exactly that person again and it's going to have to be okay because that's the only way I'm going ever going to be exactly that person again, and it's going to have to be okay, because that's the only way I'm going to move on.

And then when you do that, you're kind of free to see who you are and to see the path unfold. So that's sort of what happened for me. And you ended up going back to college and then going to grad school and studying social psychology. But during that time, as you made friends

with your new self, as you described it in your book, you were really anxious and wanted to make yourself small. Oh, so anxious. Yeah, I mean, even right now, look, I'm like pulling my knees up as we talk about this. It's really, that was a really hard time. It took me four extra years to finish college. I had, I started and dropped out a couple of times, you know, as failing classes.

And by the time I finished, you know, I was four years later than my high school classmates. But I had chosen psychology as a major because, you know, me search and all that. And- Me search meaning you just wanted to find out more about yourself. I wanted to find out more about head injury. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, psychologist so many people say it's me search,

you know, it's people go into psychology because they want to understand themselves better. So I did start in a neuropsychology lab and when I went back to school and I decided studying head injury was probably not my thing, ended up in social psychology and kind of miraculously really through a lot of like goodwill and me, well as my advisor says having Hutzba, I ended up at Princeton as a grad student, which felt... You're clearly not Jewish, are you? We say Hutzpah.

Hutzpah. There you go. There. Okay, better. So, yeah, I actually have to be honest. The first time she used that, I hadn't no idea what she... What? I was like 25, and I'm like, thanks. You made it to 25 without ever hearing this word? I grew up in Amnesty Country.

Okay, apparently. I mean, everyone looked like me. I mean, like, five, five and blonde, like all the women looked like me. And we learned German as kids in elementary school because our parents spoke German English dialect. I mean, sorry, our grandparents. Anyway.

Not for nothing, Yiddish is a mixture of German and Hebrew. Well, and Pennsylvania Dutch sounds a lot like Yiddish. There's a lot of overlap. So they don't say quotes about that? They don't. Anyway, you got the prints and I derailed you. Yeah, we've more like we have Scrapple and X-Graph. Yeah, anyway.

Anyway. No, I'm hungry. Or Ruchin. Do you know that one? No. So it means like a kid who's like moving around a lot. He's a Rucher. A Rucher? Babies a Rucher Nah. Yeah, that one? No. So it means like a kid who's like moving around a lot. He's a richer. A richer? Baby's a richer n'aw.

Yeah, that's, so that's Pennsylvania Dutch. Anyway. I have a richer at home. A richer, yeah, I had a richer too. So, sorry. You made it to Princeton because of your Hickspa. I think so, yeah. And, and, and I do think that's why I made it there.

And because I had nice female advisors who kind of took me under their wings and wanted to see me succeed. But I did not want to tell people other than my closest friends and of course, my advisor knew that I had had this head injury. I wanted to hide that because I was sure that everybody would kind of turn on me. And I'd be found out and I'd be found out and I'd be kicked out and somebody would come along and say, we're sorry we made a mistake.

So it really stoked all of those fears. So getting through grad school was not easy. I worked, I think I worked extremely hard. I think a lot of people do in grad school, but I think it might have been harder for me. How did you turn things around? I had a great advisor. She is a student, Susan Fisk, great psychologist. Her father was a psychologist, her brother's a psychologist. I grew up in a family of psychologists, just a fantastic advisor.

That is by far number one by a lot. She could have given up on me many times. But one of the things she helped me to do, she was not easy. She was not easy on me. She made me work hard. But she would say, you can do better than this. You can do better.

It was always this incremental change. In the end of my first year at Princeton, I had to give a talk to my area of the department, which is 20 people, about the research that I had done. I'm like, I'm doing all the nervous body language things as I tell the story. And I decided, I was so absolutely sure that if I gave the talk, I'd be found out that the other faculty members would go, how did we let her in, we need to kick her out, that

I decided not to, and that not only would I not give it but I can't not give it and go on so I had to quit. So I told my advisor that I was going to quit grad school. We think after all of those years trying to recover from this head injury, I'm going to quit Princeton because I didn't want to give this talk. And she basically said, and it's funny, we've talked about this pep talk and she remembers it, you know, of course, since her version is a little bit different, but it was something like, no, you're going to give it, and you're going to just have to

fake confidence. Like, you're going to just have to get through it, because this is not about not knowing what you're talking about. You're talking about your research. So, of course, you have the knowledge, you're going to have to fake the confidence just to get through it. And you should keep giving talks every time you're invited to give a talk, give a talk, because it will get easier and easier. And eventually, and she said, it's not going to be magical, and it's not going to happen overnight. You will look back and say, wow, I'm doing this now, and this is not nearly as hard. I'm not pushing the boulder up the hill. This is okay. And that's sort of what happened.

But it took a long time. And after Princeton, I ended up at Rutgers for a year in psychology, then at Kellogg at Northwestern in the business school for two years. And then I moved to Harvard Business School, which was, you know, like a fresh dose of imposter syndrome. And, you know, it, but it wasn't as bad. It was, It was a little bit easier. And I'm watching my students in class. And at Harvard Business School and most business schools, participation is about half of your grade. And it is serious. People are fighting for airtime. The comments are very high quality. You're expected to engage. You're debating, you do not go in unprepared, you read everything you're supposed to read, it's terrifying and you will be cold called. And that's sort

of the biggest fear of all HPS students is the cold call. So I had students toward the end of my first semester of teaching who had not yet spoken in class, so I was going to have to basically fail them if they didn't speak. And I, you know, I wasn't yet good at figuring out how to make sure everybody got in. So I wrote to these people, it was like maybe three, saying, you haven't participated, and if you don't participate in these last three classes, I'm going to have to fail you. And one of them said, can I come in and meet with you? And I honestly thought that she was going to have some excuse. Like, well, we had to go to Cancun because it was a section thing. And, you know, like some excuse about

why she couldn't do this. But that wasn't what she did. She came in and she sort of collapsed like, you know, the front cover of my book has one of these wooden dolls that you put, you push on the bottom of them. They're elasticized. They're pushing the bottom and they collapse. But when you release the pressure, pressure is off. Boom. Power pose. Exactly. So I looked at her and he was Katrina. And Katrina looks like one of those collapsed dolls. That was the first, I mean, her body language was utterly powerless. But then she says, I'm not supposed to be here. And that was what I said to myself through grad school. It was like my mantra, I'm not supposed to be here. In my mind, I was telling myself that.

So I realized that she did deserve to be there because she'd gotten in and it's not easy. And she came from the small rural town. We kind of had similar backgrounds in that way. But also, she's smart. You know, I know what she says to me in office hours. I know what her writing looks like. I know she deserves to be there, and I know that I got through that. So I basically gave her the kind of pep talk that my advisor had given me, which was you're going to kind of fake this confidence thing.

Faking tell you make it. And get through it. And so the next class she made an amazing comment. I mean, she said, I said, I'm gonna call on you. So just be prepared. It was really great. Like, head spun. You know, people who would not really even notice her, noticed her. I thought it sounded great. She said that she felt like she was gonna throw up. I mean, she said it was so anxiety provoking, but it got easier and easier for her. And she's now doing the kind of work she wants to be doing. So part of it for her, she said, was feeling that she could be herself,

that feeling more powerful in these situations allowed her to reveal who she is, and to be honest with herself about what she wanted to be doing with her life. So she's actually now in education. She's not in the business world. So she says that she sort of faked it until she became this version of herself, that she was sort of the best version of herself.

So that's your tweak, because the old expression is fake until you make it, but you're saying fake it until you become it. Yeah, which annoys people who want everything to rhyme, by the way. They're like, why would she not say fake until you become it. Yeah, which annoys people who want everything to rhyme, by the way. But like, why would she not say, they could do you make it? But no, but the idea was that when I started doing this research, I really thought that I would be giving people a tool to get through a horrible situation

and then go back to being themselves. So to get these students to participate, and then you can go back to being yourself. So if they could do you make it through, that's sort of how I saw it. I did not expect what happened to happen, which is that feeling powerful reveals. But it's actually totally consistent

with all of this experimental research on power, what power does to the brain, which is, it activates the approach system. It's dis-inhibiting. People are more open. They see challenges, not as threats, but as opportunities. They feel more optimistic and confident about themselves and others. They believe that their actions will have an impact.

They are just simply more likely to act and ultimately to show a true version of themselves because they're not worried so much about what other people think of them. And it was a great quote about power from Robert Carro, who was LBJ's biographer. And if you don't know Stuart Smalley, you may not know that Lyndon Johnson is a former president of the United States. You don't know that, Sam, on you. So Robert Carro was asked once, because when you say the word power, most people think of corruption. They associate with corruption. So if you say you need to feel powerful, a lot of people are like, I'm not cool with that. But somebody said to him in an interview, so after all of these years studying presidents, what do you think does power corrupt? And he said, power does not

necessarily corrupt, but power always reveals. And that's it. To me, I'm like, there it is. It reveals. It reveals who you are. When we feel powerless, we do exactly the opposite. It activates the inhibition system. We put a wall up. When we're feeling powerless and scared, why would we be our true selves?

We just want to get away. You know, we want to protect ourselves. So it undermines our executive function. It makes us pessimistic and just generally feel sad. We don't act even when we should because we feel like why bother? It's not going to do anything. And we present the socially constrained version of ourselves. And you really think starting with,

because I think so many of us have felt powerless or like we're imposters. I mean, for years, I've been at ABC News for 16 years. And I would say for 15 and a half of those years, I couldn't believe they let me through security, you know. I mean, so many of us resonate clearly with what you're talking about here, but you really think in those situations, the first step of kind of like faking it,

tricking yourself in some ways, can start the ball rolling toward having the good kind of power that reveals in a good way. Yeah, I do. I think that it's, you're not tricking anyone else. They have no reason to believe you are or are not powerful, right? I mean, you can't fake competence.

You need to have the skills. You need to have the knowledge. So it's not like I stated a holiday in last night and I can perform brain surgery those commercials. I don't see that one. Okay, but it was a whole campaign of holiday and commercials where people stay at a holiday and the next day they're gonna formula one driving. No, it's not like it's not like a con artist, right? Or these people who you know go around and and what you know, what is the movie with Leo DiCaprio where he's the catch me if you can.

Exactly. It's not like most people can't fake competence. It's about unlocking the competence that you have, right? So let me give you an example of someone who says, this is how it worked for her. This woman came up to me at a coffee shop. She was actually working at the coffee shop. And she said, you know, are you Amy Cuddy?

And, you know, your Ted Talk really changed my life? And I said, well, what happened? She said, well, I grew up in Texas, but I'm Iranian. And I don't feel, I never felt like I fit in. My parents were refugees. And Texas is not, it just didn't feel like my home. I went to the University of Texas. I still didn't feel like an insider. I went to the University of Texas. I still didn't feel like an insider.

I felt like an imposter. And after school, I finished when I graduated. I didn't know what to do. So I moved here, and now I'm working as a server. She said, but I saw your talk, and I realized that I do know what I want to do. I just wasn't really willing to confront what it would take to get that thing.

And I said, well, what was it? And she said, I want to go to medical school. I take to get that thing. And I said, well, what was it? She said, I want to go to medical school. I want to be a doctor. And so I said, well, what was stopping you? And she said, I did not want to take the MCAT exam. I was so terrified that if I did poorly, I could not recover from that because it's diagnostic and how do you recover from a bad, so concrete.

And so she said, but the thing is I knew my stuff. You know, I knew what I needed to know. I had the knowledge to do well in the MCAT exam. And so she said that she stood in a bathroom stall for two minutes before she took it, and she nailed it. And what I like about that is that it's not like power opposing magically gave her some knowledge of stem cells

or whatever she needed to do well on the exam. That she had that already. She couldn't unlock it. And that gave her the key to unlock it. So she says, you know, I was my best self. That's what people keep coming back telling me is I was my best self. I'm my best self more of the time. They don't say, oh, I became

a different person. They say, I couldn't show people who I am and now I can. So, that makes complete sense to me. I mean, the response you're getting, which has been overwhelming to this talk, which was in 2012, whatever. It seems like it's not just that people walk away with this simple actionable piece of advice, which is to do a power pose. It's also this idea of just locking onto your story of somebody who felt powerless, felt like an imposter, and mustered the courage in part because of good advice to make a big change. And so it seems like you're giving people courage on a bunch of important levels. Yeah. Well, sorry, I shouldn't say yes. But I think people are taking a lot of different messages from it. So when I hear from people, and it's funny,

if we could go back just for a moment, maybe I'm having an opportunity to finally talk about this, but to the criticism, when people say, oh, the TED doc about hormones, what if the study isn't replicate? Nothing's real. So actually, the TED talk about hormones, what if the study isn't replicate? Nothing's real. So actually, I only spent about two minutes talking about that study.

The talk is 20 minutes long, and it's about a lot of other things. So people are locking onto different pieces of it. So talking about imposter syndrome, talking about head injury, talking about just how body language affects us, and there are just so many different pieces of it. But I think a big part of it is that I shared my own insecurities and-

And you started to cry? Yeah, yeah, that was- And telling the story of Katrina? Yeah, exactly. And I think that that was, the first bunch of emails that I got, and still most of them that I get, say, thanks for sharing your story, I don't feel alone. And, you know, one of the things that happens

is people will say, I feel like you were telling my story, or I feel like you were writing my story. And it reminds me, because I do love music so much, and I lock on to songs, and I love lyrics, and I just, you know, I think so much about what this song means and what they were thinking. And I often feel, I have that feeling that the song was my song, you know, that it speaks to me. It's my story. And that's when people come up to me say in an airport and say that and they'll hug me or cry, I totally get

what they mean. It's a universal experience for the most part. Most people have been insecure, have felt like imposters, and they want to know that there's a way out that some people got out. Do you feel like imposter syndrome is more prevalent among certain kinds of people, certain genders, certain races, ages, ethnicity? So when the phenomenon of imposter syndrome

was first studied in the 70s by a woman named Pauline Clance, who herself felt like an imposter, grew up in Appalachia, didn't, like, went to 11th grade, ended up getting a PhD, but always felt like an imposter. She thought it was a women's problem, and then she ended up teaching at Oberlin and meeting more female students who were successful. And she saw them and thought, well, but they really are successful. I really wasn't.

So that's one of the things we do. We say, well, she's really not an imposter. I was, but she's not. Anyway, she thought it was a women's problem, then realized not much later that actually it's just that women were much more likely to openly talk about it. And it's so it's equally prevalent among women and men. And she calls it now, and the imposter experience, because she said it's not a syndrome, it's not pathological, it's way too common to be seen as pathological.

Women and men experience at equal rates, it does not seem to be race as pathological. Women in men experience at equal rates. It does not seem to be race-specific. It, you people feel it in all different kinds of jobs. People feel it sometimes at home and sometimes at work. There's just no demographic pattern. There are a couple of personality variables like perfectionism that are related to it. So perfectionists are more likely to report

experiences of imposter feelings. But for the most part, it's a general experience. I think 80% of Harvard Business School students say they feel it. About 80% of people report feeling imposter syndrome or imposter beliefs. It was when she started to have people answer these questions anonymously that she saw that men really

did feel it as much. And I think that's really important because it's been framed in the last few years. Not I don't think as a result of my talk. I think that it was out the idea has been out there for a long time. But as a women's problem, like some women feel like imposter's in the workplace, well, men do too. They just feel like imposter's in the workplace. Well, men do too. They just feel like they can't talk about it. So by calling it a women's problem, it does a disservice to women because they think, oh, there's another one on the pile of obstacles

we have to get over. And men then hear that and go, oh, I'm the only one. I better not tell anybody because apparently men don't feel this. So I think it's a burden for men as well. So it's very common. Two more questions from you, both of them self-interested. I wonder, you know, 32 million people is just such an enormous number of people to watch this video, such a high percentage of them clearly feel strongly about it and people come up to you in airports and hug you and things like that. Do you ever feel the reason why this is self-interested is because

not a tiny fraction of that read my book, but I often feel when people come up to me and are excited to meet me because they read my book like I'm going to disappoint them. Oh God, I do too, yeah. You do. I do, but I love these, here's the, I love them so much. I love these people, they are so, I feel like there I love the, here's the, I love them so much. I love these people. They are so, I feel like there's so much more interesting than I am. And I kind of focus on that. So I instantly just, I want to hear all about them.

And like book signing lines, I think, for my publicists, have become nightmares because I want to talk to all of them. Because they all come up. They're like, I have a story, and I'm like grabbing their hands and crying with them. And, you know, at the moment, moment I'm thinking this is the most interesting, wonderful person in the world. So I guess I don't feel, because I'm so focused on how interesting they are, I'm less worried now. But my first year of it, I felt all the time,

like I'm going to disappoint people. And when I'm low energy, I do, yeah, I'm gonna disappoint people and what on low energy I do yeah I'm sure that I disappoint people it's that's a that's tough I get it I mean I did this that's a different kind of a cluster of secret like I'm your biggest man I'm so much so amazing I mean I'm a huge narcissist so I had no problem with it it's more just like I'm all of a sudden I feel like oh well I'm you know writing a book it took I was four years. I curated every sentence in there So I've seen much funnier than I actually am because that was I worked on it for four years I can't work on what I'm gonna say next for four years But you're right the right thing to do is then just to talk about the person who's come up to you

So here's my final question also self-interested. I've seen you tweet about the benefits of meditation But you you don't actually do it. Why not? Because I am one of the people that you describe in your book who feels she can't do it. Why do you feel you can't do it? I just, you know, it's the reason mind, and then I get into this.

It's like, for me, it's meditation is the Stuart Smollie scenario, where I'm trying to tell myself I can do it, but then the more I get stuck not being able to do it, and I feel like everyone around me is doing it, the more anxious I get, so it makes my anxiety even more acute. I feel like I need to be moving. And so that's, I think that's part of my interest in this body-mind stuff is, you know, there probably are people who, I don't want to say can't meditate, but we'll find it so difficult that it becomes disempowering or they quit.

Here's an alternative. And actually, I don't even, it's an alternative, but really, I bet the mechanisms are pretty similar and we're getting to similar outcomes where people are feeling peaceful and confident and able to be open to whatever happens, as opposed to wanting to control everything that happens. Okay, so now I'm going to hop on my soapbox. You ready for this? But this is all good.

I have good news for you all around. One is that the point, and this is a big misunderstanding about meditation, which is that you have to feel a certain way. You don't. The point is to feel whatever you're feeling clearly. And so what you're feeling, what you're describing is doubt. You're feeling doubt. And all you have to do is make a note of I'm feeling doubt.

You're not supposed to feel calm with the traditional art around meditation has served us very poorly with people floating off into the cosmos and all that stuff. That is not the way it's going to feel. It's going to feel whatever is going on with you at that moment. If you're feeling that, you are meditating correctly. And so you, what you described before about your experience as a meditation, were meditating. The whole thing of thinking everybody else is doing it right.

That's called comparing mind. You were just comparing yourself to other people. So, the point is, A, don't expect to feel a certain way, and that, because expectations are the most noxious ingredient to introduce into a meditation context. Two, everybody's getting lost a million times, so don't worry about it, welcome to the human condition.

And three, there is an alternative, it's called walking meditation. It's not like walking around the park, although you can do it that way, but it helps to start with a more formal variety, which is just kind of like, I do it right in this room where we're in my office where we are right now. You just start on one side of the room

and walk really slowly to the other side of the room, carefully feeling every sensation of the movement. And every time you get lost, which you will a million times, you just notice, oh, I've become distracted and start again. Anyway, that's my soapbox. Well, I mean, I did read, I love Tara Rock's work, and I have a lot of her audio meditations, and the idea of accepting an emotion, just acknowledging it and accepting it, really,

really resonates with me. Absolutely. So, that's the closest I've gotten. Thanks for listening, our thanks to Amy Cuddy for coming in. Let me ask you a favor before I let you go. If you like what you're hearing here, do me a solid and subscribe to the podcast, rate it, five stars would be nice, and write a review. That will definitely help us stay alive. We want to keep doing this.

So rating and reviewing it and subscribing it is all super useful. I also want to thank the producers of this show, Josh Cohan, Lauren Efron, Sarah Amos, and the head of ABC News Digital, Dan Silver. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back with another podcast very soon. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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