Personal power requires defeating the thoughts and assumptions that make us feel powerless. It requires an alignment of the various parts of ourselves: our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors. Personal power requires knowing our values and being true to our values.
Even social power - being in a position to control situations - will not overcome personal powerlessness. The key to presence, writes Cuddy, is to feel personally powerful. Presence, writes Cuddy, “is the state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values and potential.” Cuddy is not asking us to embark on a journey of self-discovery to the Peruvian mountains she is simply helping us to succeed in that meeting, so that the wit occurs in the conference room and not on the staircase. What happens, explains Cuddy, is we recover the presence that we lost under the pressure of the situation. It refers to those perfect words that come to us only after we’ve left the meeting and are on our way out of the building. Even 18th-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot experienced that emotion, which is why he coined the phase “l’esprit d’escalier” - staircase wit or, in an updated version, elevator wit. They wish they could go back into the job interview room and convey, through much better words, why they are the best candidate they wish they could have a second chance to pitch their venture to a panel of potential investors they wish they could erase the reaction they had to a senior leader’s proposal and replace it with a reaction that would be impressive and memorable. The desire for “do-overs,” for example, is an experience that most people have shared. That Cuddy’s research resonates so broadly is not surprising, as it addresses head-on the anxiety and sense of powerlessness that most of us feel in the face of daunting challenges or high-pressure situations.
Her book is Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Viewed by tens of millions of people, Cuddy’s TED talk is the second most-viewed talk in TED’s history. In 2012, Harvard Business School professor and social psychologist Amy Cuddy presented a TED talk on power poses and how the body impacts the mind.
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