49 Quotes from Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges By Amy Cuddy

I love reading books written by psychologists. The information in this book is truly valuable. When I’m in a challenging situation like giving a job interview or about to take an oral exam, I try to act on the advice contained in this book, and it really helps.

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Here are the quotes that I liked:

''Presence, as I mean it throughout these pages, is the state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values, and potential. That’s it. It is not a permanent, transcendent mode of being. It comes and goes. It is a moment-to-moment phenomenon.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Presence is confidence without arrogance.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''The more we are able to be ourselves, the more we are able to be present. And that makes us convincing.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we are trying to manage the impression we’re making on others,we’re choreographing ourselves in an unnatural way. This is hard work, and we don’t have the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to do it well. The result is that we come across as fake.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we are being inauthentic—projecting a false emotion or covering a real one—our nonverbal and verbal behaviors begin to misalign. Our facial expressions don’t match the words we’re saying. Our postures are out of sync with our voices. They no longer move in harmony with each other; they disintegrate into cacophony.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Lies inevitably leak out and that one can learn, through extensive training, how to spot these leaks by watching facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors….we should specifically look for incongruities between what people are doing and what they’re saying.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''It turns out that we are not much better than chance at accurately detecting lies, although most of us think we excel at it… This might be because when we are trying to spot deception, we pay too much attention to language—to the content of what a person is saying… attending to words might, paradoxically, undermine our ability to spot lies.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Presence stems from believing our own stories. When we don’t believe our stories, we are inauthentic—we are deceiving, in a way,both ourselves and others. And this self-deception is, it turns out, observable to others as our confidence wanes and our verbal and nonverbal behaviors become dissonant. It’s not that people are thinking, 'He’s a liar.' It’s that people are thinking, 'Something feels off. I can’t completely invest my confidence in this person.' As Walt Whitman said, 'We convince by our presence,' and to convince others we need to convince ourselves.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Physical and psychological adversity shape us. Our challenges give us insights and experiences that only we have had. And—I don’t want to be glib about this—they are things we need to not only accept but also embrace and even see as strengths. While we may not have chosen to include them in our concepts of ourselves, they are there. And what more can we do but own them?''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we try to fake confidence or enthusiasm, other people can tell that something is off, even if they can’t precisely articulate what that thing is. In fact,when job applicants try too hard to make a good impression through nonverbal tactics such as forced smiles, it can backfire—interviewers dismiss them as phony and manipulative.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''My field, social psychology, has amassed a great deal of evidence that humans persistently make biased decisions based on minimal,misleading, and misunderstood first impressions. We’ve clearly demonstrated that first impressions are often flimsy and dangerous, and I’m not challenging that.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Sometimes you just hit a wall. And it’s okay. Even if it feels bad, it’s okay to let it feel bad. Because eventually you’ll stop feeling bad,because feelings just don’t last very long.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''If someone you’re trying to influence doesn’t trust you, you’re not going to get very far; in fact, you might even elicit suspicion because you come across as manipulative. You might have great ideas,but without trust, those ideas are impotent. A warm, trustworthy person who is also strong elicits admiration, but only after you’ve established trust does your strength become a gift rather than a threat.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''People are also much more likely to accept even a negative outcome when they feel that the procedure that got them there was fair. For something to be 'procedurally just,' as psychologists call it, the affected parties must believe that they’ve been heard, understood, and treated with dignity and that the process and its key drivers are trustworthy. And they’re much more likely to feel that a procedure was fair when they were involved in developing it.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Sometimes we express ourselves most eloquently by not expressing anything—by allowing our presence, unexplained and unembellished, to speak for itself.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''There are people out there who are going to withhold their approval from us, assert their superiority over us, even actively try to undermine us, and we have to protect ourselves from negative voices like theirs.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we feel powerful, we feel free—in control,unthreatened, and safe.As a result, we are attuned to opportunities more than threats. We feel positive and optimistic, and our behavior is largely unrestricted by social pressures.On the other hand, powerlessness activates a psychological and behavioral inhibition system, the 'equivalent to an alarm-threat system.' We are more attuned to threats than to opportunities. We feel generally anxious and pessimistic, and we’re susceptible to social pressures that inhibit us and make our behavior unrepresentative of our sincere  selves.powerlessness is at least as likely to corrupt as power is.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Social power is characterized by the ability to exert dominance, to influence or control the behavior of others. Social power is earned and expressed through disproportionate control over valued resources. A person who possesses access to assets that others need—food, shelter, money, tools, information, status, attention, affection—is in a powerful position. The list of things this type of power can gain is endless, but social power itself is a limited resource. The constant is that it requires some kind of control over others.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Personal power is characterized by freedom from the dominance of others.It is infinite, as opposed to zero-sum—it’s about access to and control of limitless inner resources, such as our skills and abilities, our deeply held values,our true personalities, our boldest selves. Personal power—not entirely unlike social power, as I’ll explain—makes us more open, optimistic, and risk tolerant and therefore more likely to notice and take advantage of opportunities.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Personal power is all about having the confidence to act based on one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and values, and having the sense that one’s actions will be effective.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Feeling powerless undermines our ability to trust ourselves. And if we cannot trust ourselves, we cannot build trust with others.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Anxiety.... alienates us from others. Some research suggests that social anxiety interferes with our ability to see the world through others’ eyes.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''We don’t overestimate the amount of attention we’re getting because we’re egotistical or narcissistic. We do it because we’re each at the center of our own universe, and we can’t help but see the world from our own perspective. That leads us to think that others see it from our perspective, too. This is especially so when we’re feeling awkward, having a bad hair day, or when we’ve said something dumb. In all such cases, most of us will overestimate the number of people who notice.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''If feeling powerless inhibits us, depletes us, and generally throws us off our game, it’s also true that feeling powerful does the opposite.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''In an early study on power and management, supervisors who felt powerless used more coercive power—threats of punishment or even being fired—when dealing with a 'problem worker,' whereas supervisors who felt powerful used more personal persuasion approaches, such as praise or admonishment. In another study, managers who felt powerless were more ego defensive,causing them to solicit less input. In fact, managers who felt powerless judged employees who voiced opinions more negatively.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Power makes us fearless, independent, and less susceptible to outside pressures and expectations, allowing us to be more creative. When we feel powerful, we’re less self-conscious about expressing our feelings and beliefs, and that frees us to think and do great things.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Powerlessness can also cause us to adapt our behavior to match the behavior or perceived expectations of others around us.We become insincere—not necessarily in that we intend to deceive but in that we wish to protect ourselves. After all, it’s better to blend in and please when you have no power.''
― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''when people possess a strong belief that they will be able to perform the task at hand, they are more likely to perform it.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''So does power corrupt? It certainly can, as many studies—not to mention history and experience—have shown. All too often, social power creates the kind of asymmetric interdependence that breeds inequity, injustice, and antisocial behaviors such as stereotyping. This is why I strongly favor the development of non-zero-sum personal power over the acquisition of zero-sum social power. ''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we feel powerful, we speak more slowly and take more time.We don’t rush. We’re not afraid to pause. We feel entitled to the time we’re using.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''When we are feeling powerless, in virtually every way that we can, we make ourselves smaller. Rather than take up more space, we take up less—through our postures, our gestures, our walking, and even our voices. We shorten, slouch, collapse, and we restrict our body language. And when other people watch us doing those things, they can’t help but see us as powerless and frightened.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Gaze aversion is a sign of submission.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

'' 'I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.'This provocative idea asserts that bodily experiences cause emotions, not the other way around... we experience or perform a physical sensation or action with our bodies, and that causes us to feel a certain way.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''By the way, if you want to feel a little burst of joy right now, here are the breathing instructions : 'Breathe and exhale slowly and deeply through the nose; your breathing is very regular and your rib cage relaxed.' Feel better?''
― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''Carrying yourself in a powerful way directs your feelings, thoughts,behaviors, and body to feel powerful and be present (and even perform better) in situations ranging from the mundane to the most challenging.''

― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

''There is a misconception that people who are confident, have power, have high-status tend to use ‘I’ more than people who are low status.… That is completely wrong. The high-status person is looking out at the world and the low-status person is looking at himself.''
― Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges