Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

This chapter opens and closes with discussion of the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, and their intimidating and powerful haka (a traditional Māori dance). Body language communicates nonverbally and often without conscious awareness of our own sense of power or powerlessness. Cuddy writes: “Whether temporary or stable, benevolent or sinister, status and power are expressed through evolved nonverbal displays—widespread limbs, enlargement of occupied space, erect posture” (146). She notes that this is true across cultures and even in those who were born blind, and who could not have picked up nonverbal displays from watching others.

There are many aspects of nonverbal communication, including “facial expressions, eye movements and gaze, body orientation and posture, hand gestures, walking style, [and] vocal cues such as pitch and volume” (149). Power can also influence the way we see ourselves and others. We can perceive our relative height to be greater than it is when we are feeling powerful, and less when we are feeling weak. These nonverbal cues can eclipse job titles and other indications of power when they contradict each other. For instance, the water boy was seen as more powerful than the coach when he was posed powerfully and the coach was posed more submissively.

Notably, those who feel powerful “initiate speech more often, talk more overall, and make eye contact while they’re speaking […]. 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” (154). Powerlessness has the opposite effect on our nonverbal communication: “We shorten, slouch, collapse, and we restrict our body language. And when other people watch us doing these things, they can’t help but see us as powerless and frightened” (157).

Cuddy discusses the ways in which gender is tightly wound with our perceptions of power. In a study with four- and six-year-olds, a plain mannequin with no gender was posed in positions of power and of powerlessness. When asked to determine which dolls were male and female, the children of both ages frequently selected the mannequin with power poses as male and the mannequin with powerless poses as female. She writes: “In other words, while both groups showed a strong male-power gender bias, compared to the four-year-olds, the six-year-olds were about three times as likely to see every powerful doll as male and every powerless doll as female” (162). Cuddy calls for us to make an effort to help ourselves and children understand that gender and power are not inextricably linked.

Having determined that physical positions of the body can influence perceptions of power, Cuddy asks if we should assume dominant positions even when they do not match how we feel or the level of our personal power. She notes, “we don’t want to engage with people who are conspicuously displaying dominance. We sense that their behavior is asynchronous, and they seem too dangerous” (165-66). Falsely portraying power poses in interviews, for example, tends to backfire. Cultural norms also play a role. A pose that is appropriate in Brazil might not work as well in Finland, for example. It’s important to realize that this nonverbal communication is saying just as much as we are saying aloud when we interact with others.