Amy Cuddy
speaker
1,290 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Aug
Amy Cuddy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Seven, hold it. Eight, exhale. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four. four, five, six, seven, eight. That's it. Three times. One time you feel it. It will put me to sleep at night. If I'm relaxed, it makes me sleepy. But if I'm anxious, it calms me down. There's just so much research on the relaxation response and breathing.
But what I think is interesting about it is that that kind of breathing is expansive. Just like what I talk about, you know, like expansive posture, that's expensive. You're breathing deeply and slowly. You're taking up more temporal space. You're expanding your, you know, like your physical body more. And when we expand, we tend to feel more confident, more powerful, more calm.
What we should be in is having good neutral posture. So before stressful events, That's when I say find a private space. I think I said in the TED Talk, find a bathroom stall, which I honestly think just like I thought of at the moment, but I can't tell you how many emails I get from people who are like, I was in the bathroom.
Or like people who see somebody in a bathroom with their arms up in the air, they're like, are you power posing in there?
Oh, I know. I loved it so much. That's so good. You can't imagine. Like, I love that show, and I had no idea. You had no idea it was coming. I was, like, sobbing.
I know. And I think all of us were absolutely beyond thrilled. Like, this is cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to have that. And I know I was telling Brene this, but... The first time I saw that show, at the end of the first episode, I turned to my husband and I said, I love Ted Lasso. And he goes, that's because you are Ted Lasso. And I was like, well, I guess I had good self-esteem then.
But I am Ted Lasso. And so are you. Yes, exactly. It's funny because Brene says that she's Roy Kent.
But anyway, yeah. So before these stressful situations, the ones that you approach with dread, that's when you find some space and really make yourself big. Expansive. Like whatever feels comfortable to you, expand. You know, in front of other people, it comes across as really aggressive and domineering and off-putting.
But if you're in the privacy of your own bathroom stall or office or whatever, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to worry about cultural norms or putting people off. In our everyday lives, we spend so much time like this, with our phones. And that is really bad. First, it's bad for us. just our posture, and it's creating this sort of fixed thoracic stoop.
But physiotherapists used to only see in elderly people, and now they're seeing it in 15-year-old boys from gaming and things like that. And that's something, you can't just be like, oh, I'm going to sit up straight. work that out.
Exactly.
Totally. So it's not only hurting our posture, but I believe that it is affecting our mood. And so even just set up your workspace so that you can be more expansive. Yes. We neglect our body language when we're alone because it's language. And if we're alone, we're not talking to anyone.
But we're talking to ourselves, right? So it's really important, I think, for us to be minding our posture. Also... There have been a couple of meta-analyses recently, which basically are just studies that look at all of the studies on a topic and come up with a sort of an average effect size. Like they say, yes, this is a real effect, and this is how big the effect is, right?
So studies that have looked at meta-analyses of power-opposing studies show really clearly that it affects the way we feel. By shrinking our body. Shrinking versus expanding. Affects the way, whether in a positive or- More expansive, more confident, and more powerful psychologically. Shrinking, less powerful, less confident. But what's interesting is that there are two meta-analyses.
One of them shows that more of the effect is driven by the difference between neutral and expansive. The other one shows that more of the effect is driven by the difference between, you know, contractive and neutral. So I'm not, we still, In short, there's evidence that both of those things matter, but certainly neutral is better than contractive. Shrinking, yeah, yeah, contracting.
Exactly, exactly.
Absolutely. It's funny, I once, this woman wrote to me, she said, I teach people public speaking, and I had this student who was really stressed out, this man, and so I got into power pose for a minute, and he said it made him feel worse.
And she said, but then I watched, we watched the video, she said I videotaped him, and we watched the video, and I was like, were you breathing? He said, no, I didn't breathe. I held my breath the whole time. Oh my gosh. He's like, well, that's not gonna work. Yeah, you're gonna pass out, you're gonna faint. Exactly. So he had... been like completely still in this power pose.
And she, I mean, she was laughing about it, but yeah.
You know, it's funny. I really emphasize two minutes in the TED Talk because that's what we had done in those first studies. I think actually less is more. Like we've gone out to five minutes. I think that I think that it just gets awkward. It's that silly. You feel weird, but also your body gets sort of stiff. So I just think it's... I don't even think you have to be still.
Showing 1261–1280 of 1,290 · page 64 of 65
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