Amy Cuddy

“There is no one who is present all the time, but you work on becoming present when you are interacting with people who are working for you, being able to hear them without a sense of threat, to go into those meetings with confidence and not arrogance.”

“It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.”

“When we're sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless.”

“Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.”

“A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across.”

“When you have a novel, exciting finding, that gets attention. People are going to push back, and that's honestly how science should work.”

“When you walk into those situations that have a lot of conflict in them, the first thing to do is to be present enough to allow the other person to speak first. You're not giving power away; you're actually allowing them to feel seen and understood.”

“I would never encourage anyone to adopt a contractive posture. It's not good for you physically. It's not good for you psychologically.”

“Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.”

“Charisma seems to be more about the intoxicating quality that you have on other people, as opposed to presence, which is more about the self in relation to others, and how you feel you represented yourself in a situation, and how you were able to engage. So it's less about how others see you and more about how you see yourself.”

“Although our body language governs the way other people perceive us, our body language also governs how we perceive ourselves and how those perceptions become reinforced through our own behavior, our interactions, and even our physiology.”

“A mountain of evidence shows that our bodies are pushing, shaping, even leading our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That the body affects the mind is, it's fair to say, incontestable. And it's doing so in ways that either facilitate or impede our ability to bring our authentic best selves to our biggest challenges.”