Shadowing Practice: Amy Cuddy TED Talk - Fake it Till You Make it - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack.

And all it requires of you is this, that you change your posture for two minutes.

But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body.

So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller?

Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles.

Sometimes we hold on to our arms like this.

Sometimes we spread out.

I see you.

So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now.

We're going to come back to that in a few minutes.

And I'm hoping that if you sort of learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.

So we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language.

You know, we're interested in, like, you know, an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.

Here they are arriving at number 10 and look at this lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States.

Oh and here comes the Prime Minister of the...

No.

So a handshake or the lack of a handshake can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks, even the BBC and the New York Times.

So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior or body language, but we call it nonverbals as social scientists, it's language.

So we think about communication.

When we think about communication, we think about interactions.

So what is your body language communicating to me?

What's mine communicating to you?

And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this.

So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language or other people's body language on judgments.

And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.

And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.

For example, Nalini Ambadi, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued.

So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted?

Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70% of U.S.

Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes.

and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation.

If you use them poorly, bad idea, right?

So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us, and what the outcomes are.

We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.

We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.

So, what nonverbals am I talking about?

I'm a social psychologist, I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school.

So, it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.

I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.

And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance?

Well, this is what they are.

So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.

So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up.

It's about opening up.

And this is true across the animal kingdom.

It's not just limited to primates.

And humans do the same thing.

So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment.

And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are.

This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied, she shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition.

So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it, they do this.

So the arm's up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.

What do we do when we feel powerless?

We do exactly the opposite.

We close up, we wrap ourselves up, we make ourselves small.

We don't want to bump into the person next to us.

So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.

And this is what happens when you put together high and low power.

So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals.

So if someone's being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller.

We don't mirror them, we do the opposite of them.

So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice?

I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals.

So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, like really coming to the room, they get right into the middle of the room, before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.

When they sit down, they're sort of spread out, they raise their hands like this.

You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in.

As soon as they come in, you see it.

You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.

I noticed a couple of things about this.

One, you're not going to be surprised.

it seems to be related to gender.

So, women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.

Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.

But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating and how well they were participating.

And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half a grade.

So, business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.

You get these equally qualified women and men coming in, and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.

So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating, is it possible that we could get people to fake it, and would it lead them to participate more?

So, my main collaborator, Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it?

Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?

So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.

There's a lot of evidence.

But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

There's some evidence that they do.

So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.

So it goes both ways.

When it comes to power, it also goes both ways.

So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.

So the second question really was, We know that our minds change our bodies.

Is it also true that our bodies change our minds?

And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about?

So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings.

And in my case, that's hormones.

I look at hormones.

So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like?

So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.

They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance.

They also tend to be able to think more abstractly.

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So there are a lot of differences.

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They take more risks.

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There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.

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Physiologically, there also are differences.

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on two key hormones, testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

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So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol.

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So what does that mean?

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When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone because that was about dominance.

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But really, power is also about how you react to stress.

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So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress-reactive?

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Probably not, right?

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You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress-reactive, the person who's laid back.

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Where can you actually apply this, which we cared about, of course?

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And so we think it's really what matters.

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I mean, where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations.

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Where are you being evaluated?

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Either by your friends, like for teenagers at the lunchroom table.

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It could be, you know, for some people, it's speaking at a school board meeting.

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It might be giving a pitch, or giving a talk like this, or doing a job interview.

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We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through was the job interview.

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So we published these findings, and the media are all over it and they say, okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right?

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You know, so we were, of course, horrified and said, oh my God, no, no, no, that's not what we meant at all for numerous reasons, no, no, no, don't do that.

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Again, this is not about you talking to other people, it's you talking to yourself.

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What do you do before you go into a job interview?

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You do this, right?

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You're sitting down, you're looking at your iPhone or your Android and not trying to leave anyone out.

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You are, you know, you're looking at your notes, you're hunting up making yourself small when really what you should be doing maybe is this like in the bathroom, right?

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Do that, find two minutes.

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So that's what we want to test, okay?

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So we bring people into a lab and they do either high or low power poses again.

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They go through a very stressful job interview.

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It's five minutes long.

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They are being recorded.

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They're being judged also.

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And the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback.

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So, when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds, and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, it feels fake, right?

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So I said, fake it till you make it.

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Because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.

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When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.

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I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times.

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I was thrown from the car.

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And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward.

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And I had been withdrawn from college.

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And I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic.

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I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child.

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So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back.

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They say you're not going to finish college.

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Like just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you.

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So I really struggled with this.

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And I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that.

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So I felt entirely powerless.

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I worked and worked and worked, and I got lucky and worked and got lucky and worked.

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Eventually, I graduated from college.

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It took me four years longer than my peers.

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And I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fisk, to take me on.

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And so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here.

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I am an imposter.

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And the night before my first year talk, and the first year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people.

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That's it.

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I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, I'm quitting.

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She was like, you are not quitting because I took a gamble on you and you're staying.

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You're going to stay and this is what you're going to do.

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You're going to fake it.

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You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do.

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You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience until you have this moment where you say, oh my gosh, I'm doing it.

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Like, I have become this.

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I am actually doing this.

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So that's what I did.

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Five years in grad school.

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A few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern.

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I moved to Harvard.

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I'm at Harvard.

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I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, not supposed to be here, not supposed to be here.

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So the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, look, you've got to participate or else you're going to fail, came into my office.

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I really didn't know her at all.

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And she said, she came in totally defeated, and she said, I'm not supposed to be here.

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And that was the moment for me, because two things happened.

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One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore.

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I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.

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And the second was, she is supposed to be here.

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She can fake it.

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She can become it.

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She was like, yes, you are.

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You are supposed to be here, and tomorrow you're going to fake it.

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You're going to make yourself powerful.

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And, you know, you're going to...

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And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever.

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You know?

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And she gave the best comment ever.

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And people turned around, they were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there, you know?

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She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it.

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So she had changed.

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And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it.

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Fake it till you become it.

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You know, it's not, do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.

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The last thing I want to leave you with is this.

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Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.

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So this is two minutes.

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Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.

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before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors,

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Shadowing Practice: Amy Cuddy TED Talk - Fake it Till You Make it - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: Amy Cuddy TED Talk - Fake it Till You Make it - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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