Your Body Language Shape Who You Are Summary

For many of writers, they think of a book, write it and then get responses from the public and experts, however, Amy Cuddy approached this book in a different way. Cuddy first chose to conduct many experiments on how our bodies can influence our behavior and brains, which led her to giving a TED Talk in 2012 called “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” She had so much information to share about power posing, being more present in our experiences and how to be more confident in all that we do, that I believed her book would be a phenomenal read and I was correct. In her 2015 book, “Presence: Bringing your Boldest Self to your Biggest Challenges,” she discusses many solid points using research that she and others have conducted on presence,

The ways in which we choose to carry our bodies can be a source of personal power within each and every one of us. Cuddy goes from talking about powerlessness and power to how we can use our bodies to give us more power. She goes into great detail about power posing and this helped me to realize and believe the fact that we all unfortunately “pose in powerless way[s] much more often than we think—and we need to change that” (Cuddy, 2015). Cuddy and her collaborators Dana Carney and Andy Yap developed their first experiment on power posing together by first thoroughly selecting the five high and low power poses for body language. These high powered poses show people expanding their bodies while the low powered poses show people with their arms crossed or constricting their bodies tightly. Next, they made sure that in a preliminary study, participants were able to identify what poses were low power and high power by using a 1-7 scale rating. Now, they were ready to begin their first experiment. The subjects were first recruited and were not told anything about the study. Each subject taken to a private room with a chair, computer and table and was told to watch and mimic as the five different postures came up on the screen for as long as they were there. Subjects didn’t know but they had been assigned either high or lower power poses. After the study, the

Self-esteem is discussed along with confidence in the first chapter of Cuddy’s book and is also discussed in chapter three of our Social Psychology textbook by Baumeister and Bushman. In the textbook on page 96, self-esteem is defined as how positively someone evaluates himself or herself. In Cuddy’s book page 33 describes how in the recent years, interventions on improving people’s self-esteem is no longer commonly favored. We now know that one reason for this is due to the difficulty of accurately measuring it. Having self-esteem such as that described in our textbook and having the positive self-esteem and self-worth described in Cuddy’s book will allow people to find the confidence they need to perform and approach their biggest challenges. When one has confidence in themselves, they are able to “be present to others, hear their perspectives, and integrate those views in ways that create value for everyone” (Cuddy, 2015). After reading this book, I felt as though self-esteem is a rather large part of people not only being present but being the best in their