Concept
Personal Presence
Personal presence, as Amy Cuddy defines it in Presence (2015), is the state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express your true thoughts, feelings, values and potential, especially in high-pressure moments such as interviews, pitches and difficult conversations.
Cuddy's book starts from a familiar experience: walking out of an important moment and replaying everything you failed to say. Her answer is presence, which she describes not as dominance or performance but as being synchronised with yourself, so that what you say, how you look and what you believe line up. People read that alignment as confidence and sincerity. Some of her practical advice holds up well: before a high-stakes moment, remind yourself of the values and experiences you care about most, and prepare the story you want to tell, so you arrive connected to it. The book is best known for 'power posing', the claim that holding an expansive posture for two minutes changes hormones and risk-taking. Those hormone and behaviour effects did not replicate in a larger study (Ranehill and colleagues, 2015), and Dana Carney, the first author of the original paper, said in 2016 that she no longer believed the effects were real. Whether posture changes how powerful people feel is still debated. Presence itself does not depend on the pose.
A real-life example
Nazlı, a product designer in Izmir, freezes in final-round interviews. Before her next one she skips the posture tips and instead writes, for ten minutes, about the project she is proudest of and why it mattered to her. In the interview she tells that story first. She feels more like herself in the room, and the panel asks about the project for most of the hour.
How to use it
- 1Before a high-stakes moment, spend ten minutes writing about the value or experience that matters most to you in it.
- 2Prepare the one story you most want them to hear, and tell it early.
- 3Treat posture as something that follows how you feel, not as a switch for hormones.