If you're going into finance, you might be dealing with a lot of sexism and a lot of alpha behavior. How are you going to deal with that? How are you going to feel powerful and comfortable with being who you are?
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.
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.
Politicians are very experienced - maybe too experienced - at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.
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.
Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.
Trust comes before strength, and it becomes a conduit of influence. Your strength is a little bit threatening before people trust you.
A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across.
I'm good enough; I'm smart enough. Self-affirmation is where people list their core values. These are things that really make them who they are.
It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.
People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.
Authenticity doesn't just mean you're not filtering what you're saying, it's about being able to know and access the best parts of yourself and bring them forward.
There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.
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.
Too many of us suffer from pervasive feelings of personal powerlessness. We have a terrible habit of obstructing our own paths forward, especially at the worst possible moments.
Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.
