Amy Cuddy: Feeling Anxious? The Last Thing You Should Do Is Lie to Yourself. | Big Think

Amy Cuddy: Feeling Anxious? The Last Thing You Should Do Is Lie to Yourself. | Big Think

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Self-affirmation techniques are the butt of many jokes, including a famous Saturday Night Live sketch with Al Franken. But value affirmation is something different, says Harvard's Amy Cuddy. The last thing you want to do if you're looking for more self-assurance and confidence is lie to yourself (the conceit of Franken's sketch). Instead, says Cuddy, focus on your personal values: what they are, what makes them immutable, and why they're important to you.

As a follow up exercise, Cuddy suggests writing about a time when you express these values. The endpoint of self-affirmation through your values is an increase in power — not power over other people, but internal power that represents a form of self-mastery. Not only is this an effective way to make individuals more confident and more effective, it makes people more interesting in general.

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AMY CUDDY:

Amy Cuddy, social psychologist and Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, uses experimental methods to investigate how people judge and influence each other and themselves. Her research suggests that judgments along two critical trait dimensions — warmth/trustworthiness and competence/power — shape social interactions, determining such outcomes as who gets hired and who doesn't, when we are more or less likely to take risks, why we admire, envy, or disparage certain people, elect politicians, or even target minority groups for genocide.

Cuddy's recent work focuses on how we embody and express competence and warmth, linking our body language to our feelings, physiology, and behavior. Her latest research illuminates how “faking" body postures that convey competence and power (“power posing") — even for as little as two minutes — changes our testosterone and cortisol levels, increases our appetite for risk, causes us to perform better in job interviews, and generally configures our brains to cope well in stressful situations.

In short, as David Brooks summarized the findings, “If you act powerfully, you will begin to think powerfully." Ultimately, Cuddy's research suggests that when people feel personally powerful, they become more present: better connected with their own thoughts and feelings, which helps them to better connect with the thoughts and feelings of others. Presence — characterized by enthusiasm, confidence, engagement, and the ability to connect with and even captivate an audience — boosts people's performance in a wide range of domains.

Her book is Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Amy Cuddy: There was this old Saturday Night Live sketch called "Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley," who was played by Al Franken, who is now a politician. And he would look into the mirror and say, "I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me." And by the end of it he would be saying to himself, "I am in a shame spiral. I’m going to die homeless and penniless and overweight. No one will ever love me. I am a fraud. I’m a phony." And so what was funny about that was that we all know that that doesn’t work.

When you feel acutely anxious and self-doubting the last thing you should do is lie to yourself, right? So what happens is that that creates a kind of backlash that makes you feel not only more anxious, but now you’re also a liar, right? Now you’re lying to yourself. So that’s not the kind of self-affirmation that I’m talking about. The kind of self-affirmation I’m talking about is this where you really do identify what are your core values? What are the things that no one can really change about you? Why do they matter to you? And you kind of anchor yourself in them. Now what the research shows – and there literally are hundreds of studies on self-affirmation and most of this was work done by Stanford psychologists led by Claude Steele. And what they find is that when people self-affirm, it is the simplest exercise. It really is. One, what are your core values? Two, why do they matter to you? Three, write about a time when you express this. When people do that, it dramatically lowers their stress and anxiety, self-reported stress and anxiety — it lowers their neuroendocrine measures of stress and anxiety like cortisol and epinephrine.

And it allows them to perform much better in a stressful task. So somebody might self-affirm and write about why, you know, family matters to them. .......

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