Why You Can’t Choreograph Success | Amy Cuddy | Big Think

Why You Can’t Choreograph Success

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It's tempting to rush success, but Amy Cuddy, professor at Harvard Business School, explains why setting your goals too big can backfire, and vouches for the value of incremental change and authentic learning over the desire to simply 'win'.Motivation works in some complex ways. There are reward systems, giving a person something they really want after completing a task. There’s reinforcement, punishing bad behavior and buttressing good behavior. These are ways to manufacture motivation, but sometimes it’s just not there.

When a task seems impossible, there’s little way to encourage motivation. Going from a D student to an A in a few weeks can really be impossible, so why bother studying when there’s no way it can happen? Losing 15 pounds by summer? Yeah right. Breaking a bad habit you’ve had for years seems near impossible, when it’s a part of who you are, so why bother trying?

This is why Amy Cuddy, social psychologist and associate professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, suggests keeping goals smaller in order to complete them, and to avoid being outcome focused. This is why people’s New Year resolutions fail, because many people look at a whole year, the whole 52 weeks instead of one week at a time. She recommends letting go of a fixed mindset, instead focusing on the process of improvement (and perhaps even enjoying it – gasp!) rather than the end goal. You will get to where you want to be without even realizing.

Since Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are, she has received many letters, mostly about how yes, people whose motivation in themselves increased as they started to stand up stronger. Many of them have just one thing in common, they were focused on their inner selves, how they felt, how motivated and proud they were, rather than if they actually succeeded. A lot of the time, in these letters, they even forgot to mention to her whether they got the raise or the job or resolved the argument with their friend. It always seems to turn out better, or at least on a happier note, when people seem more focused on how they feel rather than if they won or not.

Amy Cuddy's book is Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.

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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: People make the mistake of making these big goals, these big sort of New Year’s resolutions. And we also know that they often backfire. That, you know, by January 15 a lot of people have given up on their New Year’s resolutions. Why is it that we keep making them and keep failing? Because they’re so big, they’re so distant and they require a million little steps in between. And each of those steps is an opportunity to fail.

And they’re very much outcome focused. It’s not about how I’m going to feel, you know, tomorrow.

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