Last week, I saw an inadvertent demonstration of the effectiveness of “power posing” before a presentation.
Power posing is the practice of deliberately assuming a powerful body position prior to a stressful situation, such as a presentation or an interview, in order to trick your mind into feeling more confident. According to one well-known study, participants who power-posed before a mock interview/presentation were more likely to be seen by independent raters as more competent and more likely to be “hired”.
In my class on presentations, I had explained the technique as a possible antidote to stage fright. I told the students that, while it’s well known that our internal states can affect how we carry ourselves, it has also been demonstrated that how we carry ourselves can affect our internal states. It’s called embodied cognition.
One woman in the class, who had admitted how nervous she was, was very skeptical. I can’t say that I blamed her, because it does smack of pop psychology. When it was her time to speak, she slowly approached the front of the room, showing all outward signs of anxiety and withdrawal. Just before reaching the front, she suddenly straightened up, threw her arms out, and looked right at me saying loudly: “Here’s my power pose!”
It was meant to be ironic and to poke fun at the idea, and it only lasted about two seconds rather than the two minutes used during the study. But – and maybe this was just a coincidence – she then proceeded to deliver one of the more poised and confident presentations that day. In fact, one of her classmates accused her of sandbagging.
It’s impossible to say that her brief but intense power pose, even though she did not believe in it, made the difference. But for those of us who saw the before and after performances, it made believers out of us.
I would not recommend using her exact technique immediately before your next critical presentation; you don’t want to scare your audience! But, if you can spare a few moments out of sight to fake it, you just might feel it. What have you got to lose?
I was more than ordinarily nervous before a presentation on Monday. I was attending a pitch competition involving 12 teams, and I had given a little extra attention to team #3, which had selected Tommy as its spokesman.
The main reason I was nervous was that in last Wednesday’s practice run, he had performed abysmally. His opening was poor and it only went downhill from there. It was especially shocking because the week before it seemed like he was doing a good job in his practice runs, but the minute he got in front of a strange audience, his mind froze and everything he had practiced went out the window. After watching all the teams run through their practices, I had Tommy’s presentation ranked 11th out of 12.
The team even considered yanking him and using his backup, but Tommy insisted he wanted to try again. He had five days to work, and I helped out slightly. Here’s how it went:
Step 1 on the road to redemption was a clear, pull-no-punches assessment of his performance. There had to be absolutely no doubt in his mind what had gone wrong and how much work he needed to do, not to win, but simply to keep from embarrassing himself and his team.
Step 2 was important: he had to have hope that he could succeed. We told him that he had proven he knew how to do a good job in practice, but he needed to show he could do the same thing in front of a live audience. Step 2b was critical: Tommy accepted the premise and the challenge. I can’t stress enough how much courage it took to try again. It’s hard enough for someone with no speaking experience to agree to face 300 people in a judged competition, but agreeing to go through with it after failing on the first try takes a special kind of guts.
Step 3 was a clear path to what needed improvement. Tommy and his team revamped their presentation from top to bottom, focusing on just three aspects: simplification, crafting a story that the audience wanted to hear, and on making it a conversation.
Step 4 was practice, practice, practice—at least 20 passes through the presentation during the weekend. That’s where I helped a little. I coached a couple of early passes through the new version. There was a lot of improvement from before but still a long way to go. After I left them on Saturday afternoon I know they went late from there, and finally wrapped it up on Sunday afternoon.
When Tommy came out on stage on Monday afternoon, I felt as nervous as if one of my own kids was up there. He may have been more nervous than I was, but he didn’t show it at all. He approached the podium, looked at the audience, gave a confident smile, and then nailed his opening. And it got better from there. It was as if someone had kidnapped the guy from last week and substituted a ringer instead.
In the end, Tommy did not win the competition; the trophy went to another team. But he triumphed in the competition that really counts. He won the battle against fear and doubt, and taught us all a superb lesson: how much could be done in such a short time with a little guts and lots of hard work.
Preparing for the big presentation
According to research by developmental psychologists Alison Gopnik and Betty Repacholi, babies develop empathy some time between 14 and 18 months of age, which is much earlier than was originally thought.[1]
They discovered this through an ingenious experiment in which babies of each age group were offered the choice of either broccoli or Goldfish crackers. Not surprisingly, most preferred the Goldfish. Next, Repacholi selected one of the foods and either made a delighted or a disgusted face when she bit into it. Finally, she would hold out her hand to the baby and ask for some food.
The 18 month old babies would offer Repacholi the one that they saw that she liked, regardless of whether it was the one they liked. The 14 month old babies would show confusion when she appeared to like the broccoli, and then would offer her the Goldfish.
What this meant was that they had developed the capacity for empathy, to see others as different individuals, with their own likes and dislikes. Before these experiments, psychologists had thought that children did not develop empathy until much later, so Gopnik and Repacholi pushed back the boundaries to a much earlier stage in their development.
Curiously, scientists haven’t done any additional research to determine the age at which humans lose the capacity for empathy, or for putting themselves into the minds of others. I think I may be able to offer researchers a clue. I’ve noticed a similar look of confusion on the faces of full grown adults when I tell them their sales presentations have to be about the buyer and not about themselves.
They insist on including several slides about their own companies, their products, and their cool technologies. They get excited about their product’s features, without stopping to consider whether the customer actually cares. It’s all about what they like.
It seems that humans develop empathy at around 18 months, and lose it right around the time they have to make a presentation. Just doing my bit to advance scientific knowledge…
[1] The story comes from Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, by Gary Klein.
You get two ideas for the price of one in this blog post: how to get an annoying song out of your head and how to get in the right frame of mind for that high-stakes meeting or presentation. The technique is the same for both.
We all occasionally get a tune stuck in our minds, one that plays endlessly and annoyingly despite our best efforts to try to get rid of it. In fact, the more we fight it, the deeper it gets entrenched. I’ve found a simple way to solve the problem: substitution.
You can’t fight the loop going through your head, because paying it attention just feeds it. So, what I do is choose a different tune and play that in my head for a minute or two. You can’t play two tunes at once, so the new tune pushes out the old bothersome one. Many times, one substitution is all you need, and the new tune quickly fades out – but the old one is gone.
Of course, you run the danger of having the new tune take root and become just as irritating, so if it persists more than a minute or two, just pick a different tune and try again. The trick is not to let the new one stick in your mind for very long.
So what does this have to do with getting in the right frame of mind for a presentation? If you get nervous before a presentation, it’s hard to get that feeling out of your mind, and telling yourself that you’re confident only makes you more anxious.
But just like your brain can only play one tune at a time, you can only feel one emotion at a time. So the same trick applies: substitute a powerful or confident emotion for the anxious one. This is a little harder, but still easily within your power to do. Get your mind into the right emotional state by recalling a time when you felt strong and confident, or when you were excited to deliver good news to someone. Excitement is especially powerful because the physical feeling is almost identical to what you feel when you’re nervous.
Actors know it as the “offstage beat”, according to Nick Morgan in his book, Power Cues. They evoke the necessary emotion for the scene before going on stage, so when the time comes, they are not “acting” – the emotion they show is genuine. They’re not thinking about the audience’s reactions, or that they may be nervous, because they only have room for one emotion at a time.
Just like the song in your head, if you can’t turn it off, at least you can change the station!
