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?
Don’t let them see what’s going on underneath
In their book, The Confidence Code, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay counsel against the popular advice to “fake it ‘til you make it”. They tell us that “Confidence isn’t about pretending, or putting on an act; it springs from genuine accomplishment and work.”[1]
They also go on to say that faking confidence actually makes us feel less secure, and that others will certainly be able to detect the false signals we’re sending.
Let’s deal with these last two points first, and then come back to the first.
There is an entire body of research around what’s called “embodied cognition”, which means that our minds sometimes take cues from our body to determine how we should feel. In a nutshell, adopting a confident pose even when we don’t feel it can actually make us feel more confident.[2]
Will others be able to tell if we feel less confidence than we try to show? It’s not as easy as you might fear. We all think we’re better at detecting deception than we actually are, but one survey of over 200 studies found that people perform only slightly better than chance at detecting when others are not being totally truthful[3]. Even specialized training doesn’t help much, as the Transportation Security Administration found out after spending over $1 billion to train its “behavior detection officers”, with little to show for it.[4] You will probably be the only person in the room who knows the true level of confidence you’re feeling.
The first point is worth addressing at length. It’s true that confidence should ultimately rest on a solid foundation of real competence and compelling content, and in business presentations and sales, outright lying is not only wrong but it’s also stupid. But the problem is that you can have a strong conviction that you are right and still feel a lack of confidence in your ability to get others to buy into your point of view, or you may have pre-speech jitters despite your solid grasp of your material. In cases like that, it does not help your case to be open about your lack of confidence.
In fact, there are often times that faking confidence is not only acceptable, it’s the only right thing to do.
The outstanding historical example of “fake it ‘til you make it” was when Winston Churchill inspired a nation and possibly even deterred another by telling the world that “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” After he closed the speech, he remarked to colleagues, “We shall hit them over the head with broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.”
Churchill did not sugarcoat the grim military situation in the beginning of his speech, but he knew that he had to say something to inspire his countrymen for the hard road ahead. He knew that Britain could eventually resupply itself with weapons, but the one indispensable asset that had to be preserved at all costs was confidence. If he showed any wavering at all, the consequences could have been disastrous.
Does a coach tell his team during a halftime speech that he doesn’t think they can come from behind, because the other team is too good? Does a doctor tell a patient that she doesn’t have confidence that the procedure will work? In situations like this, faking confidence is not only acceptable, it’s the right thing to do for the other party.
There are also times when faking confidence is the right thing to do for your own interests. When you’re in a negotiation, do you openly admit that you’re desperate for the deal, and will cave in if they object?
Life will constantly throw situations at you where you will need to show more confidence than you actually feel; people will not follow an uncertain trumpet. Sometimes you do have to fake it ‘til you make it. It’s called leadership.
[1] P. 164.
[2] Amy J.C. Cuddy and Caroline A. Wilmuth, The Benefit of Power Posing Before a High-Stakes Social Evaluation, Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2012.
[3] Charles F. Bond and Bella M. DePaulo, Accuracy of Deception Judgments, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006.
[4] I’m still waiting to land one of those training contracts.
Who’s the decision maker?
I bet you never thought you would learn about one-celled organisms in a blog about persuasion, but bear with me for a few paragraphs because I want to make an important point.
It’s been quite the fashion over the past few years in sales and persuasion circles to focus on our three brains: the reptilian brain, the rat brain, and the human brain. The idea is pretty simple: our human brains have evolved over eons in a different environment than our modern world; since evolution by definition proceeds from what went before, as our newer brain structures and functions evolved, the old structures remain and continue to be quite active. It’s kind of like the separation of powers in the Federal government: all three branches get involved in the process. So, if you want to persuade someone, you have to appeal to the simpler brains as well as to our logical faculties.
That may be true, but why stop at the reptile brain? If we trace our ancestry even further, we all evolved from one-celled organisms—amoebas, if you will, and we were amoebas even longer than we were reptiles. So, should we also tailor our persuasive efforts to the amoeba brain that surely lurks within all of us?
I can see it now: make sure you have a lot of light when you make your presentations, because amoebas move toward the light. You wouldn’t have to explain your solution, because people can get it by osmosis. We could call it “celling”. I realize I’ve reached the point of absurdity, but unfortunately so have many of the “scientific” persuasion experts.
The basic idea is sound, as long as it’s not carried too far. Aristotle, the father of modern persuasion science, made it the core of his Rhetoric, acknowledging that persuasive appeals comprise three strands, ethos, pathos, and logos. More recently, research has categorized and measured myriad ways in which our decisions and behaviors deviate from the purely rational. Science has learned a lot about the brain in the past few decades, and technologies such as functional MRIs let them see real time into our brain activity as we make decisions, respond to stimuli, etc. A lot of that research has confirmed, refined, or changed our understanding of how our minds work.
But new scientific discoveries are inevitably seized upon immediately by modern-day snake oil salesmen to add some legitimacy to their half-baked ideas. The ink was barely dry on the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species when the Social Darwinists hijacked his theories to justify their own notions of how society should be organized. In the same spirit, a lot of experts have picked up on the colorful pictures showing various areas of the brain lighting up during controlled laboratory experiments to market their services to companies, promising that they can read consumers’ brains and know what makes them tick, even better than the consumers themselves can. (By the way, if you’ve ever been inside of one of those machines, you know just how “natural” that situation is.)
When a book applies the idea to B2B sales, telling us that, “In spite of our modern ability to analyze and rationalize complex scenarios and situations, the old brain will regularly override all aspects of this analysis and, quite simply, veto the new brain’s conclusions.”[1], then the idea has gone too far.
I have a lot of respect for the work of one of the deans of persuasion science, Robert Cialdini, but even he goes a little too far. His six principles for influence are implied to be so powerful that you can’t sell a good idea without them, and you can definitely sell bad ideas with them. You can trigger fixed-action patterns that cause people to act like a mother turkey does when she hears “cheep-cheep”, and that’s what his book is about.[2] Cialdini at least acknowledges the importance of rationality—in a footnote—saying of course material self-interest is important, but that it goes without saying.
Yet, that’s the problem: it doesn’t go without saying. When a Harvard Business School professor tells us that “what you say is less important than how you say it”, and “style trumps content”, then it has to be said.
Content has to come first
This article is a plea for a little more, well, rationality in the understanding of what it takes to get ideas approved and products sold. Of course it’s important to be able to appeal to more than just the rational parts of the brains of your persuasive target. I’ve written about ways to do that many times on this blog. But it has to start with a sound, logical and defensible business or personal case—with what Cialdini called material self-interest.
One of the oldest sayings in sales is that you should sell the sizzle, not the steak. But what happens when they buy the appetizing sizzle and then find out the steak is crappy? They won’t come back. That’s why you have to make absolutely you have an excellent steak before you worry about the sizzle. Regardless of how many persuasive cues you employ, or which regions of the brain turn which color in the fmri, if the idea does not work, you soon won’t, either. Bad ideas are bad ideas, no matter how they’re dressed up.
One problem with fixation on techniques to appeal to the old brain is that they distract from the main job of putting together a strong proposal. There are people who spend most of their time learning “the tricks of the trade” in the hope of finding shortcuts, when they should be learning the trade itself. I’ve seen people put more time in the choice of fonts for their slides than they do in critically examining the strength of their ideas.
Whether you’re trying to get a proposal approved internally or selling a solution to a customer, most business decisions are complex enough to require extensive data, deep analysis, and careful decisions. That’s the reality of our modern world, which was built by the human brain. Never forget that it’s still the most important decision maker.
[1] Patrick Renvoise and Cristophe Morin, Neuromarketing, viii.
[2] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice.
